Confronting Political Discontent
In a blog post on June 16, 2018 titled “Considering Political Discontent,” comments on Steven Brill’s book Tailspin included Brill’s dividing the U.S. population into the “unprotected” and the “protected.” In the book he defines the two groups, respectively, as “the vast majority who count on government to provide for the common good, and the minority who don’t need government for anything and even view the government as something they often need to be protected from.”
Brill recounts success in the sixties and early seventies in reducing the portion of the population living at or below the poverty line from 21% in 1962 to 11.1% in 1973, thanks to efforts by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon .He attributes the subsequent, widening gap between the two groupings to decades of actions by a well-educated meritocratic elite that included financial engineering, bank bailouts, corporate lobbying, gerrymandering, elections won with exorbitant funds from wealthy individuals, and court actions.
In his book Brill relates an interview with Peter Edelman. Edelman, an anti-poverty expert, campaigned with Robert Kennedy in 1968 and later served in the Department of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton. Brill quotes Edelman in a remarkable analysis of what transpired after 1974: “The stagnation of the middle class, beginning in the late seventies, totally changed the politics of doing something for the poor …. At least the middle class that was suffering and frustrated could still see that there were poor people below them. What politician is going to risk alienating them still more by saying he’s worried about the poor or by doing anything for them?”
Brill’s brief history goes a long way toward explaining the polarization preventing legislative progress on any number of pressing national concerns. Among those, Brill discusses poverty, infrastructure repair and replacement, K-12 education, job training, healthcare, immigration reform and election reform. Brill contends that some wealthy individuals reject such legislative action, smugly satisfied with their comfortable status quo. If so, it is a short-sighted position to take, and Brill recounted research and analysis accumulated by transparent, privately funded organizations, and distributed through the media, that contribute to the weight of evidence against the status quo.
Some of these organizations were founded and/or run by former office-holders painfully aware of the short-comings of current practice. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) was founded by two retired senators, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, to work toward a more effective Congress. CRP publishes its findings on its website, OpenSecrets.org. Issue One is a good government non-profit formed to undo the corruption made possible by unlimited donations. Former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley co-chairs the non-profit’s board of advisors. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) is a non-profit think tank founded in 2007 by former Republican Senate majority leaders Bob Dole and Howard Baker and former Democratic majority leaders George Mitchell and Tom Daschle.
Far from being discouraged, leaders of these organizations that Brill encountered believe they are, as one said, preparing the way for “when people of good faith on both sides of the aisle decide enough is enough.” Monthly Gallup polls find public disapproval of how Congress is handling its job consistently around 80%.
Are we there yet?