To Go Big Is to Keep It Simple

Here’s what should be taught these days in every Political Science 101: When the party of the right is the party of the working class, democracy is at risk.

Or to put it differently—the party of the left must be the party of the working class, to keep the party of the right in its lane. That is, to keep the party of the right as a responsible pro-business party, and not a party of gangsters. The corollary is: The party of the left has a moral obligation to be the party of the working class. For only the party of the left (the Democrats) can pursue the practical interests, the rational-actor goals of hourly and median-income workers. The party of the right, as the party of capital, unfit to pursue such practical goals, can only hold on to working-class people with Trump-like rage and fantasies of revenge. So we need the party of the left to keep the party of the right in its proper lane, which is, well, to pursue the business, or rational-actor goals of big business, small business, and those in the top 20 percent of the income structure.

It is unlikely that the party of the left, the Democratic Party, can now outcompete the GOP in rage, or even should do so, but they can outcompete the GOP if they can show working-class people that they have rational-actor goals in their behalf to pursue. If the party of the left can do this, it should make people calmer, or less hysterical, or lower the fantasy level about the hot-button issues that the party of the right is pursuing. The rational-actor goals of a party of the left, at this moment, must be big and easy to grasp because the focus on simple, practical goals is also a form of therapy to make working-class people less rattled and scared.

The problem for the Democrats as the party of the left is that the working class they should represent don’t really understand what the party has offered, and the party has never grasped how to keep it both big and simple for the low-information voters it needs. The very pro-union Biden administration, which had some outstanding labor-oriented economists, never broke through, and this is very difficult unless we make it very easy.

So, there is no alternative for the party of the left to be the party of the working class, though it will be tricky to get there. But centrist Democrats and some further-left Democrats have lots of other ideas and would first pitch the party to GOP anti-Trumpers, or the educated, or suburban women, or just race, and not class as such. Even if this worked, it is putting the democracy at risk because it leaves the working class to Trump. If Trump’s victory was no landslide, it was a watershed election in one sense. It showed there is not going to be any realignment in its favor of the party based on race, or gender, or “saving democracy.” Even if there could be, it would still leave the working class in the grip of political fantasy. It would leave the Democratic Party able to win elections, but not able to govern.

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Of course we can try our own form of raging, just screaming louder, and getting mad, but despite some, like Sanders, who have a genuine gift for it, the GOP is just much better at doing irrational rage at elites than we are. It would be a mistake to believe that the party of the left just must outcompete the party of the right at flipping the finger at vaguely described elites, or getting our own Fox News, or equally the ability to rage, or it’s just a matter of our candidates getting angrier and angrier. It’s stupid. It’s a distraction. If that’s what is on offer, people, working-class and otherwise, will go with the real thing.

Here are other reasons why rage gets in the way.

First, it would divide the party, without any point, and scare off the centrists, and some even further left, who are the relatively affluent, who have privileged educations, and who hate the oligarchs and Trump. They worry about their own security, too, and they may not be ready to deal with the consequences to them if the Democrats are the party of the working class. It is tricky to be the party of the working class, and we cannot scare off not just the affluent who not only contribute but who often are those who knock on the doors of working-class voters and help get out the vote. There is no alternative to being the party of the working class, but let’s not make things worse—this is no time for attacks on the entire system of capitalism.

Second, a related point, this is capitalism. It does shape in what way and how we can be a party of the working class. As J.M. Keynes put it in that great classic The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the challenge of public policy is to induce the rich to part with their money “to invest in the construction of durable goods” (though he may well now say “the construction of smarter and smarter phones”). It’s unfortunate but true, as Keynes recognized, that you can’t make them too nervous, or they don’t part with their money. That’s always been the dilemma of the party of the left in most countries, though less so in ours. If the dollar did not have such a privileged position in the world economy, and the American economy were not such a huge debt-ridden casino, we would know what people in other countries know, what Keynesians now gone used to know: that excess savings impoverish the population.

Third, this will be tricky because now two-thirds of the white working class—not the Black or Hispanic, thank goodness—have lifetime habits of voting GOP. So, we need a lot more than offer our own form of rage to get their attention.

What then should we do?

Promise something, damn it. Or put it another way…

Do What FDR Did

And go big.

What should we promise? Like an FDR promise, it should be big, simple, universal, easy to put in place. Personal to everyone. Something that every man, woman, and child can grasp, without any explanation. That leaves out national health insurance—way, way too complicated, and like shooting Niagara.

I can think of two such things, though: First, promise not to “save” Social Security but to raise it to 50 percent of average lifetime hourly wage income. That’s a nice round number—50.

Second, promise at last—finally—to prohibit the firing of hourly working and salaried people except for cause.

The promises have three characteristics: The first is that it is FDR-like: big, universal, easy to understand. It cannot be complicated, or for others, like Obamacare. In this case, it builds on literal FDR promises, Social Security, the Wagner Act, Fair Labor Standards, what made the Democrats a working-class party.

The second is that it’s immediate gratification. It’s now. Unlike labor law reform, which is complex and hard to understand, and depends on a whole series of contingencies, the payoff in this case is immediate.

The third characteristic—it is all about security, not opportunity, and intended not to tell people to take chances, e.g., take out student loans, but to calm everybody down. Democrats should stop talking about increasing “opportunity,” which in our time sounds like raising money for a new tech start-up. “Opportunity” is fine, but people are rattled by capitalism enough. It is not “opportunity” but security that working people want from a party of the left. What about other great initiatives, like a $20 minimum wage or national health insurance? While simple, they are not universal or for all (the minimum wage), or if they are universal, they are not simple (national health insurance).
 

Defend Democracy

But a different kind.

Didn’t we fight the past election on this issue? No. We need a broader definition. You can’t have it in just one place. You can’t protect it in the electoral sphere, unless there is democracy in the workplace and the schools, where we all live out our lives. As John Dewey argues, if we have more of it in the workplace and the schools, then working-class people have a bigger stake in having democracy in the political sphere. But it has to be a way of life—and people have to see it as in their interest, far more than they do now.

And if we don’t have democracy in the workplace and the schools, all the fixes to the Constitution will not do us any good. As the ancient Athenians once did people may just vote it out.
 

