A recent New York
Times editorial by Tim Wu,
a former antitrust adviser for the Biden
administration, caught my eye for the
criticism it leveled at Democrats for making
affordability a central issue ahead of the
midterm elections. Wu contends that the
party needs to go further and focus not
merely on the high price tags of
necessities, but on the unfairness of the
entire economic system.
While this is a refreshing shift in the
right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far
enough. It’s true that a majority of
Americans across the political spectrum
believe our economy is rigged in favor of
the rich. But merely pointing out the
obvious is unlikely to attract a huge shift
in voting toward the Democratic Party.
Moreover, Wu says nothing about the racist
rage that has defined President Donald Trump
and the Republican Party’s decimation of our
democracy, about the devastation to
communities of color, immigrants, women,
LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized
members of our society. Nor does he
acknowledge the corporate harms that
Democrats failed to tackle when they were in
power and are now being accelerated under
Republicans: fossil fuel emissions, tech
domination, and AI, harms
that disproportionately impact poor
people and people of color.
To Wu and most Democratic Party consultants,
these issues are distinct and, depending on
the cultural tides, are either worth
tackling or anathema.
In fact, they are intimately linked. White
supremacy feeds capitalism by distracting
poor whites from billionaire-fueled
inequality and climate devastation using
immigrants and people of color as
scapegoats. To take on an unfair economy
without addressing the systematically racist
impacts of policing, immigration, corporate
oligarchy, and the climate crisis does us
all a disservice. Moreover, there is an
absence of a radical vision for tackling
economic and racial justice risks to prevent
repeating the same crises in the future.
Democratic Party leaders are falling deeply
short by offering little more than
undoing Trump’s worst excesses. It is a
conservative position to seek a return to
the “good old days,” when a predatory
capitalist system was overseen by
articulate, sensible-sounding statesmen who
didn’t embarrass the nation on the global
stage, who championed police and prisons as tools
of safety, who echoed Trump’s rhetoric on “border security,” who
preserved corporate profiteering in
healthcare, who
embraced endless war as long as
it was their party’s doing, and so on.
The Democratic Party is essentially a
modern-day conservative party, while
Republicans are the extremist, fascist
party.
No wonder Americans in general dislike both
major parties at roughly the same rate. And while
the Democrats’ chances of taking control of
Congress appear to be surging ahead of
the midterm elections, it is likely because
the pendulum is swinging away from
Republicans, rather than toward Democrats
and their milquetoast agenda.
So, what can Democrats do to ensure victory?
Frankly, it is not our job as voters—or for
that matter, the job of newspaper
editorialists—to offer advice to political
parties.
Our job as voters, especially in this
moment, is to seize power in a system that
has rendered us powerless and articulate our
demands loudly and clearly. Politicians win
our votes by acceding to our agenda. Not the
other way around.
Therefore, the far more important question
is, what do we, the
voters, want?
If we agree that the economic system is
rigged against the majority of Americans,
then how do we unrig it? Is it as basic as
“a promise to level out a lopsided economy,”
as Wu advises, while ignoring other issues?
Is it as simple as a rallying cry to “tax the rich,” as some
Democratic-leaning states are doing?
If we want to end the wild pendulum swings
of American politics, which are veering us
further into the abyss of authoritarianism
with each election, we need a complete reset
on all fronts, not merely a return to a more
balanced economy.
We require, I would argue, an “abolitionist
mindset.”
Black abolitionists, who are better versed
than the rest of us on what it’s like to be
on the receiving end of systemic harms, have
long articulated a vision for a better world
where we all can thrive: a world where we
reverse the equations of how our collective
wealth is spent and where we refuse to let
our needs be continually defunded.
Black abolitionists like
Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame
Kaba, and Andrea J. Ritchie have already
shown us the way to a better world. We only
have to listen and apply their vision to all
of society.
The foundations laid by these thinkers have
helped countless racial justice
organizations, big and small to articulate
visions for a more just society. Take the Movement for Black Lives, which
released a detailed plan in 2020 for a
nation where Black people can thrive.
Central to this vision is an invest-divest strategy:
invest our tax dollars in what actually
keeps all human beings safe, while divesting
from things that actively cause harm.
The trouble is, we likely disagree on what
keeps us safe. White Americans may have
forgotten the lessons of the historic 2020 racial justice
uprisings in
response to George Floyd’s murder. But studies continue
to show how the police have always kept whites safe at the expense of Black people.
Meanwhile, local police eat up a whopping $135 billion in taxes
each year to do so.
Immigration enforcement is similar. A system
that disproportionately commits violence
against people of color while lulling MAGA
supporters into a false sense of safety
currently swallows up more than $200 billion of our tax
dollars.
Trump’s war on Iran has similarly vaporized
$113 billion of our
collective wealth. And, since October 2023,
we taxpayers have financed Israel’s genocide
in Gaza to the tune of nearly $18 billion. Both wars have been
deadlier for Iranians and Palestinians
thanks to AI-powered weapons and offered us
no benefit in return.
To pay for all of this brutalization of
Black, Asian, and Latino people at home and
abroad, we have defunded public health, housing, food stamps, and Medicaid. We have
refused to fund healthcare for all and universal childcare, and have
backslid on free higher education, all while
continually gifting the wealthy and
corporations lower tax rates.
The cost of such violence against nonwhite
people is one we all bear. We have all lost out
on fully funded healthcare, childcare,
education, housing, and the things that keep
us safe and thriving. This has
not been worth it, even for the most racist
whites among us. What good is it to cheer on
the barbarity against immigrants if it means
you still don’t have a job or can’t afford
healthcare? (In fact, the economy is worse because of
deportations).
And, unless we stop this trend and reverse
it, it will only get worse. The dystopian
vision that billionaires—the greatest
beneficiaries of our rigged system—are
offering is a society that is violently policed by ICE
agents and cops, where we are forced to live
amid detention centers and data centers, in
serfdom and in debt, while bracing ourselves
for one climate disaster after another, all
while our taxes pay for wars and corporate
subsidies.
As we approach the midterm elections, the
2028 presidential race, and every election
hereafter, we need to define a vision of the
world we want, one that is more radical than
merely rebalancing the economy, and one that
does not rely on throwing some of
us—specifically people of color—under the
bus as Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez has done.
For us all to feel safe and to thrive, we
need to flip the line items on our budgets
all the way from local to state to national
levels. This abolitionist mindset offers a
grand unifying vision of a world where we
all can thrive. It can apply to local
budgetary line items all the way to
Congressional appropriations for immigration
and war. We need to, as abolitionists have
long argued, divest from death-making institutions such as
the police, ICE, and military, fossil fuels,
and AI, and invest in life-giving systems
such as healthcare for all, housing, food,
and education. And, if we run out of money,
there’s plenty more at the top echelons of
our economy.
Undoing the horror show that our society is
becoming requires so much more than politely
asking Democrats to make the economy better.
It requires ending systems of harm and
adopting a care-based economy. It requires
imagining a better world where the entire
equation of our social contract is reversed
and demanding that politicians adopt this
agenda in order to win our votes.
This
commentary
was produced by
Economy for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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