The reality is that government is complicated, and reducing it all to a simple message is usually so reductive as to be dishonest. The Republican approach is extremely dishonest; they position themselves as simple, "Real America" outsiders railing against the status quo. Meanwhile they actually represent the wealthy, powerful types who have had almost all of the control since the beginning of time.
But it works, because everyone hates politicians. Everyone hates politicians because they only hear the bad things. The scandals and fights are the interesting things that make the news. The good things, like complex pieces of litigation that will likely make millions of lives better down the road, don't quite carry the same visceral punch. They're boring and complicated. Ideally, news networks would only report the boring, complicated, important stuff, people's preferences be damned. But as long as news networks have to sell papers and get ratings, that is unlikely to happen.
While we wait for the American populace to get more interested in policy and less interested in shocking headlines, the Democrats have to find a more arresting central message. There is a bit in this short article that points to a similarly simple, but much more honest, theme that the Democrats could use: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/how-ayn-rands-theories-destroyed-never-trump-conservatism.html:
"The conservative movement treats small government as a first-order question of liberty, alongside or even above political liberty. Liberals treat economic policy on pragmatic grounds — the point of Medicaid is to help poor people get health care, and the point of the Clean Air Act is to create more breathable air. Expanding government is the means toward those discrete ends. Conservatives have discrete goals, like economic growth, but also larger ideological ones. As Milton Friedman once put it, “‘freedom’ in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so ‘economic freedom’ is an end in itself to a believer in freedom.” While it may seem strange to liberals, for economic conservatives, the fight to slash down the size of government is itself tantamount to a fight against authoritarianism."
I think a huge majority of American side with Democrats on this. Most Americans don't equate government with tyranny, which is after all a ridiculous notion that hews much more closely to anarchy than anything that would fit under the label of "conservatism" in any other country. Most Americans are practical people. They are for things that work, that make their lives better. They're not going to oppose Medicare or Social Security because the programs can be spun into an assault on "economic freedom." What freedom would that be specifically, in real terms? The freedom to be starve or die from treatable diseases when you get old? Some freedoms are best left unrealized.
There are or course many things that can and should be looked at as essential freedoms. Most of those are elucidated in the Constitution. But while specific freedoms are vital, the general concept of "freedom" has been so stretched and abused as to no longer be useful in political discussion. Everything that the government does can be interpreted as an encroachment on someone's freedom. Social Security robs you of your freedom to do what you want with some of your money. Anti-discrimination laws deprive you of your freedom to refuse the business of gay people. Helmet laws deprive you of the freedom to be an idiot and suffer a traumatic brain injury and then pass the hospital expenses on to the rest of us because you exercised your freedom to not have adequate insurance. Drug laws rob you of your freedom to snort cocaine. Sex laws deprive NAMBLA members from the freedom to have sex with children. And on and on.
"Freedom" is simply too large and malleable a concept to have any validity when "broadly understood," to borrow Milton Friedman's term. You have to evaluate each individual thing that can be defined as a freedom on a case-by-case basis. After all, any law will deprive you of some freedom. The real question is what freedoms we need and which we don't.
I'm happy to give up my freedom to snort cocaine, and more than happy to give up my freedom to have that Social Security money right now. I give up that latter freedom because I know that Social Security works. Before Social Security, 50% of seniors lived below the poverty line. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_the_United_States) Now that we have Social Security, it's 10-15%. (http://kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/poverty-among-seniors-an-updated-analysis-of-national-and-state-level-poverty-rates-under-the-official-and-supplemental-poverty-measures/) Assuming that the goal of Social Security is to get seniors out of poverty, I think we can comfortably say it is effective.
It might work best to leave out the word "freedom," loaded as it is with self-evident righteousness. Instead, focus on pragmatism. In simple terms, the idea is "Do what works." Do what has proven to work within states or in other countries. Put philosophies aside and just look at results.
This might sound obvious, but in most political arguments, pragmatism is nowhere to be found. Most political arguments get stuck in 1) overarching ideologies, 2) competing theories, and/or 3) appeals to morality. These can be perfectly valid reasons to be for or against a government program. But they usually get us liberals nowhere in arguments, can often result in terrible failures. Pragmatism can cut through it all. Let's show how by giving examples in which each of aforementioned three main types of arguments failed.
