A New Era for the Center-Left
Bring the Political Equilibrium Back to Balance
When a sane party runs for President and a large group of people determines it is better that they take a chance on throwing the dice and hoping to get lucky it is like buying a lottery ticket than saving money. It means that the sane party will lose to a party that offers to take a chance and open for good luck.
This is what happened to the Donks in 2024. However, it was only at the of a very long process in which the Democrats would not stop the Republicans from crediting the Constitution. The result was that the Supreme Court went from centrist to right-wing, there were votes that the Donks could have but ignored, and a culture of lying became the norm at the presidential level. As a result, in 2024 they were caught in the situation where their opposing party could simply lie and get away with it.
The situation at the federal level is that there is one term to get the major laws passed for either the Republican or Democratic party. This means that the incoming party to the presidency will have one term to make major changes and the rest time they will have at least one house of Congress under the opposite party's control. This may not happen the next time, but the best situation is to rely exactly on one term, and the major pieces of legislation must be passed under reconciliation. This means that one has to have a clear idea of a program and the laws that will make that program a reality. Much as one may wish for a term like FDR’s first term, where there is ample room for passing monumental legislation, this will only happen when the United States is in a truly desperate situation.
This means that several pieces of legislation must be ready to go. The reason that this essay did not promise specific actions in the last section, is that the crowding out part of the Republican Party must be stopped and reversed. The old Democratic Party was more than willing to let the crowding out happen, which is why I often referred to the Democratic Party as “That Other Republican Party” or TORP. This is because the Democratic Party was center and even to the right of center to get sweeping majorities for minor issues. There is a reason for this and it is because the Reagan- GHW Bush years stung the Democratic Party into a much more centrist position. There was also the fact that many of the liberal ideas had run their course and the United States was in the position of having built up the fossil fuel economy and was willing to cut taxes and spend less because of the economy’s finished shape.
That meant that people such as Sen. Bernie Sanders which had once been solidly Democratic went independent. It meant that the Democratic Party, which had always been splintered, became more so. After all, in the 1930s humorist Will Rogers quipped “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” In the post-Civil War era, the Democrats were a combination between a Southern openly racist party and a northern labor party, whose primary source of agreement was opposition to the Republican Party. This means that the present situation is not new for the Democratic Party which is why only two members became president in the period of 1868-1928: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. Both had deficiencies: Grover Cleveland was a gold Democrat, when the party was openly pressing for silver as a part of the monetary system, and Woodrow Wilson, while being a progressive on many issues, was also openly racist. There was also the Election of 1876, where Democratic Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote, which was not as clean a measure as you might think, and the election was decided by a committee in favor of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.
This situation is going to happen again, which means that an open party rather than a more unified party will probably happen unless we have a presidential candidate who has great political appeal across many demographics. This means that we must gain some concessions but will not be able to reform the American political system as much as we might like.
This is why even where the Donk Party is good, they have difficulty getting proposals through. This is because your special interest is someone else’s key reason to support the Democratic Party - this is true on the Phant side of the ledger as well, but having taken the time to massage certain ways of getting their agenda through, such as SCOTUS, it is much easier for them to deliver. Where the Democratic Party has an edge is with the bureaucracy, and this is why Trump is willing to take on the bureaucracy because oftentimes it is in the minor implementation of rules that stymies his own, largely overblown, ideas for complete domination.
To take one example: let us take an example from Democrats.org. “making big corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes…” This is laughable. You can write such nonsense on a webpage but that does not mean that it is true. During the presidency of JFK, the marginal tax rate peaked at 70%. It is now less than half of this number. There is no way to square that circle. The only way to do it is to take members who do not see because they do not want to see. That is to say, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers who are comfortably over the $100,000 mark. They have a particular set of issues but are not the problems of the working or bottom three-quarters of the middle class.
This is why The New Republic, for example, over and over again stresses how wonderful the economy is doing, because, for their group of readers, it is. However, their group. of readers is not the working class or the bottom half of the middle class. And for those groups of people, it is not working. This is because this is a fallacy that is older than our country: the difference between. average and median. The two are not the same. This is because the average is the total wealth divided by the number of people while the median is the level of income represented by the 50th percentile. The reason that these two are not the same is because the absurdly wealthy, and even the merely wealthy, take up most of the income. That means that the average is skewed upwards.
One way to measure this is by the Gini coefficient. As a reminder, the Gini coefficient is measured by the ratio of a flat line between the richest and poorest (A) against the actual line (B). The difference is the Gini coefficient. This means that one takes the difference of A/(A+B). The greater the difference, the higher the Gini Curve with 1 having the very rich own all of the income and zero representing a flat distribution.
