hey were stopped right next to each other at the light. In one lane, a muscular cherry-red Ferrari, snarling confidently with no top and a dazzling glass panel that revealed its emblazoned engine (also cherry-red) underneath. In another lane, a battered pickup truck — if you could call it that — with a blue driver’s side door, primer-gray cab and pale yellow bed, exhaust pipe dangling dangerously close to the pavement, lawnmowers and leaf blowers piled high in the back, tires nearly flat.
What happened next could be a metaphor for economic inequality in America. The light turned green, and the Ferrari, with all eight glass-covered cylinders whirling a high moan, sped off toward downtown La Jolla. The pickup truck jolted forward with a “kachunk,” followed immediately by a discouraging whirling sound, and the blue-gray-yellow Datsun was drifting toward the middle of the intersection at 1/4 mph, its tailpipe scraping loudly on the dark asphalt.
Scenes like this — of extreme wealth brushing up against extreme poverty — are not new to the American landscape. For the last 20 years, the top 5 percent of the population has been soaking up more and more of the nation’s wealth, leaving less and less for the other 95 percent. In 2003, the average CEO made 300 times more than his average worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 1983-1998, the average change in household net worth for the poorest 40 percent of Americans dropped 76 percent, while over the same period, the top 1 percent saw their net worth increase by 42 percent.
The widening rift between the nation’s rich and everyone else isn’t the result of chance. It’s not an accident. It is, and has been, the goal of conservative economic policy.
President George W. Bush’s new agenda says it all: Give the Ferrari customers a permanent tax cut while their secretaries’ sons die in the Middle East. Gut as many social programs as possible so that fewer Americans born without a chance will ever get one. Float Wall Street on the back of American workers’ retirement savings.
Conservative rule has led America into becoming the world’s most unequal industrialized nation. The gap between rich and poor is far greater here than in any Western European country or Japan, and it’s getting bigger. Our much-celebrated middle class is shrinking.
Instead of taking this information to the 99 percent of Americans who aren’t buying new Ferraris this year and turning their anger into political power, the Democratic party has been twiddling its thumbs, daydreaming about the Clinton years.
Half the party wants to become “Republican lite” after the “mandate” of Kerry’s defeat, and the other half, led by soon-to-be-chairman Howard Dean, wants to “energize the party’s core.”
Both sides are wrong. If the Democrats want to win, they can’t wait for Republican policy to lead the country back to the 1890s, then tell voters “I told you so.” They also can’t win by moving to the right, effectively admitting that the Republicans were correct all along.
The right wing has succeeded in its tireless campaign to make voters believe that liberal, Democratic ideas don’t have a place in America anymore — they’ve even gotten quite a few Democrats thinking the same thing. If the party of progress wants to stay alive, it has to find a way to make its core ideas appeal to more Americans.
What it needs is a message that’s not a defense against (or in agreement with) the latest Republican effort. It needs a message that will appeal to voters across cultural, religious and geographic lines to expand the party’s membership. It needs to launch a war of ideas, taking dead aim at the heart of Republican ideology.
The one thing on every American’s mind, no matter whom they live with or who they pray to, is money, and it’s money — the transfer of it from working Americans to the super-rich through conservative economic policy — that the Democrats must use to fight the Republicans.
Why not point out how the nation’s tax burden has been shifted from those who can afford it to the middle class? Why not point out how fewer and fewer Americans are finding opportunity, if opportunity means something more than $7 an hour? Why not point out that the “ownership society,” Bush’s domestic goal, is really where they get to own you? Most people in this country who vote also work, so why aren’t they voting for the workers’ party?
They don’t because the conservatives have succeeded in using liberal culture as a wedge, driving Missouri and California apart based on lifestyle and programming choices. They’ve managed to hide the fact that everyone — from the gardener in San Diego to the roofer in St. Louis — shares a common economic interest that’s being squelched by the greed of the nation’s rich.
The future of the Democratic party depends on its ability to redraw the lines of the national debate away from cultural and values issues and toward the heart of conservative economic policy. It must show how almost everyone in this country isn’t in the Ferrari zooming off toward a white city, but in that decrepit pickup, struggling to make it through the intersection.