1. Overarching ideologies
Social Security provides a good example of the problem with ascribing to overarching ideologies. Basically, Social Security is socialism. It's an involuntary redistribution of wealth by the government. Ideological conservatives get very upset about this fact. To which I say, "Maybe it is socialism -- so what? It works." The people who receive Social Security would likely agree with me; seniors, who tend not to be socialists by any stretch of the imagination, on the whole, are very, very, very supportive of Social Security.
Maybe it makes you feel icky to have anything that smacks of socialism in our society. Maybe you feel more stable and satisfied when you can devote yourself to one simple ideology that encompasses everything. I'd argue that those sorts of concerns are a lot less important than whether something works. If something makes millions of lives better at a minimum of pain, then I don't really care about your need for ideological purity.
Ideologies are important, sure. But the world is always more complicated than any ideology can really encapsulate. Capitalism is a great thing, except when it isn't. Socialism is also a great thing, except when it isn't. Again, it's a case-by-case thing.
Some things need to be run by the government, like Social Security. Some things need to be run by the private sector, like most of the economy. I want to make this latter point very clear to my more left-wing ideological readers. Horrible things occur when the central government tries to micromanage the economy. You can see this by looking at what happened in communist nations.
From 1958-1961, Mao Zedong tried to force China to quickly change from an agrarian to an industrial economy, in what was called the Great Leap Forward. He was an ideologue, believing firmly that government control would work best in every aspect of society. It proved to be a horrifically tragic blind spot, as the Great Leap Forward resulted in a massive famine that devastated China. Estimates range from 18-55 million deaths. In the history of the world, only World War I and II can top that level of devastation.
That is not to say that something similar did not happen in the history of almost every communist country. Another example is found in Ukraine in the 1930s. The Russians controlled Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of Europe. Stalin was an ideologue, so he forced Ukranian farms to reform into collectives. As a result, grain production dropped precipitously. Five million Ukranian peasants starved to death. The Russian commissars who were overseeing the project has strict quotas, so they would take away even the seed grain, making future food production impossible.
How do we react to these tragedies? Do we start delving into the philosophical or ideological reasons that communism caused such horrors? In "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things," author Matthew White has a better perspective:
"Never trust anyone who argues against communism on theory. Here we have one of the greatest social experiments in history failing spectacularly, yet instead of using the obvious, scientific proof that we tried communism and it doesn't work, some people want to take the long way around and argue property rights and theories of ownership. They obviously don't care whether communism worked or not; it's the theory of communism that bothers them, and they'd argue against even if it had worked perfectly."
The people Matthew White is ridiculing have a compulsion to frame everything in theory and ideology, to such a ridiculous extent that they have do it with communism, a massive failure that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people across the globe. Just put all the theory and ideology aside and concentrate on pragmatics: Communism doesn't work. So let's not try it again. Done and done.
Terrible consequences can result from getting stuck in philosophy and forgetting pragmatics. In reaction to the failures of communism, many people became staunch laissez-faire capitalists. Ayn Rand, for example, grew up in Russia and saw how awful communism could be. Then she made the common mistake of saying "Well, if that's wrong, then everything opposite to it must be right." Her single-minded, oversimplified worship of capitalist alpha males formed the foundation of objectivism, which still infects our political system through Paul Ryan and many other capitalist alpha males. (Ironic that they love the philosophy that makes them into gods, eh? If only someone would invent a philosophy in which nerdy liberals were ubermensches, I might have to rethink everything.)
The failure of communism does not mean we should go to opposite extreme and allow no government involvement in the economy. We saw what that did in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and early 1900s. A few people got incredibly rich, but most people lived in fetid slums and died young. Children worked in factories for 12 hours a day with no hope of ever having a better life. Eventually the system collapsed in on itself, as a gigantic stock market bubble popped and led to the Great Depression. Then people watched farmers being paid to destroy food even though people were starving. It made sense in capitalist terms, as it lowered the supply and thus boosted prices. But in any human sense, it looked like insane cruelty.
An even better example was found in India. The British owned India at the time, and exploited its agricultural capacity to the hilt. Throughout their history, Indians had always stored food to guard against famine. They knew that every so often, the yearly monsoon would be weak, the harvest would very bad, and you have to dig into the food stores to survive. But this was anathema to the Adam Smith devotees among the British upper class. When the market was favorable, they sold the food, ignoring any concerns about future famines.
