Economist article on Warren: Ideas still matter

[blm]

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/06/22/elizabeth-warren-saviour-of-capitalism?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/elizabethwarrensaviourofcapitalismlexington&fbclid=IwAR1ITDs7Z8iy3eL7hOph3ZD9iAPjq40W0Dv01f7UTiB08B_23XEhO0RMl7Y

[Celerity]

1. an excerpt for people that are pay-walled out

There is a revealing tradition of apostasy in American politics. Ronald Reagan’s disingenuous claim never to have left the Democratic Party (“It left me”) helped him woo millions of blue-collar Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s decision to downplay her early Republicanism, by contrast, signalled her lack of ambition to win votes from the other side. That Donald Trump switched camps at least five times before entering the Republican primary suggested his disloyalty to any party. Elizabeth Warren’s gravitation from right to left, and the use she is making of it in her increasingly fancied presidential campaign, is another telling case.

Unlike Mrs Clinton, she is leaning into her Republican past. Her stump speech, which Lexington heard in a sun-dappled New Hampshire garden last week, opens with a description of her conservative upbringing in Oklahoma: her three brothers in uniform, her frugal parents. It testifies to her experience, rare in a former Harvard law professor, of working-class concerns and the heartland, even if she escaped both long ago. Yet she remained a registered Republican into her late 40s. Many Democrats would find that embarrassing. Yet Ms Warren, who entered politics over a decade later, after making a name for herself as a critic of Wall Street after the financial crisis, has no need to prove her left-wing credentials. She has used her conversion story to help distinguish herself from Bernie Sanders, her rival on the left, and to try to broaden her appeal.

She stuck with the Republicans, she has said, because she believed their claim to be the best market managers. Unlike the socialist from Vermont, she says she is a “capitalist to my bones”. She left the right after researching surging individual bankruptcies, which turned out to be caused not by fecklessness, but ill health and other misfortunes. Why were so many hardworking people like her parents living so precariously? she asked. And why were companies, their soaring profits suggested, more protected? Like Mr Sanders, she considers the economy to be not merely skewed, but rigged in the corporate interest. Stagnant wages, rising economic insecurity, outsourced jobs are a product of “who government works for”, she said in New Hampshire. But where Mr Sanders promises a revolution, her proposals are more measured, detailed and various. Indeed Ms Warren, who in a couple of recent polls was ahead of Mr Sanders, in second place behind Joe Biden, has unveiled more policies than her main rivals put together.

Her signature proposal is a wealth tax of two cents on the dollar on assets over $50m. She optimistically claims this would raise $2.75trn in a decade, a windfall she would splurge on progressive priorities including universal free childcare, free public college fees and writing off college debt. That is Sanders-esque, with a tonal difference. Unlike Mr Sanders, whose recent entry into the “millionaire class” seems not to have lessened his dislike of rich people, Ms Warren claims not to begrudge them their success. She just wants them to chip in more (“Two cents—just two cents!” is one of her slogans) to help expand opportunity (which is another).

Believe that or not, her other main proposals are regulatory fixes that are far-reaching and radical but mostly within the Democratic mainstream. Channelling the spirit of her hero Theodore Roosevelt, she vows to curb lobbying, campaign-finance extravagance, carbon emissions and much else. She has hedged her support for Mr Sanders’s promise of Medicare for all.

snip

[backtoblue]

2. Thanks Celerity!

[Celerity]

3. yw!