Be the Labor Movement, Temporarily, Until There Is One

Despite unrest at Amazon or Starbucks, a serious American labor movement has yet to be. It is nowhere near being a countervailing force. The state is too weak to guarantee one, and society is too weak to sustain one. That comes from being so long without an effective right to organize. It comes also from a workplace culture where people have learned not to trust each other. Yes, the PRO Act can change that, but for the time being, the Democratic Party itself, temporarily, not just organized labor, needs to take up part of the role of mobilizing the country to demand a real labor movement. FDR once said: Make me do it. We Democrats need to get the society to push the party, because it can’t come from the party, or from party activists. It has to come from out there.

What does that mean? If the party were really serious about reaching the working class, it might consider flipping Citizens United. Instead of labor giving money to us Democrats, Democrats could give their PAC money to labor unions. If the Democrats shaved off just a tenth of the billion or so now spent without much effect on the presidential election, they could give it in the form of grants to unions to use for organizing, and it would help finance a ruckus in the land. While the risk-averse unions sit on their cash, the militant ones right now spend as much as they can to organize.

The party could pick the unions it wishes to help—gratis, no strings—except to organize. The billionaires who pony up for our PACs would gasp—but it is only, say, 10 percent of what the party is spending at the presidential level now. It is a way for the Democratic Party to organize on the ground now, which is just as important as building up the party in races at the local level. Organizing drives are like political races, only more intense. The more the party spends, the more people who are now apathetic are going to become activists, outside of the Democratic Party, but changing the culture, and likely to put more pressure on Democrats to be a party of the working class. To be sure, that is less likely in the building trades, but with some exception, the dead wood is not where the party should spend the money. This is quasi-state support, and some would say, dangerous for an independent labor movement. Perhaps so—if such a thing really existed. But if it seems to give the party influence over labor, we give labor influence over the party by building it up. A big part of organized labor is dead wood. Maybe even the dead wood will spring green shoots if somebody shows them the money.

Or we could try something even bolder still.

We could invite the working class expressly into the structure of the party, to give it some limited specific control over the selecting the leadership. One way is to have a nationwide mail ballot election open only to union members to elect the super delegates that the party leadership now appoints. Yes, we could limit it to union members who are registered Democrats. Let the delegates that they elect be the delegates vote in the second round. The effect here is literally to replace the “establishment” as the “decider.” And let those super delegates draft a platform for the party convention itself to adopt, modify, reject or consider

To be sure, this might just be symbolic—but it is an open displacement, symbolically, of the highly educated elite that is supposed to be in control of the party.

Maybe this will work. But what will not work is just to go on telling people we are the party in favor of labor law reform. Biden did his best to be a pro-union president and it had little effect.

Even Harris tried a bit—she refused to intervene in the dockworkers strike, which might have upended her election.

There are two problems here: First, it is very hard to explain to working-class people what the Democrats, if really in control—in full control of the Senate—could do for them. How it would pay off for them. When it would pay off for them. Nor is it the fault of poor Biden or Harris or Obama or Hillary Clinton that the PRO Act especially is so hard to explain. After all, the party outsourced to the AFL-CIO and other unions the task of coming up with it. For 50 years, for my entire adult life as a union-side lawyer, organized labor has been bungling the cause of labor law reform. The early bill under Clinton was a stupid, defend-what’s-left attempt to guarantee jobs to strikers in declining industries and not to organize or expand labor’s base, and would have had little effect even if it had passed. It had little support in the country. The PRO Act that came later is far better, but may sink under its own complexity, and some key provisions will never survive the Supreme Court.

What could survive, and be easy to explain, if we had a bolder organized labor, is something simpler, a civil rights act, with the same individual legal remedies, like juries, punitive damages, legal fees, that exist under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. But it’s riskier too, opening control of the labor movement to the rank and file who might go out and get their own lawyers, and could bring their own suits, with no control of an ossified union bureaucracy. The AFL-CIO, if it had more nerve, could have just presented a clean version of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but put in all those remedies for anyone who tried to organize and got fired. That, at least, is simple—at least we could explain it. We might even mobilize the country behind it. But just as the country does not understand the mind-numbing PRO Act, or care about it, the Democratic Party does not either. Even if they could, any immediate benefit to an individual worker seems uncertain and far off.

The Civil Rights Act for labor? That would be easy to explain.

There is a second problem, though. We will never be able to give the right to organize as a gift. This is a big deal, after all. To give it, we need to figure out how to stoke up the country to demand it—and to see that only Democrats can provide it. The working class is not demanding the right to organize, or at least the PRO Act, which the average voter, even the sophisticated voter, does not understand. It is not enough for some wonderful people in the Biden administration to work on it—until working people themselves demand it on their own.

In The Narrow Corridor (2019), Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who to much surprise just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, make a similar point about women’s right to vote. Women had to take it, they argue, and by that logic, the working class has to take it, and not receive it as a gift from policy wonks in the Democratic Party.

But we can show them the money—give people a sense of what might be on the table. That’s the important thing about the big promises

Let’s start with raising Social Security instead of, God forbid, “protecting” it as we do by making it just a little bit worse.

The key word in Social Security—security. And it goes to people directly. There is no labor movement that first needs to arise from the ashes to provide it. The Democratic Party, for this purpose, is the labor movement.

It’s hard to think of a better way to steal Trump’s base. Right now, Social Security pays just 36 percent of people’s income for a medium earner who retires at age 65, the former “normal” retirement age. Let the Democrats bring it to 50 percent. That’s a nice round number: 50 percent, so it’s easy for people to keep tabs, to know if it really is being protected. And make it a statutory right.

It would force the party to decide in front of the whole country: “Who are we for?” The only serious way to get to 50 percent is to lift the cap on the payroll tax as the major means for doing so, and that exposes the structural obstacle to being a working-class party. The cap is $168,000 and we have been defunding Social Security as more and more people earn over that amount, including those in the constituency from which the party draws its leadership, not the super wealthy, but those doing very well, thank you. It would be a shock to the constituency from which we draw many of our best activists and, while not super wealthy, do contribute significant money and time. Other than the ineptitude of organized labor, that’s the internal contraction that keeps the Democrats from being a working-class party.