In fact, Adam Smith didn't even believe famine could result from such conditions. He wrote "Famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth." (Again, I'm cribbing this and the rest of the information about the Indian famines from Matthew White's book, which is terrific. If you need one book to teach you world history, his is a good start.) So in other words, only government intervention in the economy causes famine. Markets, when left alone, always make things right.
In 1874, a drought hit northeastern India, just as it always does periodically. The British had made sure there were no sufficient food reserves. The little food that was being produced was so scarce that it jumped in price, becoming too expensive for Indians to buy. Sir Richard Temple, the British official in charge, leapt to the rescue, setting up a system for importing rice from Burma and giving it to the poor. It was a huge success, and famine was averted.
But the British ruling class did not see this as a success; quite the opposite. Temple was severely reprimanded for his actions. "He was scorned all across the ruling class for spending money and meddling in the natural order of things." (White again.) White uses the term "natural order of things" ironically, but the British at the time meant it quite seriously. It is of course not at all a "natural" order of things to anyone who owns a conscience or capacity for empathy that hasn't been clouded by the ideology of Adam Smith-style lassiez-faire capitalism.
Another drought hit India in 1876, and this time Temple didn't repeat his "mistake" of saving lives. Again, scarcity drove food prices beyond the ability of Indians to pay. Prospectors hoarded grain in the hopes of even higher prices. While the Indian people starved, the food they produced was shipped to Europe for sale. It is estimated that anywhere from 5 to 10 million Indians died of starvation.
Did the British capitalists learn from this? Not exactly. They blamed the famine on the weather and then did the same thing when the next drought hit, in 1896. And then they did it again in 1899. An estimated 16 million people died in the the three famines.
There were people in Britain pleading for mercy. But the British ruling class argued that any sort of relief would "encourage a cycle of dependency." Sound familiar? To be fair, the British adherence to lasseiz-faire capitalism went well beyond the patronizing arguments that modern conservatives make against anti-poverty programs.
The viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, stated that "the Indian population 'has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil' and that any relief would simply be absorbed in further unrestrained breeding." In other words, these subhuman Indians will only make too many children if you give them food; better to allow millions to starve to death and thus keep the population under control. (Never mind that the old system of storing grain kept the Indian population at a manageable level without frequent multi-million-casualty famines.) Lytton and Temple worked together to enact the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act, which "outlawed any private relief donations that might undercut the price of grain set by the open market." Let's underline that: Feeding starving children became illegal, because it could potentially lower the market price of grain.
Throughout the Gilded Age, unfettered capitalism created a world so out of balance, with so much blatant cruelty, that it gave rise to communism, an extreme form of socialism in which an oligarchic government makes all the decisions regardless of what the people want. (Socialism is different in that it is responsive to the people; socialism requires democracy. That doesn't make it infallible, but it makes it much, much less likely to create famine.) The turn to communism turned out to be a terrible, tragic overreaction. But considering the example of India and many others, you can at least understand the motivation.
The truth is that both extremes of capitalism and socialism are horrible, monstrous ways to run modern economies. Thus all countries use carefully constructed combination of the two, in what economists call "mixed economies." Some arenas are best left to private enterprise while some are best left to government. Selling consumer goods is left to private enterprise while national defense and justice systems are left to government. Few people would argue with that; no one wants the government selling apples and no one wants the police abolished and replaced with private security forces available only to the wealthy. Pretty much everyone who calls him/herself is a "capitalist" or a "socialist" is actually believer in mixed economies.
In the great book "Government is Good," Douglas Amy likens the government's role in the market economy as like that of a referee at a football game. The referee is there to enforce the rules. But in enforcing the rules, he doesn't destroy competition, as many conservatives would have you believe about the economy. The referee actually enables competition to occur. Without the referee and the rules, football would just be "kill the man with the ball." It would be chaos, with even more brutality and carnage than football already has. Everyone would be incapacitated except the biggest and strongest, who would then saunter slowly down the field and win every game in a blowout. Maybe sociopaths would enjoy that more. And maybe sociopaths would enjoy an economy in which might makes right and the powerful have no restrictions from crushing the powerless. I think the rest of us would not want that.
