Why Cultural Explanations for Trumpian Populism Are So Inadequate

My old pal and co-author, John Judis, has a terrific article out in the Washington Post magazine about understanding the 2018 election results and the continuing red-blue divide.

In Judis' view, you can't understand this divide without understanding the different economies that underpin red and blue America. By this, he doesn't just mean the income levels or unemployment rates of red vs. blue communities but their vastly different economic trajectories, job structures and workforces. For those in red America, they see their economy, rooted in fading rural and industrial areas, changing in ways that undermine their communities an their entire way of life. People in blue America experience a different economy and have a different point of view.

The richness of Judis' analysis of these different economies and how they shape politics is a refreshing change from the torrent of studies that purport to "explain" Trumpian populism by simply linking it to resentful or hostile views of blacks, immigrants, women, etc. These studies dismiss any kind of economic dimension to Trump support because standard survey variables like views of family financial situation don't have linkages that are as strong. But of course that is is not what Judis means by the differences between red and blue economies. It is not all, or even mostly, about income levels and certainly not their most recent changes.

"Many Americans (primarily but not all white) who once lived comfortably in older Midwestern and Southern towns have had important parts of their identity stripped away by the transformation of the U.S. economy. Many of them once enjoyed lifetime employment from the same company and could identify with that company — whether it was General Motors or Sears. They also may have enjoyed the protection and solidarity of belonging to a union. They lived in neighborhoods and frequented the same bars, restaurants, churches and bowling alleys. They and their friends had gone to the same high schools and followed the same local teams. They owned their homes and protected them by owning guns. Many of the men had served in the armed forces and belonged to veterans’ groups.

Move ahead to now: The company has left. The union is gone. The neighborhood is gone. Many of the working-class whites, like the Trump supporters in Ohio I interviewed for my last book, have moved to nearby suburbs, where the main public square is the shopping mall. As identities made possible by the old jobs and the old economy have faded, other identities — ones often associated with hard-line conservative politics — have both endured and filled the void: strong identification with the traditional family, with the home (for which these voters see gun ownership as an essential means of protection), with church and religion, with the flag and the nation. Interwoven among these identities are ones that are fundamentally rooted in resentment: toward undocumented immigrants whom they believe their taxes subsidize; toward both legal and undocumented immigrants who they see as upending the mores and language of their hometowns; toward those minorities who, in their minds, benefit unfairly from affirmative action; and toward distant elites in the cities who project disdain for them and their way of life....

It’s hard to imagine America finally confronting the differences in prosperity and prospects between red and blue areas as long as Trump and his tweets occupy center stage, transfixing Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet for the sake of America’s future, we are going to have to find a way to talk honestly about the massive divide caused by the two economies — and somehow, start working to bridge it."

About this website

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

The key to understanding America's red-blue split isn't ideology or culture. It's economics.

What the 2018 midterm results — and all those blue dots — tell us about the future of U.S. politics.

How to Beat Right Wing Populism

Two interesting recommendations here. In the UK Guardian, Paul Mason emphasizes the role of emotion, inspiration and economic hope.

"The first lesson...for liberal centrism, if it wishes to survive, is that it needs an emotional narrative with an inspirational core offer. And that core offer has to be economic hope: there is nothing that says the far left has to own policies of fiscal expansion, redistribution, state aid and high wages. It’s just that the neoliberal economic textbook says they can’t be done. The “fear of the future” reported in much qualitative research on supporters of the nationalist right is, for many of them, rational. People are reacting as if scared, depressed and angry because the world created by precarious employment, poor housing and rising inequality is scary, depressing and annoying.

If you can’t answer the question: “How does life get rapidly better for me and my family?”, no amount of communicative power will help. Secondly, the centre has to make a strategic choice: to side with the left against the right. All discussions of populism that avoid that conclusion are worthless."

Amen. On a different tack, Joan Williams on the Atlantic site focuses on the various ways educated and affluent whites tend to look down on the white working class. She includes a tendency to pooh-pooh the whole idea of economic anxiety as a driver of reactionary populism ("it's just racism") and a tendency to see any and all opposition to open borders as yet more racism.

She concludes her piece with a challenge to white elites. I particularly like the last line.