Still, consider how the working class is rattled. Every month 5.5 million Americans lose their jobs. To be sure, many are voluntary quits, but they often quit involuntarily because pay is too low, hours are awful, and it’s intolerable to say. If that’s not bad enough, there is technological change, endless, frightening outmoding of jobs, in AI, already here, but not just in AI, and more ahead, with no stopping point. Even if jobs continue as they almost certainly will, they will be even less secure. And of course, working-class people have no savings, no wealth, and the stock market does not go up 23 percent a year for them as it does for much of the liberal elite they despise. The least the elite of the party can do is to chip in out of their own pockets for more security.

But here is the message to our own postgrad liberal elite: “Democracy isn’t free. Be prepared to write a check.”

No, not to a PAC—but the IRS. Weren’t the unions supposed to take care of this?

“Why is it up to us to pay?” Yes, it’s understandable that those in the top 20 percent of the income structure, rapidly becoming the party’s base, may think, “Hey, the unions were supposed to take care of this.” And in a sense, they’re right. It’s hard to take the lead in redistributing income—it’s just against nature. They may well think: Weren’t the unions supposed to handle this? Yes, the stock market just went up by 23 percent last year, and balanced growth IRAs went up a lot too. Yet it takes that much to feel safe. Let’s put aside retirement. With good reason, they fear that the wealth they have from their own privileged education is necessary to get the same education for their children. “Wait—I have to protect my child!” There is no democracy in education. That’s why it’s hard to have democracy in the workplace.

The point of raising the cap is to show that, yes, for the benefit of the working class, we can tax that ever larger part of our base, the educated part, which does all the talking. Nor need it be so great as to jeopardize too much the ability to pay what it now takes for the privileged education of our young.

Then consider the second big promise—a law that directly protects your right to a job, a right not to be fired except for just cause. This has long been a favorite cause of plaintiff employment lawyers like me. There is no greater divide between the working class in this country and that of Europe than the right of an employee not to be fired except for just cause. In Berlin, on a short-term fellowship, to students at Humboldt law school, I once tried to teach a class on American labor law. No one could get over the shock of the American rule of “employment at will,” the principle that an employer can fire even a long-term employee at any time for any reason, without even having to explain. At the beginning of every class, students would want to go back to our first class and ask, “Wait, are you serious? Is this possible?” It was beyond their comprehension, not just for the German students, but the Belgian students, the Cambodians, and everyone else in the class.

This too is a promise that would come directly from the Democratic Party and not depend upon the revival of the unions.

I sometimes hear from friends that our courts would be overwhelmed. But there are alternatives to state and federal courts. There could be a single agency, or state agencies, to hear the claims, as with the so-called “labor courts” in countries like Germany.

There is one big reason for this change—it might embolden the working class. It is to change the culture in the workplace, the servility, the learned helplessness, that leads people to bow and scrape before their bosses and reserve their anger for liberals far away whom they never see, and kick the poor migrants on the border. Until the Democrats change that culture, to name the fear people have and exorcise it, we will never win over the large majority of the working class.

Remember, It’s a Culture War

So far as I can tell, as a union side lawyer, authoritarianism has been on the rise for years, chiefly in the workplace. Since 1973 or so, along with CEO pay, there has been an increase in royalism, in top-down management. Though hard to see year by year, this is just as big a cultural change in the United States in my lifetime as sexual choice, and even comparable to the rise of social media as an influence on our character.

The big change is the increasing fear of association, I mean nonpolitical association, of the kind that enraptured Tocqueville in Democracy in America. He made clear that these were not political but usually work-related associations, or at least outside the sphere of government.

But we now keep people from associating outside of that sphere, especially if they are hourly workers. One sign of it is the rise of distrust—of everything. People distrust the president, Congress, and just about every other institution, because in the workplace, where Tocqueville-type association should occur, they have learned to distrust each other.

Let me give an example. I represent fired workers as well as unions. When they are not in unions, workers who are fired lose not only their jobs but their friendships. Friends there—or former friends, now—will often no longer talk to them, or talk to me trying to figure out the case. When I bring these suits for non-union fired employees, I am sure of one thing, that there will be one and only one witness on our side, and that is the person who is the plaintiff.

Everyone in that workplace knows that he or she dies alone. Ending employment at will would be the first shot in a culture war. It is hard to pick up the habit of resisting tyranny in the political sphere if people spend most of their waking lives on their knees at work.

It might even bring some free speech at work. Right now, many a workplace, for white males, is a safe space only to speak up for Trump, or Musk, or just the far right. That’s true even in union workplaces. That’s one reason the Trump right is so fearful of diversity—the absence of Blacks in the workplace makes it that much easier to intimidate the whites. In some cases, racial diversity in a workplace protects the whites there as well. It is astonishing to me that, despite what they encounter day to day, one-third of the white working class has enough nerve to vote for the Democrats. It is just a guess that one-third tend to be in workplaces where they feel safe, less intimidated by Trump bros who can support Trump without fear of offending the boss. There is a far-right political correctness, with a hint of violence behind it, at the shop-floor level. And it thrives in a culture based on the fear of being fired at any time.

The New Dealers understood that they were fighting a culture war. Or just as Stalin was trying to create a new “Soviet man,” and Hitler was trying to create a new type of German, the Roosevelt left was, less ham-handedly, trying to create a new type of American, or change the American character. That is the purpose of the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, to embolden the working class that had had no self-confidence before. Like the USSR and Nazi Germany at least in one respect, the New Deal was an example of what the historian Charles Maier calls the “project state.”

But in constructing this new type of American, New Dealers had it relatively easy—it will be much harder to bring democracy to the workplace, in a service economy, not amenable to mass organizing. It is even harder now to couple this with democracy in education. Oh yes, we ended the digital divide, and now with everyone online, we have only diminished the education that people used to have. Right now, by many accounts, reading comprehension in the US is dropping. A third of adult Americans read at the level of 10-year-olds and are more or less illiterate. Though we worry about disinformation, and rightly so, fewer people follow the news in any way at all. They are not even getting disinformation. And when working-class people get the chance, they often try to vote down tax increases intended to educate their own children. Meanwhile, thanks to education, the rich get richer—and the Democratic Party does not even go near this issue. Public education is so decentralized and locally based, it seems impossible to change. There is nothing simple to propose. It is even more treacherous an issue, and more complex, with more tradeoffs than even national health insurance. In Europe, there are no institutions like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, or elite state universities and research—really, the crown jewels of our economy. Such institutions do not exist on the same scale in social democracies, where it matters far less which college one chooses. There is no equivalent in, say, Finland, whose education system is the envy of the rest of the world, or should be.

