Finally, Democrats are looking in the mirror. That's reason for optimism
By Thomas Frank
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/10/finally-democrats-are-looking-in-the-mirror-thats-reason-for-optimism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
At the end of July, the leadership of the Democratic party bestirred themselves from their comfortable Washington haunts and paid a visit to a small town in Virginia, where they assumed a populist guise and announced before the cameras of the world that they were regular folks just like you.
The occasion for this performance was the launch of a Democratic party manifesto that bears the uninspiring name, A Better Deal. Its purpose, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wrote in the New York Times, was to “show the country that we’re the party on the side of working people”.
Famous for being one of Wall Street’s greatest friends in Washington, Schumer makes for an unlikely populist. Still, reacquainting Democrats with their working-class roots is a worthy goal, and a politically necessary one these days.
...But there’s also something about A Better Deal that gives me a sharp jolt of optimism for our Democratic party. It is this: the Democrats have committed themselves to a war on monopoly.
Noting the extraordinary stitching together of monopolies in industry after industry over the past 30 years, the online version of the manifesto acknowledges that “the extensive concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations hurts wages, undermines job growth, and threatens to squeeze out small businesses...”
This is a remarkable and even a wonderful thing. Since the Reagan years, both American parties have come together, DC consensus-style, to suppress antitrust enforcement, and the results are a thousand awful transformations of this country in favor of concentrated wealth.
...A second awesome thing about the Democratic manifesto: it is a tacit admission by the party that it needs to change course. This might seem unremarkable or even obvious to outside observers – they can plainly see that the Democrats have been trounced nationwide – but here in America it represents something of a breakthrough.
After all, liberals in this country inhabit a 24/7 echo chamber that constantly reassures them of their righteousness and insists that all their defeats have been orchestrated by devious outside forces they are powerless to combat: the Russians, the FBI, the media, the gerrymandering state legislatures.
A Better Deal invites Democrats instead to look in the mirror. “When you lose to somebody who has 40% popularity,” Schumer recently told the Washington Post, “you don’t blame other things – Comey, Russia – you blame yourself.”
Of course, this is only the first glimmering of the larger sort of self-appraisal that must happen before Democrats turn things around. Building a real populist movement is going to require them to ditch not only their squishy prose but also their bankerly image, their love affair with Silicon Valley, and their summers hobnobbing with the billionaires on Martha’s Vineyard...
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