"With each trump-fueled outrage, people on Twitter ask whether I’m finally ready to admit that the white working class is simply racist. What my Twitter friends don’t seem to recognize is their own privilege. If elites cling to the idea that working-class whites are perpetrators of inequality, rather than both perpetrators and victims, perhaps it’s because they want to believe that they are where they are because they’ve worked hard and they’re the smartest people around. Once you start a conversation about class, elite white people have to admit they have not only racial privilege but class privilege, too.

Acknowledging this also requires elites to cede yet another advantage: the extent to which they have controlled Democrats’ priorities. Political scientists have documented the party’s shift over the past 50 years from a coalition focused on blue-collar issues to one dominated by environmentalism and other issues elites cherish.

I’m one of those activists; environmentalism and concerns related to gender, race, and sexuality define my scholarship and my identity. But the working class has been asked to endure a lot of economic pain while Democrats focus on other problems. It’s time to listen up. The only effective antidote to a populism interlaced with racism is a populism that isn’t."

https://www.theguardian.com/…/liberals-politics-emotion-rig…

https://www.theatlantic.com/…/the-democrats-white-p…/573901/

About this website

THEATLANTIC.COM

The Democrats’ White-People Problem

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

Is Ohio Lost to the Democrats?

As John Russo points out in The American Prospect, a lot of Democrats seem to think so:

"Many Democrats seem ready to give up on Ohio. Michael Halle, who coordinated Hillary Clinton’s battleground state strategy before managing Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray’s campaign this year, told The New York Times that “it was time for Democrats to jettison Iowa and Ohio in future campaigns in favor of Arizona and Georgia.” Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri now says that that the Clinton campaign should have spent less time and money in Ohio and spent more in Georgia, Texas, and Arkansas. Speaking from ground zero for Democratic crossover voters in Youngstown, Mahoning County Democratic Chairperson David Betras commented after the midterms that it wasn’t the people who had left the party. Instead, Betras stated, the Democratic Party had left Ohio."

As has been widely noted, Sherrod Brown was the great exception to a string of Ohio Democratic failures in the last election. The lessons of this to Russo are clear:

"Ohio Democrats cannot count on a strong organizing effort alone to yield victories. They also need the kind of clear message, wide-ranging outreach, and concrete proposals that Brown offered. If Democrats want to reclaim Ohio, they need to recognize that many Ohio Trump voters are also Sherrod Brown voters and vice versa."

In this context, it's worth dwelling on the internals of how Brown managed to cobble together a victory in a state otherwise slipping away from the Democrats. Here's something I wrote awhile ago about how Clinton lost Ohio in 2016 and what it would take to win there in the future.

"It's all about white noncollege voters. In the Rustbelt troika of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the story [of Clinton's losses] gets muddled because, even though there were big swings among white noncollege voters in these states, they were so close that better performance among black voters could conceivably have turned these states to Clinton.

Not so in Ohio. Not even close. Democrats could completely replicate Obama's high water performance among black voters in 2012 and still lose the state handily, probably by around 5 points. There is really no way around bettering Democratic performance among white noncollege voters, where the Democrats' losing margin roughly doubled from 16 to 31 points between 2012 and 2016.

Of course, some may argue that you could achieve the needed improvements among white voters by appealing to the other part of the white population--white college-educated voters. This is theoretically possible but very, very difficult. Start with the fact there were about twice as many white noncollege voters as white college voters in Ohio in 2016, a ratio that is likely to change only slightly in 2020. So to achieve the same effect as a given shift in the white noncollege vote, you need twice the swing among white college voters.

Since Clinton split the white college vote evenly with Trump in the state, that means to neutralize the big white noncollege shift away from the Democrats, you would need to carry white college-educated voters in Ohio by 30 points in 2020. Not gonna happen."

And indeed that did not happen for Sherrod Brown in 2018. He didn't carry white college voters by 30 points, only 5 points, which is not too different from how Clinton did in 2016. But his deficit among white noncollege voters was a mere 10 points, vastly better than Clinton did in 2016.

That's how it was done. Could a Democratic Presidential candidate replicate this winning formula in Ohio in 2020? Well, in the event Sherrod Brown himself gets the nomination, that would give Democrats their best shot. But, failing that, Brown's playbook certainly provides a good guide for whomever gets the nomination. Indeed, it would be political malpractice to try any other approach if Democrats are genuinely interested in carrying the state in the future.

