The Democrats’ failure to tell the truth about the Rot at the Top

Today I continue with the four stories of America and bring us to the present. The underlying question is why Democrats have allowed Trump to tell his own fake version of the Rot at the Top while Democrats have been reluctant to tell the real one.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the conceptual breach that Democrats had left open in the late 1960s and 1970s.

For Reagan, the Mob at the Gates was not merely a Soviet Union that needed to be contained, but an Evil Empire that had to be destroyed.

The Rot at the Top was big government — Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats who stifled Triumphant Individuals.

The Benevolent Community’s foundation was not New Deal-style programs but small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference. (Social spending could be cut, therefore, without threatening the mythology of benevolence.)

The Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, was no longer the little guy in need of a helping hand, but the business entrepreneur who would spawn new companies and industries if unencumbered by government regulations and taxes.

Through the alchemy of supply-side (“trickle-down”) economics, the Triumphant Individual’s self-enriching triumphs would, Reagan said, help us all.

Reagan’s overall message was as hopeful and upbeat as FDR’s: “America is back and standing tall,” Reagan said in 1984. “We’ve begun to restore the great American values — the dignity of work, the warmth of family, the strength of neighborhood, and the nourishment of human freedom."

Reagan’s versions of the four stories formed a long shadow over subsequent Democratic administrations.

The Soviet Union imploded, removing the most provocative Mob at the Gates.

The Rot at the Top remained big government.

To be sure, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 promising to “fight for the forgotten middle class” against the forces of “greed,” but Clinton inherited such a huge budget deficit from George H.W. Bush that he couldn’t put up much of a fight. And after losing his bid for universal health care, Clinton himself announced that “the era of big government is over” — and he proved it by ending welfare.

Clinton’s Benevolent Community remained, as it was under his Republican predecessors, a nation of volunteers; Clinton appointed a commission on volunteerism and encouraged the private sector to offer jobs to former welfare recipients.

Clinton urged would-be Triumphant Individuals (who were working harder than ever with no appreciable increase in pay and benefits) to embrace a new covenant of personal “opportunity and responsibility.”Under George W. Bush, the stories continued to reflect Reagan’s versions. The September 11 terrorist attacks powerfully revived the Mob at the Gates, giving the Bush presidency a seemingly compelling mission.

Bush’s Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, was a property owner who achieved the “dignity and security of economic independence” by getting rich off his assets, as Bush put it in his second inaugural. The “ownership society” was intended, as Bush explained, to make “every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny.”

In this universe, there was no more need for national benevolence. In fact, Social Security — which had been the very symbol of FDR’s Benevolent Community — was to be turned into private accounts that Triumphant Individuals could use to gain personal wealth.

In Bush’s retelling, the Benevolent Community was found in religious congregations — in “faith-based” organizations that “rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart to heart.”

As Bush explained when he appointed his father and Clinton to head a relief commission for nations harmed by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, “The greatest source of America’s generosity is not our government. It’s the good heart of the American people.”

It was in the retelling of the story about the Rot at the Top that George W. Bush departed most from preceding Republican versions and laid the narrative foundation for Trump.

Rather than big government, Bush told America that the Rot was lodged in America’s “cultural elites” —depicted as influential liberals in prestigious coastal universities, the upper strata of New York and Hollywood, and the media.

This Rot disdained ordinary working Americans, rejected religion and patriotism, celebrated Hollywood’s licentiousness, and sought to impose sexual permissiveness — including abortion and gay marriage — on good, God-fearing Americans.

A TV advertisement aired in 2003 by a conservative group during the Democratic primary campaign described this new Rot as a “tax-hiking, government-spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show.”

In the general election campaign of 2004, Republicans repeatedly attacked John Kerry as a “Massachusetts liberal” who was part of the “Chardonnay-and-brie set.”

Bush mocked Kerry for finding a “new nuance” each day on Iraq, drawing out the word “nuance” to emphasize Kerry’s French cultural elitism. “In Texas, we don’t do nuance,” he said, to laughter and applause. House Republican leader Tom DeLay opened his campaign speeches by saying, “Good morning, or, as John Kerry would say, ‘Bonjour.’”

Barack Obama came close to offering new versions of the four American stories.

At the Democratic National Convention of 2004, Obama wedded the Benevolent Community to the Triumphant Individual. In Obama’s retelling, individual Americans could triumph because the nation as a whole supported and invested in them.

“My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ‘blessed,’ believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential. …”
“… it’s not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.”

For Obama, the link between the Triumphant Individual and Benevolent Community was a belief in the common good:

“… A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”

Obama’s Benevolent Community and Triumphant Individual were premised on equal opportunity.

“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”
“People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.”