It is the lack of democracy in education that may explain our inability to be a working-class party, and it may be the existence of a liberal humanist culture that has put democracy at risk. The tragedy of the Democratic Party is that so many of its best people have a material interest in maintaining a system that has created this terrible divide, which ending the digital one has only exacerbated.

One possible solution may be to put in place an estate tax on wealth—of a kind that stops the real wealth transfer between generations. As some economists point out, the highly educated are passing on their wealth—not when they die but when their children go to school.

Liberalism, progressive liberalism, just like neoliberalism, can be an ideology that hides even from us our own material interests. The only counter here is to change the structure of the party, and invite in the working class, not our ideal of it, but the working class as it really is.

After all, even in the case of the white working class, one third in the last election decided they could not stomach Trump. I have learned sometimes that a client should tell the lawyer what the law should be. Maybe they would be better at telling us, if we listened, how we can go big and keep it simple too.

Yes, Hillary Clinton has trouble connecting with white men without a college degree—not all, of course, but a whopping number of them. How to pull them away from Trump? Free college won’t work; it’s too late for them. National health insurance? I wish, but it’s not clear they’re that interested. But they do worry about globalization. To get their attention, here are three things she can say that Trump cannot.1

First, she can say that if elected, she will push for the right of working people—yes, even high-school grads—to elect one another to some of our biggest corporate boards. Let a few high-school grads be in the boardroom when the big investment decisions are made. Yes, do it the way it’s done in Germany, a country that has a much bigger percentage of its employees in the manufacturing of things. Germany is also, not coincidentally, running a huge trade surplus, and partly at our expense. And nothing distinguishes their capitalism from ours more starkly than the fact that high-school grads are sitting in the boardrooms of their big global companies. Clinton might say: “Enough with Trump being your voice—why don’t you be your voice?” After all, Trump would never let a high-school grad sit on his corporate boards.2

In Germany, it’s called co-determination, and it works just fine over there: In companies with more than 2,000 workers, they elect half the directors of the board. And in companies with more than 1,000, employees still elect a third.3

But that’s impossible here, right? A GOP-controlled House would never allow it, right? Here’s what Hillary could say: “Look, I probably can’t get Congress to put it into law, but I can say that, if I am president, companies with workers on the boards will get preference in federal contracts.”4

Would that be overreaching—further than she is allowed to go under the federal procurement laws? Well, if she can pick the next justice, the Supreme Court will let her do it. The four center-left justices now are very friendly to Obama-type uses of executive power.5

If Clinton were to do this, it wouldn’t be an iron rule, just a nudge, limited to federal contracts. In this way, she can still be Hillary: She raises a big new idea that is both transformational and incremental.6

And it would change the conversation from trade treaties like NAFTA, where she looks bad. Indeed, why don’t we change the conversation from trade deficits with people of color? The obsession with NAFTA turns what should be a class issue into an ethnic/race issue. Trump has been brilliant at combining the two. By its obsession with NAFTA, the left has done its part to create Donald Trump. How many realize that we run a bigger trade deficit with Germany than with Mexico? It’s not just a bigger deficit but a nastier one—billions reflected not in low-wage but high-wage jobs. I need not mention Canada, Japan, and other high-wage countries that inflict deficits as well. But since Germany and Canada are “white,” it’s hard to make a race issue out of that. Those deficits never get a mention. If Germany inflicts a bigger deficit than Mexico, maybe our response should be to learn from the invader—by putting workers on corporate boards, and in general by giving working people a voice. Maybe countries like Germany out-compete us because they understand the principle of inclusion: If stakeholder companies compete better, it’s because they have more people making decisions.7

That would be a wonderful thing for Clinton or any Democrat to say: that to be globally competitive, we actually need these high-school grads sitting on corporate boards. Here’s a wild claim: High-school grads actually know things, but with our Trump-like corporate model, we shut them out. Germany—where they at least have a voice—is not just running up a big deficit with us. It’s stealing customers around the world, customers that we might have, if we had a different corporate model.8

Of course, we have constraints, including an always overvalued dollar. As long as the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, it will always be overvalued. Still, it would help to give working people some say over how we invest our capital. It’s at least one way that German workers can inoculate themselves against the worst aspects of globalization. No, as a German labor officer on a corporate board once said, we don’t stop the outsourcing of capital, but we place “conditions, conditions, conditions.” Open a plant in country X, but then do something back in the home country, too.9

One more point to rouse Americans without college degrees: No, you don’t have to be a union officer or a union member to be on one of these boards. Anyone—the person who waters the plants in the bank lobby—can be elected to it.10

But is it too radical for Hillary Clinton? Come on: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is for it. The UK’s new prime minister, Theresa May, just shocked her Tory colleagues by coming out for it. So Clinton has plenty of cover, at least from the women chieftains of the world. Besides, sooner or later, it’s in Clinton’s interest to take the side of workers in some astonishing way against our country’s discredited elite.11

It’s also time for her to rouse us with a new national goal: to get us out of this humiliating trade debt, which it seems only the United States and the Great Britain, the free-market models, have to such a crippling degree. Other high-wage or rich countries—just as globally exposed as we are, or more so—don’t run deficits. If they can run surpluses, why can’t we?12

*  *  *13

But to protect people from globalization, we have to do more than change our corporate model. That’s the second thing Clinton has to hammer away at: We need more public works, giving jobs to those without college degrees. And while Trump is in favor of public works, here’s an issue on which I think Clinton is more credible than Trump. And it’s also where we could do more to protect our high-school grads than the Germans now do. After all, the Germans are obsessed with fiscal austerity and notoriously refuse to do public works.14

We are speaking here of massive public works, as Clinton has in fact proposed. While Trump can make promises, he can’t deliver. It’s a con. For one thing, he’s already committed to cutting taxes. It’s where, as a populist, he differs from Russia’s Putin or France’s Marine Le Pen, neither of whom would cut taxes on the scale Trump would. With his enormous cuts, we’d have enormous budget deficits. We would be so deep in the hole we couldn’t even fill the potholes in the streets.15

Wouldn’t he borrow the money? Come on! This is Donald Trump, the king of bankruptcy. Every respectable bank in the country has cut him off. Even the more sensible Trump supporters wouldn’t lend money to Donald Trump. Besides, he has to placate the GOP in Congress: Do you know of any Republican congressional leader in favor of massive spending on public works?16