About this website

PROSPECT.ORG

Ohio: Another Brick in the Red Wall?

Lacking Sherrod Brown’s secret (progressive populist) sauce, Ohio Democrats will likely keep on losing.

Correcting the Record on the 2018 Election

To read a lot of the coverage of the 2018 election, you'd think the only shift of real significance in the election was the movement of suburban white college-educated voters voters toward the Democrats. This is just not true no matter how well it fits into pre-existing narratives about the election favored by the media.

The white college educated part of the standard view is definitely suspect. My analysis of Catalist data indicates that, while white college voters made a very significant contribution to the Democrats' gains, white noncollege voters did as well. The split was roughly 2:1 between white college and white noncollege. And, as the Catalist data document, the Democrats also benefited from unusually high midterm turnout by nonwhite voters, particularly Hispanics and blacks.

Jack Metzgar, in a post on the Working Class Perspective blog, notes the following:

"[A]long with the dozen or so suburban districts they flipped, Dems also flipped at least 14 House districts that cannot be characterized as “suburban,” let alone “wealthy.” Nate Silver highlighted many of these as “Obama-Trump” districts because they went for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. There were 21 such districts, mostly in Rust Belt states where there are large proportions of white working-class voters – including 6 in New York, 3 each in Iowa and Minnesota, 2 each in Illinois and New Jersey, and one each in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats won 14 of them, and that is at least as important as the “wealthy suburban districts” D.C. pundits continue to focus on.

What’s more, even in the traditional Republican suburban districts The Post chose to highlight, wealthy voters were not obviously more flippy than middle-income voters in those districts; those with household incomes in the $50-75k range also “surged” for Dems in comparison to their Republican pasts. Two-thirds of suburban residents do not have bachelor’s degrees, and the largest group is middle income, not affluent, let alone wealthy.”

If the all-white-college angle is wrong, so is the all-suburbs, all-the-time focus of most coverage. G. Elliott Morris on The Crosstab takes particular aim at the almost-universal under-estimation of Democratic gains in rural areas (something I've posted about previously).

"We may have overlooked that, compared to 2016, House Democrats actually did better in rural areas in the 2018 midterms. We saw evidence this year that they’re beating expectations in “Middle America,” not lagging behind them.

Indeed...Democratic House candidates beat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance all over the map, but especially in rural areas. What is notable is that Democrats seem to have slightly bounced back — or “boomeranged” — in these areas that swung toward Trump between 2012 and 2016, but they did not lose significant ground in areas that swung toward Clinton in the same period.

In other words, Democrats may have expanded their coalition in rural areas in 2018 — reversing some (not nearly all!) of the polarization to the right that occurred in the region between Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies — without sacrificing gains they have made in recent cycles."

To my mind, that's a pretty important story and it's a shame it's getting lost as the conventional wisdom solidifies.

https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/…/class-prejudic…/

https://www.thecrosstab.com/2018/11/26/rural-dems/

THECROSSTAB.COM

Want to know what happened in the 2018 midterms? Look at rural America. | The Crosstab by G. Elliott Morris

There is (unsurprisingly) a debate over (A) what happened in the US midterm elections and (B) how they matter in the larger context of US politics. I’ve spoken out in this debate already, but for posterity’s sake I am including (and expanding briefly upon) the discussion here.

What Is Happening with Inequality I: The Global Story

The indispensable Branko Milanovic has a new post up on his blog where he summarizes trends from the latest available global-coverage income data (up through 2013). There are both some very positive developments and some negative ones:

"[T]he striking and important thing is what we cannot see from National Accounts but can see from household surveys: the dramatic increase in the global median income (income at the 50th global percentile). This positional income which reflects high growth rates of the relatively poor populations in Asia (China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia etc.) has throughout the past 25 years always increased faster than the global mean income, and in the most recent period (2008-13) the gap between the median and mean growth has soared: the median income went up by an average rate of 6% pc pa while the mean income grew by only 1%.

