Joe Biden's victory in South Carolina shows that the forces of reason are reasserting themselves in the topsy-turvy Democratic Party. The moonbats of progressivism are being brought to heel by the adults in the room.
Realpolitik rules. It's what makes government work, and what makes it a constant disappointment. As I observed in the previous post, what makes a politician on the nominal left electable is the assurance that he or she will continue the inexorable pull to the right.
In the quest for electability, candidates like Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigeig all in varying degrees make sure that the broader electorate knows that they will not support things like an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income. They don't use the word "free" to refer to education. Nothing is socialistic.
Socialism is a scare word with good reason. It has much less power now than it did when our global nemesis was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the USSR did plenty to tarnish the brand, which -- in its purest form -- is a recipe for just another kind of heavy-handed government. The negative stereotype has wide, deep roots and a dense, hard grain that you won't cut just by insisting that this socialism is democratic, and doesn't really mean what one definition of the word has always meant: government ownership of the means of production. It's been politically risky from the outset to try to turn socialism into a proud badge of American identity. It was one of those things that you would try to ignore, while focusing on the actual good things offered by the movement. But too many people can't overcome their ingrained visceral repulsion at the term. And then there are the wealthy, who stand to lose, bigly, with the institution of any form of widespread democratization in the workplace and the economy at large.
Small business owners may be even more afraid of humanitarian movements, because small businesses are much more vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces. Technological developments or social trends may kill demand for your product or service with no quick route to regain your revenue stream. Rising wages not coupled with other social improvements like universal health care and affordable access to education and retraining may make employees too expensive, even though your business volume calls for more personnel. But because universal health care has been widely reviled for decades, you know as a business person that it's too risky even to try. Because everything in this country since 1980 has been based on the pursuit of profit and the glorification of wealth, it's un-American to suggest that education should be subsidized and expanded.
Tax policy could be designed to extract much more from the big earners, especially the corporate behemoths that profit inversely to their social responsibility, but that would require an overhaul of investment culture at its most basic level. Good luck with that.
This is why we can't have nice things: because the people with lots of nice things don't want to give any of them up, and the people who have managed to scrape together a few nice things know from sad experience that they are the ones who will get squeezed if any pie-in-the-sky programs get adopted. The wealthy who control the government will make sure that they get their preferential tax policy no matter what crazy bills manage to crawl all the way through an accidentally and temporarily progressive majority in Congress and get signed into law by the odd and occasional Democratic chief executive.
Even Democratic and unaffiliated voters who might want those nice social policies are afraid to ask for them because they know they will get hammered by the opposition from the GOP, corporate Democrats, and right-leaning unaffiliated voters.
The unifying factor among the majority of voters is that they want to make plenty of money, pay as little as possible in taxes, and take no real risks. Even the lefties who say they don't mind if their taxes are high only accept the taxation as long as the money goes to the kinds of social programs they believe are ultimately good.
Policy fails because its proponents can't convince enough people that it is ultimately good. Because any policy usually takes a long time to show results, the waiting period often spans an election cycle, giving disappointed voters a chance to flip the party dominance in retribution. This generally derails beneficial social policies more than destructive ones, because nurturing and growth are slow processes that require patience. Destruction often shows quick profits, even if they're only a benefit to the rich getting richer. Economic pundits can still point to positive numbers as evidence that this is the way we should have been headed all along. That goes back to the fundamental toxicity underlying investment for profit. And the conservatives gravitate more readily to a warlike model of political interaction, which bolsters gerrymandering and dark money contributions to advance the glorious cause of unlimited wealth on a finite Earth.
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