Moreover, laissez-faire capitalism would crush what conservatives always say they love more than anything else: entrepreneurship and competition. Read up on the things that the robber barons of the Gilded Age did to maintain their monopolies and crowd out any up-and-comers: kickbacks, slush funds, bribes, and lots of other tactics that are now illegal. Innovation would also grind to a halt; established companies tend not to bring about change nearly as quickly as entrepreneurs do. Monopolies really don't like change; why would they want to do anything that could possibly threaten their monopoly cash cow? If you have a cable company, you have some idea what it's like to deal with a monopoly. You get charged a ton for very little, and if you don't like it, what are you going to do? Not watch baseball?
The role of government as a referee is the best solution, but not because it hews to some overarching ideology. It is best because it works. As I said, it is what all developed nations do. Many third-world nations don't, and they have much lower standards of living, higher mortality rates, etc. etc. When every developed nation does something a certain way, that probably means it works.
2) Competing theories
This one is a sort of a micro version of the previous one. When I say "competing theories," I'm talking about theories about what a particular piece of policy would do. Let's delve straight into an example.
Conservatives say that raising the minimum wage actually hurts the working class because then employers can't afford workers. Then minimum-wage jobs disappear, and people go from being underpaid to not being paid at all.
OK, that's a theory. It makes some basic sense. And it was in fact the dominant theory about minimum wage laws for many years among economists.
But now let's look at the pragmatics. Is this a theory that has been tested in the real world? If so, what were the results?
We have lots of results for this particular theory, because the minimum wage has been raised many times, in the United States and elsewhere. And on the whole, the theory doesn't stand up. Minimum wage increases, as long as they aren't too drastic, do not tend to result in large dips in jobs, minimum-wage or otherwise. In 2013, the Center for Economic Policy and Research did a meta-analysis about the question, and found that minimum wage increases had little or no effect on employment levels (http://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf) (Meta-analyses, by the way, are always the way to go to find pragmatic answers to questions. Never believe a single study, which can can come up with just about anything. A meta-analysis takes the results of dozens of studies and shows the general result. It's much, much more reliable.)
Maybe all that is a bit much to fit on a bumper sticker. But the basic dynamic of this argument can work for Democrats. In a debate it would go something like this:
Democrat: No one who is willing to work full-time should ever be under the poverty line. (Editor's note: This is a very good moral argument that convinces you and me. But won't convince many people, as we know from the fact that minimum wage increases are still controversial. Watch our Democratic friend take a new tack later.)
Republican: But minimum-wage increases hurt the people you're trying to help, Democrat! They make it too expensive to have workers. You'll see massive layoffs if you enact such a law!
Democrat: Interesting theory. But has that happened in practice?
Republican: Say what now?
Democrat: The federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times since 1938. Did it ever result in large layoffs nationwide?
Republican: Well, uh ... (A dumb Republican will change the subject here; a smart one might have a few cherry-picked examples of this and that happening in a particular town once.)
Democrat: Your theory, Republican, used to be the main one among economists. But in practice, it's been proven wrong. On the whole, minimum wages do not result in lots of layoffs. There are many theories as to why, which I could get into, but suffice to say: What matters a lot more than a theory is what happens in the real world. And in the real world, minimum wage increases, as long as they're not too drastic and are done right, help the poor, and indeed everying in America willing to work for a living.
See what Democrat did there? She appealed to Joe Sixpack who doesn't give a flying fig about theories. He cares about what happens in real life. Most Democratic positions on the economy are rational ones rooted in what has been shown to happen in real life. They need to push that above all else.
Democrat didn't also get bogged down in why minimum wage increases don't result in mass layoffs. That kind of thing is interesting to you and me, but to most people, it makes their eyes glaze over. Just show the results; they're more powerful than anything else.
With any pragmatic approach, there is a danger that Democrats can come off looking like smarty-pants professors, which tends to annoy people (even if they need it). After all, this is all about teaching people about meta-analyses and examples that they don't know about, because they don't pay close attention to academia and world governments across. But I think if you couch it in terms of "Well, that's a nice theory, but what works in practice?" you can actually cast the Republican as the out-of-touch ivory-tower denizen and make yourself look more in tune with the average Joe who wants results, not theories. (Then you can keep to yourself the knowledge of how important theories are in the whole process.)
3) Appeals to morality
This is going to be insufficient and short, because I've already written much more than I intended here. Really, the main point in all this is the first one, that pragmatism can brush aside all the blind spots that oversimplified philosophies create. But it's also important to lessen the Democratic tendency to argue everything with an appeal to morality.
