[ In order to test whether improving people’s lives can convince
them to support Democrats, you have to, well, improve people’s
lives. Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, in a piece
called “The Death of ‘Deliverism,’” argued otherwise.]
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MOVING PAST NEOLIBERALISM IS A POLICY PROJECT  
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Matt Stoller, David Dayen
June 27, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ In order to test whether improving people’s lives can convince
them to support Democrats, you have to, well, improve people’s
lives. Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, in a piece
called “The Death of ‘Deliverism,’” argued otherwise. _

President Joe Biden speaks about jobs during a visit to semiconductor
manufacturer Wolfspeed, Inc., in Durham, North Carolina, March 28,
2023., Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo // The American Prospect

 

For years, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have been in the doldrums,
with almost 60 percent of voters
[[link removed]] unhappy
with his management of the country and the economy. This isn’t
necessarily a political catastrophe, though it could be. In the voting
booth, the Democrats did better in the 2022 midterm elections than any
incumbent party has in 20 years, despite Biden’s lackluster polling.
But it is worrisome nonetheless, and is consistent with Barack
Obama’s presidency, which saw the Democrats lose over 1,000 elected
positions
[[link removed]] and
then lose the White House to Donald Trump.

We aren’t political consultants, and we aren’t going to tell
anyone how to win elections. But our political theory, nicknamed
“deliverism [[link removed]],”
is that Democrats, when in government, need to not only say popular
things, but actually deliver good economic outcomes for voters. They
did not do this for many years, and neither did the GOP, which is why
Trump blasted through both party establishments. Deliverism is linked
to the death of neoliberalism, because it’s an argument that
Democrats could reverse their toxic image in many parts of the country
by reversing policy choices on subjects like NAFTA, deregulation, and
banking consolidation, which have helped hollow out the middle class
for decades.

Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury, in a piece called
“The Death of ‘Deliverism,’
[[link removed]]” _[see
xxxxxx post - [link removed]
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]_ recently argued otherwise, asserting that Democratic unpopularity
shows that a narrow focus on policy to improve people’s lives is
largely irrelevant to electoral outcomes. They point to a series of
Democratic policies that, though enacted, did not help win votes.

It’s an intriguing thesis, and worth considering. If economic policy
doesn’t really matter to voters, as many political scientists argue,
then politics really should orient itself around cultural questions.
That said, these authors use an odd basket of evidence, and in doing
so, actually show the real political problem with improving the
material lives of Americans. The problem is that most Democrats are so
set on defending our policy legacy against right-wing attacks that
they have no idea how voters experience the economy, or how our
policies impact people.

TAKE THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, which now seems to have a strong
political anchor after years of political controversy. Bhargava,
Shams, and Hanbury argue that the ACA is “Obama’s signature
achievement” that improved people’s well-being. Yet, they say,
there’s a paradox, as it “did virtually nothing to shift political
allegiances.” If those who believe that helping people economically
are right, they allege, then the ACA should have switched large
segments of the voting electorate.

But is this a fair test? Let’s take a quick look at how Obamacare
actually affected normal people. First, the goal of Obamacare was to
insure more people, and it did. Roughly 85 percent of Americans had
health insurance in 2008. Today, it’s about 90 percent. So 5 percent
of the country has something they didn’t have before, and it’s
quite possible to say that many lives were saved. Biden built on this
by giving higher subsidies to individuals to purchase insurance if
they don’t get it from an employer or qualify for a public plan.

What about the other 85 percent? Well, in 2009, the average medical
cost for a family of four was $15,609. Today, it’s $30,260. That’s
almost the cost of a new car in health care costs, every single year.
In other words, 85 percent of potential voters have the same or a
worse experience with health care today, versus 5 percent who gained
insurance. It’s hard to call that a net economic improvement in the
lives of most voters. Obama himself said that the ACA would reduce
costs by $2,500 a year. He knew what sells, even if he didn’t
deliver that to voters. (Biden knows, too, as his promise to negotiate
lower drug prices in Medicare attests. But the results of those
negotiations won’t kick in until 2026.)

Most Democrats are so set on defending our policy legacy against
right-wing attacks that they have no idea how voters experience the
economy.

There’s more. The typical Democratic talking point, that Obamacare
prevented discrimination against pre-existing conditions, isn’t
true. Since the ACA kicked in, the number of high-deductible health
care plans has skyrocketed from 7 percent to 32 percent. That means if
you have, say, diabetes, you get to pay $2,000 or more in cash every
single year before your health insurance kicks in. That may be better
for some people than the previous system, but is that
nondiscrimination? No.

That’s before you get to the fact that routine drugs used in all
hospitals are in chronic shortages, including many drugs used in the
treatment of cancer
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Hospital understaffing is at a point of crisis, with as many as
124,000 physicians needed
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2034, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Nurses are in such demand that those who travel to fill shortages can
make as much as $10,000 a week
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And mass hospital closures have left medical deserts in large swaths
of America, with nearly 80 percent of rural counties
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“medically underserved.”