I know that, to many, Clinton’s talk of the “biggest public-works program since World War II” sounds like a snooze. But that might just be what ends the long-term stagnation of the economy. Take a look at Robert Gordon’s recent tome, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Although the book’s revelation is how much innovation matters, there is another revelation—how much massive government spending in the 1940s stimulated the efficient use of capital and skills. Buying up virtually all the output of the economy during World War II is what created the Big Bang that made America great. And because the government was buying up all the output, that’s partly how the New Deal got so many more people into unions in the 1940s. In a way, public works, Hillary’s way, could be a kind of labor-law reform, more or less forcing people into unions the way the government once did in time of war.17

It’s true that the Republicans are likely to hang on to control of the House. So to rouse the country into accepting that a public-works program is even possible, Hillary has to pledge—and can plausibly pledge—to do everything she can to get rid of gerrymandering. She might say that if she’s elected, the Justice Department will sue to overturn gerrymandering—all gerrymandering—under the 14th Amendment, and maybe as violations of the Elections Clause under Article I. She’d have a very good shot at flipping the Supreme Court, to win that very case. That would at least partly unclench the grip of the GOP on the republic. And she should make clear that she will file lawsuits challenging not just Republican but also Democratic gerrymandering in all the remaining states that, unlike California, have yet to ban it. Yes, let her rouse the country by taking on the Democrats, too. I can’t think of anything that would do more to excite people in this country about her campaign than to say that the nonpartisan redistricting put in place by voters in California ought to be, in a constitutional sense, the law of the land.18

Then and only then—with gerrymandering gone—can any candidate deliver. Then and only then will we get the public-works projects that both high-school grads and the rest of us deserve. I know it would take a lot of nerve for her to say all this—but at this point in the campaign, she has everything to gain by taking on not only the GOP’s but her own party’s elite, and tying it to public works. That’s her best hope to change the way people think about her.19

*  *  *20

Third, unlike Trump, Hillary can promise to use the welfare state to make us more competitive. How? Consider what would happen if we expanded Social Security. If we get more workers over age 65 to retire, instead of hanging on because they lack a decent private pension, we could employ more middle-aged and young workers now sitting at home, or promote them sooner. We need the government to assume more of the private sector’s “non-wage” labor costs. There are yet other examples where the welfare state could make us more competitive: Expand Medicare to workers between ages 55 and 65, so employers can stop avoiding payment for working people who have higher skills. Or have a fair federal system of worker compensation, instead of states’ using it to bid against each other. Or have the federal government offer to take over state Medicaid in those states that promise to use the savings for public education and worker training. And isn’t publicly funded childcare a way of ensuring that we use human capital more efficiently instead of trapping highly educated women at home?21

These are three ways Hillary Clinton can rouse the country—and go bigger than Trump ever can. But most of all, she has to show she can flip a finger at the elite. Does she really believe we are “stronger together”? Then let’s do what the Germans do. Let’s go after one-person, Trump-like CEO rule. After all, if she doesn’t win, we all may end up working in casinos.22

It has become clear that the only way to deal with the most serious economic issues facing our country—inequality, underemployment, wage stagnation—is not just to elect a Democrat as president in the November elections but to completely destroy the Republican Party. To do so, we will have to think beyond particular candidates and specific elections. We will have to think more radically, to propose more fundamental reforms. The Constitution of 1787 offers far too many nooks and crannies in the cobwebbed architecture of our political system in which Republicans can hide out and bide their time before attempting another hostile takeover of our democracy. Because the founders-approved option of amending the Constitution is, for the time being, unavailable to us, we will have to figure out ways of amending it without formally amending it, in order to end the artificially enhanced prominence of a party that has been so malignant in its current form.

First, we need a plan to immediately end the gerrymandering of congressional districts. Without taking this step, there could be no hope of returning the people’s chamber to the people’s hands. If we wait until after the next census, in 2020, it will be too late. By then, even if the Democrats win by a landslide in 2016, the GOP will have returned.

For starters, if they do not take back the House of Representatives in the fall, Democrats should file lawsuits in the courts arguing that the gerrymandering of congressional districts is a violation of the Constitution, which nowhere explicitly confers on the states the power to gerrymander, or even to create congressional districts. (One section of federal law, 2 U.S.C. 2c, may do so, but it, too, says nothing about gerrymandering.) The states cannot claim the power under the 10th Amendment, which “reserves” powers that the states would have had prior to adoption of the US Constitution. The states cannot logically be said to have had the power to organize their delegations to a body that did not yet exist.

In past attempts to end gerrymandering, Democrats have practically tried to lose. They haven’t really wanted to end the practice in its entirety—only a particular GOP-favored form of it that is derided as “going too far.” This is because many Democrats in the House, even when they are in the chamber’s minority, have ridiculously safe seats thanks to gerrymandering. This is important for progressives to understand: It hasn’t only been the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court that has kept gerrymandering in place. It’s also because our own side keeps making incoherent arguments that “some” gerrymandering is okay. If we were able to get rid of gerrymandering entirely, any consideration of voter registration data in drawing up boundaries of congressional districts would be impermissible. There would not be the current need to show “intent,” much less the requirement of proving that one party has been “shut out” from representation, whatever that means.

It used to be argued that there was no fair alternative to gerrymandered districts. But that is no longer true. California, Arizona, Iowa, and New Jersey not only discourage partisan redistricting—as Florida does—but actually have procedures like independent or bipartisan commissions to ensure that it does not occur. For years we could not even imagine these alternatives. Now we have them—and we know they work.

If the Democrats take back the House of Representatives in November—which is not impossible if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is the Republican nominee—there would be a much faster and easier way to keep the chamber in the party’s hands. Article I, section 4 of the Constitution—the elections clause—allows Congress to commandeer the conduct of federal elections: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators.” There is no state rule, no line drawn, nothing, that Congress under Article I, section 4, cannot “alter or amend.”

Requiring a reallocation of some or all of the congressional districts prior to the election in 2018—a process that would be overseen by either a non-partisan federal commission or by non-partisan commissions in the states—would at least give the party a chance to hold on to the House in the 2018 mid-term elections. Introducing at-large voting or proportional statewide representation in all the states would be even better, accounting for the fact that Democrats increasingly tend to cluster in cities and Republicans in more rural, under-populated areas; perhaps a compromise would have states with more than two members of Congress split their representatives between those chosen by individual districts and those chosen by statewide election.

