McGovern’s Shadow
Democrats need someone who is like Biden, just not Biden
The drubbing of McGovern in 1972 (1) and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 returned the conservative wing of the Republican Party to power.
In 2023, aligned with an alleged felon and co-conspirator as favored party candidate, can the conservatives retain power in Washington?
McGovern’s 1972 platform and strategy was populist and revisionist: get out of Viet Nam in return for freeing American POWs, reduce military spending by 37%, and
a “demogrant” program that would replace the personal income tax exemption with a $1,000 tax credit as a minimum-income floor for every citizen in America,[22] to replace the welfare bureaucracy and complicated maze of existing public-assistance programs. Its concept was similar to the negative income tax long advocated by economist Milton Friedman, and by the Nixon administration in the form of Counselor to the President Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Family Assistance Plan, which called for a minimum family grant of $1,600 per year (later raised to $2,400). The personal income tax exemption later became $1,000 under President Reagan. (As Senator, McGovern had previously sponsored a bill, submitted by the National Welfare Rights Organization, for $6,500 guaranteed minimum income per year to families, based on need.)[23] In addition, McGovern supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
-”George McGovern 1972 Presidential Campaign,” Wikipedia
For the Republicans, the twinning of reducing military spending and “expanding the social safety net” was perceived through a distaste for government intervention in the markets as ‘unpatriotic.’ In other words, tax dollars’ benefit was exclusive to the “defense of America” whether risks or threats existed.
Simply said, any alternative distribution of wealth was perceived as “That’s not the American Way.”
America since, for fifty years, has been tolerating a disconnect between what most Americans can participate in and what’s “best for America.” Post 1972, for the Democrats, who had been in power successfully for thirty-odd years, this was “McGovern’s shadow”: a revisionist return to “the party of the New Deal,” or forging an alternative to Republican constraints on social spending.
For McGovern, ‘redistribution of wealth’ came primarily in the form of a GMI, guaranteed minimum income. (2) As a Senator, McGovern had proposed an annual family GMI of $6700 based on need ($48,383 in today’s dollars) and during the 1972 campaign settled for a tax credit “as a minimum-income floor for every citizen in America,” of $1000 ($7,221 in today’s dollars).
To grasp how far both parties have deviated from New Deal policy, consider the lapsing of the Expanded Child Welfare Tax Credit, which was designed specifically to support working families, members of whom juggle 2–3 jobs to make ends meet. This “New Deal” type distribution helped millions of families survive the economic turmoil caused by the Pandemic. Its defeat when most sub-median income families barely survived the Pandemic was bitter. For Biden — more “New Deal” than his forbearer, Obama — the lapsing of the Expanded Child Welfare Credit was a Scrooge-like rebuke of his American Recovery Act. (3)
In a November 8 newsletter, New York Times columnist and economics reporter, Peter Coy, referenced this disconnect between “New Deal” policy and “New Democrats” policy:
A lot of Democrats are bewildered by why their party isn’t doing better in campaigns against a Republican Party that is deeply dysfunctional. A new paper by three economists proposes a fresh explanation that seems persuasive to me. It says the Democrats went astray right around … 1976.
The argument, in a nutshell, is that the Democratic Party has gained educated voters but lost less educated voters because of a change in how it tried to help the working class and the poor. Instead of trying to prevent market forces from generating inequality, it has leaned toward giving free rein to market forces and then fixing the resulting inequalities through the tax-and-transfer system, taking some of the gains of the most successful and sharing them with the least successful…
Citing a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Compensate the Losers? Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US,” (3) Coy goes on,
To understand the party realignment, the three economists analyzed results of more than 800 surveys of about two million respondents since the 1940s. They also studied congressional voting records, party platforms and data on donations. They found that at least since the 1940s, “less educated voters appear to prefer a less market-based and more interventionist economic program that aims to promote domestic employment and wages.” Those voters left the Democratic Party when the party left them.
The authors labeled the traditional, New Deal approach as “predistributionist” and the New Democrat approach as “redistributionist.” The authors didn’t have data on why less educated voters prefer predistributionist policies. One explanation could be the dignity of work: People want to feel that they earned their own way (even if their earnings were invisibly bolstered by government policies such as tariffs). Or “voters may believe that the tax-and-transfer system is more opaque, corrupt or inefficient,” they wrote.
Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, makes the same point in an appraisal of the Democratic economic strategy and its implications for 2024:
Markets depend for their very existence on rules governing property (what can be owned), monopoly (what degree of market power is permissible), contracts (what can be exchanged and under what terms), bankruptcy (what happens when purchasers can’t pay up), and how all of this is enforced.