The shrinkage of the distance between the mean and the median is often taken as an indicator of reduced inequality (for asymmetric distributions). And this is indeed the case here. In 1988, the mean per capita income of the world was just over $PPP 4000 and the median just over $PPP 1000; a quarter-century later, these amounts were respectively $PPP 5500 and $PPP 2200. So the mean-to-median ratio has decreased from 4-1 to 2.5-1. The global Gini coefficient went down from 0.69 to 0.62; the global Theil index from 0.92 to 0.73."

But:

"We thus have only apparently paradoxical developments over the past 25 years: on the one hand, strongly rising global median income and the shrinkage of global inequality when measured by the synthetic indicators like the Gini or Theil; but, on the other hand, the rising share of the global top 1% and increasing number of people in relative poverty (mostly in Africa). The last point opens up again the vexed question of lack of convergence of Africa and its growing falling behind Asia (and of course the rest of the world).

So, is the world becoming better, as Bill Gates wants us to believe? Yes, in many ways, it is: the mean income in 2013 is almost 40% higher than in 1988, and global inequality is less. But is there a bad news too? Yes: the same share of the world population is being left behind and the top 1% are getting ever further away and richer than everybody else. So, we have, at the same time, the growth of the global “median” class and an increase in world-wide polarization."

Simultaneously heartening and worrying.

Extremely Blue California

As a sort of companion piece to my post on Purple Texas, it's worth considering the 2018 results in Extremely Blue California. Despite the endless articles conservative Republicans churn out on how California is a hellhole and only getting worse, the actual voters in that state don't seem to see the GOP as in any way preferable to the Democrats who are allegedly ruining their state.

In 2018, Republicans got absolutely crushed in California Congressional races. Once they call CA-21 for Democrat TJ Cox, the GOP will have lost half of its already meager allotment of California House seats, diving from 14 to a mere 7 out of 53 seats. That's bad--almost unbelievably bad for a party that was competitive in statewide elections and at least a healthy minority of House seats not so long ago.

What's happening? Trump's happening. And it's causing an implosion in an already-weakened party in the nation's biggest state. Ron Brownstein explains in a excellent, detailed article (lots of good data and California political history!) on the Atlantic site:

"The final ingredient in the GOP collapse was Trump. From the start, his open appeals to white racial resentments and the fear of social change faced enormous resistance in diverse, culturally cosmopolitan California: He won less than 32 percent of the state’s vote in 2016. That essentially tied Alf Landon in 1936 as the weakest performance for a Republican presidential nominee in California since 1860. (William Howard Taft won even less of the vote in 1912, but only because Theodore Roosevelt, the former Republican president running as an independent, narrowly carried the state.)

But despite the unmistakable indication of Trump’s local unpopularity, the California GOP delegation locked arms around his turbulent presidency. ...California Republicans serving in Clinton-won districts voted more as if they were representing Alabama than swing seats in a state steadily becoming more Democratic. ([Mimi] Walters even told one interviewer that she thought Trump would win her affluent, diverse coastal district today and that she’d welcome a campaign appearance.)

Those choices emphatically caught up with them during this month’s sweep,....Now most California Republicans see little prospect of regaining many, or perhaps any of these seats, so long as Trump’s stamp on the party repels both minority voters and college-educated white suburbanites, key growing constituencies throughout the state. They have been reduced to a literal handful of inland districts, almost entirely isolated from the state’s racially diverse and economically dynamic metropolitan areas.

“The national party has become a cultural brand that’s anathema to the demographics that have grown here,” says GOP consultant Rob Stutzman, the former communications director for Schwarzenegger.

With Republicans so marginalized in the state—Democrats this month restored supermajorities in both of the state’s legislative chambers and routed the GOP in all statewide races—just raising enough money to make their case may grow increasingly daunting for Republicans, Stutzman says.

California may be an extreme case of the political risks the GOP faces in a changing nation as Trump focuses the party’s message and agenda ever more narrowly on the priorities and cultural preferences of older, blue-collar, rural, and evangelical whites.

But Cain, the Stanford political scientist, notes that California is not unique, particularly in the west. Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and even Utah and Texas are being reshaped by forces similar to those that have dyed California so deeply blue....

The most ominous prospect for national Republicans is the possibility that the California GOP’s slide into the ocean is only a preview of the growing strain they may face under Trump in the other southwestern states advancing along a similar trajectory of economic and demographic change.

“They have got themselves into this little echo chamber, and now Trump has added to that,” Cain says. “But obviously this blew up on the Republicans in California. And it’s blowing up on them in these suburban areas in the West and other parts of the country.”