This will be a tough habit to break. Perhaps contrary to stereotype, we liberals tend to be very morally minded people. Specifically, we always think of everything in terms of "rights." Again from my beloved Matthew White:
"The Civil War was a battle between two competing visions of America -- one defined by nationality (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) against one defined by ideology (all men are created equal). This is probably the central conflict of American history ... the Fourteenth Amendment made the states subordinate to the federal government on matters of human rights for the first time, an ideological victory that has annoyed conservatives for a century and a half."
We liberals genuinely believe that the United States is based on the principle of "All men are created equal." It is the moral center of everything else in this country. Conservatives, though, tend to believe in it only when it benefits their tribe. The people they know personally and identify with are America. Everybody else who lives in this country are scary and threatening.
This mindset doesn't make conservatives evil. But it does make them disappointingly just like every other group of people who have ever lived on this planet. Pretty much every other country was founded on an idea much less lofty than "All men are created equal." Instead it was always something more like "Let's all band together so we do better than those assholes over there." It's an instinct firmly rooted in our species' DNA, but that doesn't make it right. The founding fathers discovered something much better in "All men are created equal."
Our genuinely principled perspective leads to put everything in terms of "rights." For example, people would often talk about all people's "right" to adequate health care, regardless of wealth. While I believe that's true, it's not an effective argument to conservatives. Much the way everything can be couched in terms of "freedom," everything can be couched in terms of "rights." It is a very valid concept for many things. But it has been beaten to death from overuse.
Other moral arguments would talk about people in general, and how they suffer from the terrible health care system. That's not good enough to convince conservatives; they'll just think you're talking about minorities and won't care. Instead, bring it to the people in their tribe. Say, "Ever seen those flyers at the gas station asking for money for someone who was diagnosed with cancer? Ever known someone who stayed away from the hospital until the last minute because he/she couldn't afford it, and by then it was too late? Know anyone who can't get insurance because of a 'pre-existing condition'? How horrible is that concept, by the way? It means the people who need insurance most can't get it. Can you name any other product that you can't get if you need it too much? How about a world where none of this crap never happens again?"
I suppose in this one, you have to get into the weeds a little, just people know what you're talking about. With a minimum-wage hike, it's all there in the name. With health care reform, people often didn't know what exactly the problem was.
It might seem crazy to those of us immersed in these issues, but lot of people never saw or understood the need for health care reform. So we should have showed them the need in visceral, heartstring-tugging terms. Conservatives effectively exploited fear by making up lies about death panels; liberals need to learn how to use both hope and fear.
Then talk about how the United States spends more on health care, but gets worse results, than any other developed nation. In my experience, this fact tends to get people to stop and think. Obviously, these sorts of problems have been solved in other countries. This is all the old advertising tactic of "Present the problem, then offer the solution." It's old tactic because it works.
I really, really wanted Democrats to push this perspective more during the health care debate: All you have to do is look around the globe and see what has worked elsewhere. And what has worked is either single-payer (i.e., "Medicare for all," which is a phrase I love because it hooks in the seniors), or non-profit health insurance companies, or something, anything besides leaving it to the capitalist markets. Like many things, from roads to national defense, health insurance does not work as a consumer good on a marketplace. I say, be blatant about the pragmatics behind it all: that some things are best left to capitalism, and some things, like health insurance, are done best by governments. Don't be afraid to say that governments can actually do things well; yes, we know everyone will scoff at first, having been immersed in knee-jerk anti-government crap since Reagan. But give them enough concrete examples and they might start to listen. Say, "You know those people who object to the idea of socialized medicine because "it's socialism"? They usually think the same about Social Security. And you like Social Security, no?"
I was a Hillary Clinton supporter, but I didn't agree with her on everything. I got especially frustrated when she responded to Bernie Sanders's description of health care works in Denmark by saying "We're not Denmark." What the hell is that supposed to mean? How are we so different from Denmark that we can't copy what works there? Are we a different species with different diseases? Are all Danish doctors volunteers or something? Of course there are challenges in adapting a policy from a small country to a large one. But I don't know of anything so fundamentally different about our nation that forces us to invent everything from whole cloth.
Anyway, all this is a first draft of a lot of ideas that have been kicking around my head for a while. Please offer any constructive criticism.
