Here's a useful discussion in today's NY Times
Democrats Need Recommit to Average People, Not Financial Wizards and Stars
Mike Gecan is the co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national organizing group.
November 9, 2016
The election was not just a defeat for Hillary Clinton but also a resounding rejection of the modern Democratic Party.
If the Democrats focus blame only on Secretary Clinton, they will quickly spin into another electoral cycle without understanding why so many Americans have grown disgusted with the party's culture.
The party of data and imagery must become the party of meaningful work with living wages, rebuilding the nation as well as the party.
That party has been dominated by Wall Street and Silicon Valley and by its academic and professional supporters. Its heroes have been financial wizards, technology geeks and media and athletic celebrities -- a largely placeless troupe of self-described "rock stars."
If the Democratic Party is to recover and become relevant again, the lessons of this election is to recommit itself to the vast majority of non-rock-star Americans who still live in physical space -- blocks, neighborhoods, subdivisions, trailer parks, workplaces, fading cities and aging suburbs and towns. The core issue for these Americans is the lack of long-term living wage work, especially for those who are not college educated. This issue was rejected, ignored or fumbled by the Obama-Clinton team.
The party needs to push for a dramatic and broadly based maintenance program -- better bridges, roads, regional transit systems, flood and hurricane defenses, communities rebuilt and renewed with critical masses of affordable housing. The District of Columbia and the states and counties that surround it are hampered by a transit system that is in desperate need of upgrading, just as New York City's was in the mid-1980's. The vitality of the entire region and the survival of the City of Baltimore as the potential home for workers who can commute to jobs in other parts of the region are in the balance. So are the health and safety of the millions of riders and thousands of union workers who use and operate that system.
Just as city, state, business, union and civic leaders -- many of whom fought with one another -- managed to coalesce and rebuild the New York transit system, the same kind of realignment and reconstruction need to occur in the D.C. area. Hundreds of thousands of jobs -- new jobs building and upgrading the system, existing jobs reachable on a world-class transit grid -- are at stake.
Energy efficiency strategies are maturing -- opening the door to pragmatic and financially self-sustaining efforts to retrofit the nation's aging apartment buildings, hospitals and religious institutions. The task of making America's buildings more energy efficient involves nitty-gritty work like installing insulation, replacing windows, installing new boilers, regulating heat and air flow with the same sensors that operate in our iPhones. This work can be financed by the increasingly predictable savings incurred when this retrofitting is properly done. This is good, old-fashioned blue-collar work, as well as a way to cut energy costs dramatically.
All of these initiatives can be modeled in the states and regions where democrats remain in power and pressed for, relentlessly, on a national scale. The party of algorithms, data and imagery must become the party of meaningful work and living wages for millions.
Finally, the party should make three books mandatory reading for all operatives and and candidates. "Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business," by Rana Foroohar, Time magazine's chief financial writer, describes the dominant position of financial institutions in the American economy and political realm and why the Democrats chose to save big banks and deserted millions of homeowners who lost their houses and hard-earned equity. It would be interesting to see the voting patterns in the nation's foreclosure belts -- Florida, Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere.
"Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right," by Arlie Russell Hochschild is a remarkable account of the way conservative residents in southwest Louisiana choose to vote on the basis of what Hochschild calls their "emotional self-interest" -- their need to feel respected and affirmed -- rather than their economic self-interest.
And "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" by Thomas Frank, is a scathing dissection of the drift of the Democratic Party toward "the best of the best of the best," as the character played by Will Smith in the movie "Men In Black" sarcastically described a group of well-credentialed and clueless competitors.
It will be painful reading, but a necessary corrective to a party that has embraced the economy's wealthiest takers, has treated the working class with special contempt, and valued elitism and professionalism over the quality of life of so many marginalized Americans.