In the case of the Senate, of course, it will be harder to root out the GOP. The principle of equal state representation—putting North Dakota on the same level as California—is a devastating and tragic violation of the one-person-one-vote principle. The upper house continues to fulfill the design of the founders, who created it as a check on the democratic passions of the voters. We have a “democratic deficit” at least as encumbering as the European Union’s. It is long past time to bring down that deficit.

* * *

The second necessary reform is liberating the Senate from the encumbrances of the filibuster. In November 2013, the Democratic-led Senate ended the use of the filibuster for executive-branch and non–Supreme Court judicial nominees—this was the so-called “nuclear option.” Though largely unnoticed, it was the seismic event of the Obama era, arguably even more important than the Affordable Care Act. Consider labor: The new limitations on the use of the filibuster allowed, for the first time in years, genuinely pro-labor people to take positions in the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is far more assertive now. There’s a chance now for real regulation of Wall Street, should the Democrats win the presidency in 2016 and recapture the Senate.

But should the Democrats ever recapture the House as well, a Senate without a filibuster would allow for a true political revolution. Had there been no need to get 60 votes in the US Senate, we might have had the much bigger discretionary fiscal stimulus in Obama’s first year. We would have had a “public option” for Obamacare. We might have put government-appointed trustees on the boards of banks that were bailed out.

* * *

Finally, to really overcome the status-quo-defending “checks and balances” of the 1787 Constitution, we have to make everybody vote. Most people don’t vote, at least in the mid-term elections that usually give the Republican Party a “mandate” to run Congress and obstruct progress on a variety of pressing issues. In a poll conducted shortly before the 2014 congressional elections, Pew found that non-voters were disproportionately young, people of color, and in an economically precarious state. The benefits of the Affordable Care Act went to people who didn’t vote for Democrats or didn’t vote at all; it did little for many people who did. It’s doubtful that this year will be different: The people who benefit from the welfare state Democrats put in place may not come out to vote to save it. That’s the fundamental contradiction of the Democratic Party: We deliver for a phantom base. We have to make it a real one.

Enacting compulsory voting is neither unconstitutional nor impossible. The states can force citizens to serve on juries, so why can’t it force them to vote? Compared to sitting six months on a medical-malpractice case, voting once every two years is a small burden. Besides, unlike a jury, you wouldn’t literally have to do any voting at all. It is perfectly legitimate to cast a blank ballot. A compulsory voting law does not interfere in that respect with your right not to vote. It is not a burden on your right of expression.

Even if it were, the interest of the state would arguably win out. Compulsory voting increases the number of citizens making decisions—about rules, about the way we deliver or provide public goods like clean air, education, and so on. The more people who vote, the more legitimate the decisions. That’s Political Science 101. But it’s also pragmatic. It binds people to those decisions. It makes them easier to implement. Presumably, the state has an interest in its own stability.

Some might ask: Wouldn’t these be “low-information” voters? This argument is circular. Perhaps it is actually that people don’t have good information about politics because they aren’t already voters. For the Athenians—as Martin Wolf and others have pointed out—the citizens who took no part in public life were called idiotes, the source of our word “idiots.” If non-voting is a form of illiteracy, it makes sense to stamp out illiteracy.

We could start in one state—say, California. If California passed a law requiring that every citizen cast a ballot in federal elections every two years, New York might soon follow. If a few reliably blue states with large populations passed such a measure, we would soon end up with a very different politics. The Electoral College would quickly become even more of a joke than it currently is: A big Democratic vote from California alone would run up the popular vote for any Democrat to preposterous levels. With Democratic-leaning states posting turnout rates near 100 percent and Republican-leaning ones still stuck around 35 percent, it would make a mockery of using state-by-state totals to determine who becomes president. The results would regularly be out-of-step with the choice of the country at large, undermining the legitimacy of the representatives from the small-turnout states. Mandatory universal suffrage would also offer a sharp contrast with the efforts by Republicans to restrict, rather than expand, suffrage and political participation more generally. The result would likely be enormous political instability throughout the country. Within the United States, we would have in effect two different “republics.” It would be a house divided against itself, and just as in the 1850s, this one too could not stand.

All three of these changes to our “informal” Constitution belong in the platform of the Democratic party. If the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign wants a cause in Philadelphia, it should force the party to commit to putting them into action. After all, if we are serious about limiting the power of Wall Street and reclaiming American democracy, we have to destroy the GOP.

(Sue Coe)

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

As a labor lawyer, I hate it when people pat me on the head and say, “Do you think the labor movement will ever come back?” As if it’s my problem and not theirs. Or as if it’s something that “the unions” or “organized labor” have to do—not, as I think, an obligation that we all have as citizens.

I can give the usual, often hackneyed reasons for bringing back a labor movement. For starters, we need to raise wages—a lot—or there will be no middle class. From 2000 to 2012, the pay of the bottom 70 percent of Americans was flat or falling, even as non-farm productivity rose 30 percent. If we choose a longer time frame, it’s even worse: since 1979, pay for most workers has barely budged—but productivity has risen 75 percent. It is impossible to keep up aggregate demand without pay raises, unless middle-class people go recklessly into debt. We did that in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008, and without a labor movement, we will do something similarly disastrous again.

A labor movement will also help us recover our sense of citizenship by giving us more control over our lives. I used to complain that people no longer had unions. Now many of us no longer have employers, either. Even college grads with science degrees and high skills have to work as temps. We can’t carry the bad habits that we acquire in the workplace—disengagement, learned helplessness, unquestioned obedience—into a democratic society and then expect that society to work.

Is it even possible to bring back some kind of labor movement? Yes, it is—but we have to do three difficult things all at once:

First, we have to change our labor model. Here is a very difficult point to get across in this country: our labor model, based on “exclusive representation,” is just plain weird. In the United States, either the union represents every single person in a plant or shop, with mandatory collection of dues, or it represents no one. For the most part, that’s not the way it works in other parts of the world. In Belgium and Germany and just about everywhere else, the union represents the militant minority, the true believers, the men and women who really want to join. Since our model clearly isn’t working, why not try things the way they do in countries that still have unions?