Yup, there does seem to be a trend here. Why in California even white noncollege voters are going Democratic!--they supported Democrat Gavin Newsom for governor by a solid 10 point margin. Shockingly, white noncollege men also joined the party, giving Newsom a 5 point edge.

Interesting. And if I was a Republican, just a little bit frightening.

About this website

THEATLANTIC.COM

California Has Become a Crisis for the Republicans

For years, the state’s massive congressional delegation was highly competitive, but not anymore. Of 53 House seats, Democrats now hold at least 45.

Purple Texas

Well, perhaps it's a bit early to talk about blue Texas. But probably not to talk about purple Texas or competitive Texas. And a purple or competitive Texas means a Texas that could plausibly go blue in some near-term elections.

That's the spirit of Tom Edsall's new piece on the New York Times site. Edsall is hardly a traditional booster of Democratic chances, so it's significant that he would write a piece highlighting Trump-era Democratic chances in what has been a very difficult state for them for decades.

He quotes Rice political scientist Mark Jones as follows:

"It is premature to say that Texas is turning blue, but whereas four years ago its hue was dark red, today it is light pink. As long as President Trump is in the White House, Republicans in Texas can look forward to much tougher battles from higher quality and better funded Democratic challengers than they faced prior to 2018, as well as being required to do something that most Republican candidates have not had to do for years in Texas; actually work up a sweat in the fall."

He also quotes Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist who is bullish on Democratic prospects:

"[T]he metro v. rest-of-state gap widened hugely in Texas, with the big cities going overwhelmingly Democratic while suburban counties outside Austin, Houston, and Dallas/Ft Worth moved toward the Democrats. But non-metro counties stayed very Republican with very high turnout, enabling Cruz to eke out a narrow win."

And:

"We had 8.3 million voters in 2018 (up from just 4.7 million in 2014). That should go over 10 million in 2020, giving statewide Democrats a good chance of carrying the state for president and winning the U.S. senate seat...[There is also] a 50 percent-plus chance of taking the Texas House of Representatives, with major implications for the 2021 redistricting process.”

Another Houston political science professor, Brandon Rottinghaus, says:

"The migration of Texas’s big urban counties from red and purple to blue means Texas is a two party state for the first time in almost 30 years. Demographic changes, tremendous energy from voters, and a surge of resources will keep Texas competitive for decades.....[Trump] was a net negative, driving a wedge between college educated, women, and independent voters. As long as Trump is on the ballot in fact or in spirit, Texas will be a competitive two party state."

Interesting! Of course, a blue victory in purple Texas will not be easy and there are considerable obstacles still to be overcome, not least generating high enthusiasm and turnout again among nonwhite voters, particularly Hispanics. And, as great as Beto O'Rourke did, he still fell a little bit short on what he needed from the white vote. In a piece I wrote last year on possibilities for a blue victory in Texas, I said that:

"Rough calculations indicate that if Democrats can cut their white noncollege deficit to 45 points and their white college deficit to 10 points, while {continuing positive [trends among nonwhite voters], that should be enough to flip the state or come very close."

The exit polls indicate that O'Rourke's deficit white college Texas voters was 11 points and his deficit among white noncollege voters was 48 points. So close!

Maybe next time. But the goal is certainly within sight.

About this website

NYTIMES.COM

Opinion | As Long as Trump Is President, Blue Texas Could Actually Happen

What was once a Democratic pipe dream is now a real possibility.

The Left Is Winning on Health Care. And It Will Continue To Do So.

Paul Starr has an excellent article up on the American Prospect website running down how the Democrats are now winning on health care. Starr notes:

"It took a long time, but the Affordable Care Act finally paid off politically for Democrats in the 2018 election. According to exit polls, voters rated health care the top issue, and they trusted Democrats on it more than Republicans....

In 2018, unlike the other elections since the ACA’s passage in 2010, voters had seen what Republicans were actually proposing to do about health insurance....[T]he legislation passed by Republicans in the House and endorsed by Trump would have resulted in millions of people losing coverage and sharply increased costs for others, especially for older people buying insurance in the individual market. Unable to pass that bill in the Senate, Republicans saw the whole repeal-and-replace effort collapse.