It’s possible, even likely, that our health care system would have
been worse without the ACA, and many wonks make this point. But our
point is that how voters respond to Obamacare is not a basis for
testing the political reaction to a program that improved the material
life of Americans under Democrats. Because the fact is, health care as
experienced by most people is more expensive and harder to obtain. If
you can’t accurately understand how Americans experience our culture
and economy, the very acts of seeking the care to live or die, then
your judgment on political and policy arguments will be off.

BHARGAVA, SHAMS, AND HANBURY’S ESSAY is full of this style of
analysis. In the opening anecdote, they are mystified by the lack of
enthusiasm from working-class parents for the monthly Child Tax Credit
checks passed in Biden’s American Rescue Plan. One person asked,
“What’s the catch?” Indeed, there was one: The credit expired
within six months! The cynical assumption that the monthly checks
wouldn’t last is an artifact of decades of Democrats failing to
follow through on promises—and it turned out to be completely
warranted.

Polling at the time showed
[[link removed]] that
voters who received the benefits were more likely to support Democrats
until the credit expired, when they shifted to Republicans by 15
points. Yes, you can thank Joe Manchin almost entirely
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this; but the point is that it’s not surprising a temporary policy
that ended didn’t flip voters.

In fact, virtually all of the pop-up safety-net provisions delivered
during the COVID-19 pandemic—some passed under Trump, some under
Biden, making it hard for ordinary individuals to differentiate—have
been rolled back
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with millions losing Medicaid benefits, expanded food stamp payments,
enhanced unemployment, rental assistance, and more. Democrats might
say it wasn’t sustainable to maintain all these policies after the
pandemic. But the lived experience of beneficiaries is that they lost
government help.

The authors point out that in 2020, lots of voters supported a higher
minimum wage in Florida and Nebraska, and yet still voted for
Republicans. That’s evidence, they assume, that people won’t vote
for Democrats even if that would increase the minimum wage. Once
again, this ignores lived experience. People don’t want a higher
minimum wage; they want _higher wages_. They don’t care if that
comes from a tighter labor market or direct wage policy.

If you look at the data, yes, under Trump, low-income wages went up
faster than they did under Obama. You can write about MAGA extremists
and racism as much as you want and cite political scientists on
racism, but Obama didn’t deliver on higher wages, and Trump did.
(Wages for lower-income workers have also boosted under Biden
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which may explain some of his political success, though those gains
have been eaten away by inflation for higher earners, which may
explain Biden’s ceiling.)

THE AUTHORS ARE RIGHT THAT a pure policy program is not enough, and
that we need political narratives that voters find compelling. But
it’s unclear what the authors’ prescription is on that front. They
say that Democrats must “construct a social identity,” speak to
social isolation and disorder, make clear who the culprits fueling
this discontent are, and offer a vision of the good life through
organizing that fosters a sense of community. They offer a few
examples of smaller community organizations that they say do that. But
the main example of a broad community uprising that checked most of
these boxes, organizing people into a meaningful fight against defined
enemies, happened in the Progressive Era.

Medical costs are up and wages are not for one reason that is very
easily understood by Americans: monopolies. Hospitals, doctor’s
practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing
homes, rehab facilities: Every part of our health care world is
increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money.
Meanwhile, big corporations have consolidated over the last 40 years,
pushing wages down for workers by tens of thousands of dollars a year.
That’s an easy, true, and compelling story, and it’s the story
that carried 19th-century progressive populists, and the New Dealers
behind them. It brought together workers, farmers, and business
upstarts who were being overrun by concentrated power. In the hands of
Franklin Roosevelt, it was even seen as an antidote to fascism.

This is not a story that today’s Democrats are comfortable telling,
and not one that today’s progressives, for all their discussions of
the need to move beyond neoliberalism, have internalized. Joe Biden
sort of gets there, and the midterms showed voters will shockingly
support an unpopular 80-year-old. Some of the best things he’s done,
like a fight on insulin
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led the drug companies to lower prices, show this instinct. But his
administration is too split to offer a coherent policy or political
agenda.

The phenomenon of negative partisanship is real, and fighting
Republicans who seek to take away rights and benefits, from the
freedom to read the books they want to the right to an abortion, will
continue to pay political dividends for Democrats. But if you want to
test whether improving people’s lives sells, then you have to
improve people’s lives.

It’s embarrassing to admit the last few decades of Democratic
politics has delivered bad economic outcomes for most people. To admit
that, we’d have to admit that cherished programs that we fought for,
like Obamacare, didn’t work out as advertised. But if we can’t
understand that reality, then it’s going to be harder than it should
be to come up with a coherent and winning argument to realign the
country around a progressive political agenda.

_[MATT STOLLER is research director at the American Economic Liberties
Project and the author of ‘Goliath: The 100-Year War Between
Monopoly Power and Democracy.’_

_DAVID DAYEN is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’’]_

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2023 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

_Click here [[link removed]] to support the Prospect's
brand of independent impact journalism_

* Neoliberalism
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* Deliverism
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* Build Back Better
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* democracy
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* Politics
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* Democrats
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* Democratic Party
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* Joe Biden
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* Economic Policy
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* Health Policy
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* social policy
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* Affordable Care Act
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* Obamacare
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* American Rescue Plan
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* Tax Credit
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* Minimum Wage
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