Second, we have to change our corporate model. To give people more control over what they do at work, we have to move from a dysfunctional stockholder model, in which CEOs are not accountable even to shareholders, to a stakeholder model, where managers are at least partially accountable to workers. Indeed, to bring back the labor movement, we might need to change our corporate law more than our labor law. One way to do this is to put in place more European-style works councils. Such works councils—which are elected by everyone, union or nonunion, including the managers—have special rights to sign off on how the work is done. Another way is to bring co-determination to our bigger companies—that is, to let workers elect up to a third of the directors who sit on the board if the company has 500 employees or more.

Third, we have to change our political model. We need a stronger national government—one capable of passing and enforcing the laws necessary to put a labor movement in place. We need a state strong enough or independent enough of the business interests that have weakened ours.

But we can’t change our political model unless we restart a labor movement that brings more people to the polls. And that’s the problem: we need to change our political model to change the labor and corporate models, and we need to change our labor and corporate models to mobilize enough people to change the political model. Indeed, to fix any one of these models—labor, corporate or political—we have to fix them all at once.

* * *

Let’s start with the federal government. Yes, it’s hard to fix the Constitution, a virtually unamendable document that invites gridlock. The Senate in particular pushes the country so far away from “one person, one vote” that one might wonder if we truly have a republican form of government. But in defense of the founders, they didn’t invent the filibuster or gerrymandering, which has made labor-law reform impossible.

Some will ask, “What does the filibuster have to do with the labor movement?” Everything. Just as the filibuster was used to lock in slavery, today it helps lock in the status quo of low-wage America.

At least twice in my lifetime—first in 1978 and again in 1993—statutory labor-law reform proposed by a Democratic president passed a Democratic House and then died by filibuster in a Democratic Senate. The prospects have become so hopeless that during the Obama administration, no one even tried any statutory law. For the moment, with the Republicans holding the majority in the Senate, eliminating the filibuster wouldn’t even matter. But one day, it will be the biggest obstacle to labor-law reform.

For the same reason, we have to fix the gerrymandering of the House. Perhaps that will change after 2020, a presidential election year, when more Democrats could end up drawing the districts. Or perhaps the Supreme Court will outlaw it sooner, if the balance of the Court changes.

To do any of these things, we have to mobilize more voters—not just during the midterm elections, but in presidential election years as well. The base is simply too narrow for Congress to have the legitimacy to do much. Just 37 percent of the electorate showed up in the last midterm election. Even in 2012, we had a turnout far below that of most democracies in the world.

But if the federal government is so weak, how can we change the corporate model? Like the Progressives a century ago, we can start with the states. It’s at the state level that corporations get their charters. One or two states could get the ball rolling by requiring corporations to elect employees to corporate boards.

Wait—that’s impossible, right? Corporations facing this new requirement would merely relocate to some other state with weaker laws. And that’s true: many corporations are beyond our reach. But many nonprofits are trapped in their home states. Nonprofits may not be as big as Walmart or General Electric, but they’re big enough. And they can’t run off to Delaware to incorporate—or if they try, they could lose the all-important property-tax exemption within their home states.

It’s easy to imagine that with an elected janitor in the same room as a nonprofit CEO making $300,000 a year, that organization’s labor policies will start to change. Works councils might even sprout up.

Besides, there’s a good nonlabor reason to let the employees elect a few directors of the big nonprofits: they have no stockholders, and nonprofit boards are self-perpetuating. Electing a few nurses to the boards of big university hospitals, for example, might help them to hew more closely to their charitable mission. (It’s important to note that this is about corporate governance, not labor law. There’s nothing here about unions or collective bargaining.)

Once the idea of co-determination becomes real in the nonprofit sector, it will open up the chance to push it toward the for-profits. The president could encourage this development by using his procurement authority to issue an executive order saying, in effect, “Other things being equal, the government will prefer vendors that let employees elect at least a few directors to their boards.”

* * *

Finally, as mentioned earlier, we need to change our labor model. We should have a law that protects employees’ rights to join a union, freely and fairly, without being fired. In The Nation back in 2002, Barbara Ehrenreich and I made the case for a civil-rights act for labor. The idea is to enact a civil-rights law banning discrimination based on one’s support of a union, just as we do in the case of race, age or gender.

Such a law would open up the labor movement in ways we have not seen in decades. It would give individual workers—not just union organizations—more control over when and how to organize. Employees could retain a lawyer and press for remedies that even the strongest unions do not have right now. What would they get? Preliminary injunctions, punitive damages, juries, legal fees to help fund organizing drives—and, best of all, a discovery phase during which they could depose CEOs and more or less rifle through the corporate files.

* * *

The idea of such a civil-rights law is slowly moving out of the op-ed pages and into the congressional debate. In the House last summer, Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison and civil-rights icon John Lewis introduced the Employee Empowerment Act, which would enable workers to file civil complaints against employers who violate basic labor rights.

There is little hope for such a bill in the current political climate, of course. Many people believe that in the absence of significant labor-law reform, initiatives like the “Fight for $15” minimum-wage campaign and “alt-labor” movements like OUR Walmart are the best way to go. These are great causes, but they have limits. For one thing, they rely on foundation funding. In the long run, the money should come from unionized high-skilled workers. The more of them we can organize, the easier it will be to support efforts to organize lesser-skilled workers.

Even under current law, we could try organizing for the few rather than for the majority. We could give up the prize of “exclusive representation” and aim to represent the militant minority who want to join. As a labor staffer in Germany told me, “If we had to get a majority vote here, we wouldn’t have any unions either.” So forget 50 percent plus one—let’s go for 40 percent, or 30 percent.

Look at the approach of Volkswagen and the United Auto Workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the heart of non-union Dixie. Last February, the UAW lost an election for exclusive representation. But it didn’t pack up and go home; it kept pressing. In November, Volkswagen said it would meet with any union that had the support of 15 percent of its employees—and pledged to meet every other week with a union that had 45 percent support. This followed a tentative pre-election deal in which Volkswagen agreed to a works council that would take the lead in negotiating plant rules and that the UAW would not control had it become the exclusive representative.