The Benevolent Community and Triumphant Individual in turn depended on resisting the Rot at the Top:

“That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — or at least, most of the time.”
… So instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas … offer them to companies creating jobs here at home…. [Make it so] all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves. … [Fight for] energy independence, so we aren’t held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields. …”

And on resisting the Mob at the Gates:

“A while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, 6’2” or 6’3”, clear-eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he’d joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. As I listened to him explain why he’d enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us?
I thought of more than 900 service men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one’s full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or with nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists. When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.”

For Obama, the real villains at the top were those trying to divide us:

“Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

The Democrats’ weakest story has been the Rot at the Top. Democrats have been reluctant to condemn economic elites who have grown richer than ever and who have used their affluence to corrupt the political system.

This should not be surprising. Since the 1980s, Democrats have been drinking at the same funding troughs as Republicans — big corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals. And as the Supreme Court opened the spigots of big money into politics, those troughs have become far larger, for both parties.

Soon after he was installed in the White House, Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out their banks.

In a private meeting, the CEOs of the biggest banks reportedly sought to explain to him why they and their top executives deserved the bonuses. Obama stopped the conversation short. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Ultimately, some 10 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure. This was not an inevitable result of the financial crisis. It was a policy choice.

Other policy choices over the last 40 years have also tilted the playing field against average working people.

Between 1972 and Trump’s election in 2016, the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy more than doubled in size. At the same time, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned more wealth than the bottom 90 percent put together.

Americans born in the early 1940s had a 92 percent chance of obtaining a higher household income than their parents, once they became adults. They would live out the American dream. But those chances steadily declined. Americans born in the 1980s had only a 50-50 shot at doing better than their parents.

This is the real story of the Rot at the Top — rigging the economy against average workers, cutting taxes on the top and raising them on everyone else, making it harder to form labor unions, and creating vast monopolies.

At the same time, the monied interests have prevented workers from getting better wages and more secure jobs.

Bernie Sanders told this story about the real Rot at the Top, but other leading Democrats have been reluctant to tell it.

The Democrats’ failure to tell this story has enabled Republican cultural populism to fill the void, offering Americans who were growing distrustful of the system an explanation for what had gone wrong and a set of villains to blame — immigrants, “coastal elites,” "woke”ism, the “deep state,” transgendered people, “communists,” “socialists,” the “Left,” Critical Race Theory, “cat ladies,” and other bogeymen.

But none of these is the real explanation. The real explanation, the real Rot at the Top, has been a new record concentration of wealth and power at the top — enough to corrupt our system of self-government.

As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”

Democrats have scored some important victories for working families, including the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. I’m proud to have been part of a Democratic administration.

Yet Clinton and Obama were reluctant to criticize the monied interests, or target their corrupting influence on democracy.

Both Clinton and Obama depended on big money from corporations and the wealthy. Both turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, yet he never followed up on his reelection promise to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United v. FEC decision.

Because Democrats (with the notable exceptions of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) have not told the real story of the Rot at the Top, the only version available to voters without college degrees has been the Republican cultural version.

By the 2020s, Republicans saw the culture wars as the central struggle of American public life.

Donald Trump blamed America’s problems on immigrants, Democrats, socialists, and so on.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis shipped undocumented immigrants out of Florida, barred teaching about sex or America’s history of racism, blocked abortions after 12 weeks, and required trans young people to use bathrooms according to their sex assigned at birth.

JD Vance, Trump’s choice for vice president, called women who chose not to have children “childless cat ladies” and lied that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Republican cultural populism is entirely bogus. The biggest change over the previous four decades, the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class, has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”ism, or any other Republican cultural target.

The biggest change has been a giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power that has accompanied that shift; and in the injuries to the pride, status, and self-esteem of those who have been left behind.

What’s holding us back from remedying this? Concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven’t witnessed in this nation since the late 19th century.

Mammoth corporations and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy, take over much of our media, give executives stratospheric pay packages while firing workers, and pad their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare.

In this, they have been helped by a Republican Congress and White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again by Trump and his lackeys.

Donald Trump has already named more billionaires to his pending administration than any administration in history, starting with giving the wealthiest person in the world responsibility for identifying and cutting out so-called government “inefficiencies.”

As Al Gore said in 2000, in a remarkably prescient speech, the GOP has been bankrolled by “a new generation of special interest power brokers who would like nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits.”

Gore came in for a lot of criticism after his defeat from Democrats who felt uncomfortable with his description of a nation divided between “the people” and “the powerful.” But Al Gore was on to something in 2000. After all, he got the most votes.

Unless or until Democratic candidates tell the real story of our time — the corruption of our system of self-government that has been the direct consequence of record inequality — and vow to take it on as their central mission, they will have failed the nation.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/