…These rules have been altered over the past few decades as large corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals have gained increasing influence over the political institutions responsible for them.
Simultaneously, centers of countervailing power that between the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-eighties enabled America’s middle and lower-middle classes to exert their own influence — labor unions, small businesses, small investors, and political parties anchored at the local and state levels — have withered. (4)
Looking through these lenses, explains several political phenomena occurring simultaneously and which positively impact a trajectory towards a Trump victory in November:
Why VP Kamela Harris is not trending and why for liberals, this remains a confounding issue;
Why Biden — not Trump — is being blamed for poor economic leadership;
Why the dignity of work is being devalued;
Why Biden’s age is seen as the problem, not Democrats’ abandonment of the working class;
Why the growing false denial of any government intervention.
Exacerbating these phenomena is the cringeworthy masquerade by “New Democrats” that “we care,” giving the lie to the social policy initiatives touted in the press and voted against or “sunset-ed” on the floor of Congress.
At face value the threat of a 2024 Trump/Republican victory is to turn back to the “New Democrats’” strategy of “compensate the losers,” rather than, as proposed by Progressives, address the inequities of the system. This in effect would give Republicans — and Trump — the economy is the issue advantage.
These are tall orders, and a return to “pre-distribution” economic strategies will test American voters’ trust. And a return will require time and energy to accomplish convincingly. However, a clue to overcome new Democrats’ abandonment of the working class — a traditional Democratic base — may be found in an appearance by President Joe Biden in Michigan, to walk the picket line, recently, with UAW strikers. This was not simply an appearance but more like a gesture. Tradition dictates, the UAW doesn’t endorse candidates for President before the convention.
But candidate Biden showed up — his first un-proclaimed campaign trail appearance. One is reminded of “New Democrat” Hillary Clinton’s decision to pass on revisiting Wisconsin in 2016 because in her words she thought since Wisconsin was a “labor state,” she could count on their votes.
To glimpse at what Democrats are up against, recall that Michigan repealed recently its right to work laws (March, 2023), the first state to repeal “right to work laws” in recent history. In November, polls show Biden running behind Trump in Michigan by a healthy 5 points. (5)
Wisconsin passed its right to work law in 2012, four years before Clinton’s aborted campaign stop. In 2020 Trump carried Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, formerly New Deal Democratic territory. Eleven years later Wisconsin is polling Biden slightly ahead of Trump, 365 days before Election Day, 2024. And the right to work laws have not been repealed.
The Democrats’ disaffection with re-electing incumbent Biden resides not with his age, but with “McGovern’s shadow,” with disaffection with trade unionism and solidarity writ large. McGovern lost and then Sanders lost because in a way America isn’t ready for the next chapter of progressivism — what theorist/activist Naomi Klein calls the “unselfing” of political change. (7) To fully embrace change does not reside in getting something for ME, but as Sanders bellowed in 2020, getting something for US.
We let the voices pitching a false union get in the way of challenging anti-democratic stirrings in our midst, of uprooting our hidden desire for authority, pining for “adults in the room,” deferring to polls and money and elites writing the script. Indeed, 2024 is not about Biden, but about democracy and America’s will power. But this doesn’t get America off the fence and really participate in political change — to move beyond McGovern’s shadow.
Can we afford to chastise Republicans for rallying behind Trump when we sideline the forces of inclusion?
When we fail to imagine the alternative?
November 12–29
Notes
1-McGovern carried Massachusetts and DC. Despite early revelations about the Watergate break-in, Nixon carried 49 states. “Presidential Election of 1972,” Wikipedia
2- GMI, or “guaranteed minimum income, would replace the individual standard deduction of $1000. With respect to Wikipedia, the GMI is an expansion of the social security safety net, not an offset on the 1040, nor a Freidman-esque “negative income tax.” GMI is not a new idea. Today, California is considering a state version. What was new in 1972, was that the GMI would be funded by lifting the tax burden of supporting a massive military, so in this sense, McGovern’s fiscal platform would not increase taxes but redistribute the funding from defense to social programs.
3-Oshan Jarow, “We’ve been fighting poverty all wrong,” Vox, November 20, 2023
4- “Compensate the Losers? Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the United States,” Hyana Kuzienko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx and Suresh Naidu, National Bureau of Economic Research, October, 2023
5- Robert Reich, “Beyond Trump (Why is American Capitalism So Rotten? Part 1), November 9, 2023 substack
6- The New York Times/Siena polls, November 3, 2023, cited in https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/michigan/
7- Naomi Klein, “Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World,” 2023, p. 347–348
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