This gets back to the saving versus gambling impulse: if the lower class of people believes that there is no purpose to saving then they will take the chance of getting rich by luck or by imagined skill. And this has been in place for about 40 years, when the Reagan tax cuts finally hit, which is about 1985. The Democratic Party believes in saving whereas the Republican Party believes in gambling. When the working class of the country believes that savings is, on the whole, better than gambling then the Democratic Party prospers, when they believe that it is more to their benefit, whether rightly or wrongly, to gamble then the Republican Party benefits. See chart above: in the 1975 through 1980 frame the United States was in the lower part of the bracket of Gini, and now it is not. This is why in every election the Democratic Party is at a disadvantage: the Republican Party knows that they don’t have to deliver for people by saving they just need to hold up examples of people who made it rich by playing the lottery. It may not be fair, but it is the way things are at the present time.
If this is the case, and I submit that the chart is only the beginnings of the proof, then added on to the fact that the Republican Party has an advantage in filtering the vote so that they get a larger share of the power then there percentage of the electorate would justify, the Democratic Party must begin to play the game as it is not as they want it to be.
But how to translate the theoretical in to the practical?
The trick is to group people so that all of the people are counted. The problem is that the Democratic Party wishes to exclude many of the people. Not as much as the Republican Party does, but still enough to favor certain interests over others. the asking of each person what they want does not deliver a more left-wing style of government, because it has already been used in Australia. The center right party is the dominant governing party. What changes is the focus of the government.
Other rather simple thing is to count all of the people who could vote: this means Washington DC and Puerto Rico. This is non-negotiable, it must be done if the Democratic Party wants to continue to be relevant.
The third almost trivial thing to do is to expand the House of Representatives two 600 seats, because that will reduce the state representation in favor of people representation in the presidential election. At the same time this is done make it so that nonpartisan boards set up the division of representatives rather than doing it by the state legislatures. This is because we now have the power to almost individually decide what the house will look like which is not part of the framework which even the founders wanted.
The last is too stressed to fold the voters and the representatives that this is the way we deliver victories. In fact, it is the way that the Republican Party has made it so that the far right has certain laws built in that are antithetical to almost the majority of voters, whether Democratic, independent, or even Republican.
While there needs to be done far more in this bucket, these must be queued up for the first reconciliation. Unfortunately this does not dent the over reliance on the right wing of the Supreme Court of the United States. This means it will be 20 years before we can do something about this, because one term of Trump, two terms of a Democratic president, to terms of a Republican president, means the next probable time that this can be done is in 20 years. This is how long. it tookthe Republican Party to build up a majority for repealing Roe versus Wade, we can also manage to do this in less time if we have a second term with a majority in the Senate. But this also means that we have underline to our supreme court nominees that they must step down when we can replace them with centerleft justices. It may not be good to speak ill of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she was a member of the old Democratic party which dressed individual accomplishment regardless of the cost that it inflicted on the institution. This attitude cannot work, and quite frankly, we will be paying for this for along time. Instead of stepping down when a centerleft justice could take Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s place she waited and the result is a conservative justice, specifically Amy Coney Barrett, with conservative ideas that they were willing to implement.
You might also have mentioned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg SHOULD have resigned far earlier, rather than waiting to die on the bench. She was certainly bright enough to realize that ReThuglicans have no honor, and the coup pulled off by Moscow Mitch came as no surprise. [It was even more obscene that he had no problem with the October nomination of Amy Coney Barrett during an election year, after having blocked a February nomination four years earlier.]
However, DemocRats cannot get out of their own way: period. They are far too concerned with issues that at best mean nothing to the "average" voter, and they ignore the issues that apparently matter. The 2024 election might have been salvaged had Biden decided not to run a year earlier. However, even the candidate chosen in the primaries would have needed to deal with immigration and inflation at the grocery story (and elsewhere).
The Dems simply could not deliver a message. They assumed that the overturn of *Roe* would hand them an easy victory. Instead, they chose a very weak candidate, lost seven out of seven "swing states," and handed a convicted felon the keys to the White House. Shameful!
I could point to many other factors: the way the Party marginalized Hispanics and Progressives; the way it ignored and insulted the Arab-American and Muslim-American voters (costing them Michigan and Wisconsin), the way they have stood by for decades without the guts to fight, and the way they have consistently run inept campaigns with very weak candidates. Add 2024 to that list...