Seizing on the Republicans’ failed rollback, Democratic congressional candidates and the groups supporting them highlighted health care more than any other issue. According to an analysis by Wesleyan Media Project, 54.5 percent of all Democratic ads from September 18 to October 15 discussed health care; those ads focused overwhelmingly on protecting people with preexisting conditions and on Republican efforts to undo the progress under the ACA....

Not only do the election results put an end, at least for the next two years, to Republican congressional efforts to undo the ACA; the voters also chose to extend coverage. Five states are now likely to expand Medicaid—three (Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah) where voters passed referenda in favor of expansion, and two (Kansas and Maine) where a shift from a Republican to a Democratic governor removes the last obstacle to expansion."

Starr advocates that Democrats now move to extending and improving the ACA, particularly in the context of the 2020 election campaign. I agree completely. Starr in particular advocates what he calls "Midlife Medicare", making Medicare available to those 50-64. I am fine with that though there is a lot to be said for "Medicare for All", especially in a campaign context. Even if such an approach is difficult to implement all at once, it can serve as both a rallying cry and an identifying principle for various, more specific reforms.

I would broaden Starr's argument about the ACA and left strategy as follows. Over time, the left has accomplished many things, from building out the social safety net to cleaning up the environment to protecting public health to securing equal rights for women, black people, and gay people. These and many other gains of the left have a very important thing in common: They are “sticky.” That’s a term borrowed from economics that means, simply, they will be hard to reverse. They provide benefits that people do not want to lose — and, what’s more, they shift norms of what is right and wrong.

Social Security and Medicare are great examples of policies that once seemed radical and now are simply a part of life. The Affordable Care Act’s core innovations may turn out that way, as well, despite the controversy that has dogged the program from its inception — and the declared intent of the current administration to eliminate it.

The ACA has provided benefits to millions who don’t want them taken away, and helped to establish the principle that every American has a right to health care, guaranteed by the government. That’s why the Republican attempt to radically downsize the program hit a buzzsaw. To be sure, Republicans will keep trying. But, in the end, they will not be able to “repeal and replace” with a fundamentally less generous program.

Instead, it’s more likely that the ACA, either under that name or another, will get more generous over time. As the late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer noted during the initial ACA repeal fight: “A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system.”

Krauthammer was despairing, but the left should be heartened by the observation. Indeed, at this point, Trump and the GOP have been reduced to hoping that if they neglect the ACA, it will collapse on its own — yet that doesn’t seem to be happening The very desperation of this “strategy” is a sign that Krauthammer may have been prescient about where American health care policy is headed.

So it has turned out. Repealing the ACA turned out to be way, way, way harder than Trump and the GOP anticipated and ultimately it failed. This emphasizes a basic characteristic of American public opinion that Trump and the GOP failed to understand and the left would do well to remember.

The dominant ideology in America combines what political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson refer to as “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to do more and spend more in a wide variety of areas). In their definitive book, Ideology in America, they characterize symbolic conservatism as:

"…fundamentally different from culturally conservative politics as defined by the religious right. It is respect for basic values: hard work, striving, caution, prudence, family, tradition, God, citizenship and the American flag….[I]t is the mainstream culture….It is woven into the fabric of how ordinary Americans live their lives."

And on operational liberalism they note:

"Social Security is…no exception. Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more. It is no accident we have created the programs of the welfare state. They were created—and are sustained—by massive public support."

Thus, there was no insuperable ideological obstacle to the ACA and, indeed, there is no insuperable ideological obstacle to a substantially expanded role for government in health and other areas in the future. Indeed, such an expansion would be fully in accord with Americans’ durable commitment to operational liberalism.

Of course these expanded government programs will not happen all at once. Far from it. Like the programs of the past, they will be phased in gradually over time, in fits and starts, frequently in inefficient and suboptimal forms (like the ACA!). That’s the messy business of politics in a democracy. But happen they will and once enacted they will be hard to get rid of; instead, just as in the past, the programs will be modified, improved and even expanded. The reason is simple: people like programs that make their lives better and are far more likely to respond to program defects by demanding they be fixed than by demanding programs be eliminated.

Just like with the ACA.

About this website

PROSPECT.ORG

How Democrats Finally Won with Health Care

And how they can build on that success in 2020