Some say it’s impossible to give up exclusive representation. Here’s one objection: “If there is no certification as exclusive representative, then the employer has no legal duty to bargain.” There are two responses to this. First, it’s likely that the employer has such a duty to bargain whenever workers exercise their right to act collectively under Section 7 of the Wagner Act, the basic labor right from which all others follow. Under Obama, the National Labor Relations Board might yet reach that interpretation. Arguably, Section 8(a)(5), which creates the duty to bargain, does not make it conditional on the union being the exclusive representative; it just precludes an employer ignoring an exclusive representative to bargain with someone else. Second, does it matter if there is such a duty anyway? Even when a union wins election and becomes the exclusive representative, the employer often refuses to sign the first contract. What matters is whether the union is able to disrupt. It may be easier for a key group of 30 percent to disrupt for two or three hours every week than to get a 100 percent walkout for six or seven months.

At the same time, it would be illegal for that 30 percent to negotiate for everybody else. But in the 1930s, as labor-law expert Charles Morris has pointed out, the first labor contracts applied only to union members. Naturally, if the employer didn’t extend those benefits to all, the others would join the union.

As the Chattanooga case shows, more in labor are thinking seriously about this approach. But this requires a different kind of labor movement—one that is not living off compulsory dues or even a fair share from everyone at work, but is getting its money from a more militant few. Instead of bargaining for 6.6 percent of the private sector, we’d bargain directly or indirectly for up to 30 percent or more. We would have to work a lot harder, even if we could reach more people. And the money might not be there for the researchers, staffers and lawyers (like me) in the relatively secure way it was before. But this new movement could spread across the country and mobilize millions of workers who have never heard of organized labor.

If we can mobilize that many people, our chances of changing the political and corporate models would be much stronger. We would be a big step closer to the goal that the great American philosopher John Dewey set for us: to extend everywhere and as far as we can a democratic way of life.

After the Obama stimulus seemed to fail, a Washington Post headline gibed: John Maynard Keynes, the GOP’s Latest Whipping Boy. On the left, of course, he’s still our guy, even if, like some “Keynesians,” we have never read a word of Keynes. Some pundits say that in the 2012 presidential election, the real candidates will be Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who raged against all forms of state planning (though Hayek liked national health insurance). If that’s the real presidential election, wouldn’t it behoove some of us true believers to ask, in this moment of double-dip despair, “My God, what would Keynes do?”

If we consult his writing, the scripture left by Keynes himself, we might be surprised to find that it would be a lot more than “prime the pump”—i.e., just run up the federal debt. For Keynes, the problem would be not just getting people into stores, or even getting employers to hire but getting our plutocracy to invest. It’s not just our jobless rate but our huge trade deficit that would appall him. He’d be aghast to see the United States bogged down in so much debt to the rest of the world.

I know: that’s not what people think. “Wait, wasn’t Keynes the one trying to get us into debt?” Yes, but not that kind of debt—in fact, as his biographer writes, Keynes personally hated debt. Especially in a recession, he hated to see a country with a trade debt, or trade deficit, which arises when a country’s imports exceed exports. Indeed, when the trade deficit is as jaw-dropping as the US trade deficit is now, it is harder to use Keynesian deficit spending to push employment back up. Keynes, unlike some of his disciples today, was quick to see this problem.

In 1936, when Keynes wrote his classic—The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—he was emphatic on this point: no country, ever, should run up any kind of trade deficit, much less the trade deficit on steroids we are running. Of course, in 1936 and for years after, the United States was the biggest creditor country in the history of the world. So Keynes never worried about our being a debtor country—rather, he spent much of his last days begging the United States to get other countries out of debt. If he came back and saw the colossal external debt we run now, he would be pushing for a serious plan to bring it down just as hard as he’d be pushing a stimulus for full employment.

I admit, Nation readers, that standing in line at Whole Foods, I occasionally pick up The Economist, if only to go to the back page and see the merchandise trade deficit the United States and other countries have been running in the past twelve months. It’s scary: $680.9 billion as of July 9. That puts us near $0.7 trillion in the red. But in the chart, much of the world is in the black. OK, the two US wannabes, Britain and Spain, have trade deficit disasters. And some have too much. “Low-wage” China has a surplus of $172.5 billion. “High-wage” Germany beats out China, with a surplus of $188.4 billion. But when I run my finger up this chart to the US deficit, it’s a shock. It’s as if I’m pressing on the sucking chest wound in the world economy.

Keynes would rattle that ripped-out page in front of us.

Actually, the trade deficit might be worse if there was full employment, our supposed goal, since we would have the money to buy even more hardware from abroad as we bite into more sandwiches at Jimmy John’s.

And that is just the surface trade deficit. Underneath that, there is a still bigger deficit, with US corporations outsourcing so many jobs. Here is a headline from the Wall Street Journal on April 19: Big US Firms Shift Hiring Abroad. During the 2000s, the Journal reports, while US multinationals have fired 2.9 million workers here, they have hired 2.4 million abroad. Some of these workers make parts to be shipped here, but when the parts are assembled into the gizmos or widgets that we sell abroad, we count them as “exports.” “Isn’t that true for other countries?” Sure—but the United States is much worse, because there is no government check (as in China) or organized labor check (as in Germany) to keep employment here. Our real trade deficit is much worse than the one on the back page of The Economist.

That’s what Keynes, spluttering, would be the first to point out. Indeed, he spent most of his life trying to get debtor countries out of debt. After World War I, he tried to get Germany out of debt. Read his famous 1919 essay “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.” By the 1930s Keynes had notoriously turned against free trade and was giving lectures on the need for “national self-sufficiency.” He concludes The General Theory with a long polemic against free trade and a paean to what the Bourbons and the Habsburgs used to do: knight any merchant prince who brought back a ducat from abroad. The one big (and smart) idea of absolute monarchy was to push exports over imports.

It’s all in the last part of The General Theory—which the wonderful Paul Krugman describes as “a kind of dessert course.” But Keynes’s attack on external debt comes as a crescendo to his whole argument. And he died trying to set up a system that would keep debtor countries out of debt. He pushed for the World Bank and the IMF. He even fought for a global currency: the bancor. In the last volume of Robert Skidelsky’s great biography, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946, there’s poor Keynes getting off his deathbed in 1944 and trying to set up a global system that would push creditor countries like the United States to pull debtor countries out of debt.

* * *

Of course no country should run a trade deficit. That’s common sense. Maybe the economists whose courses Bush and Obama probably took at Yale or Harvard think it does not matter. But for Keynes, a trade surplus was a “stimulus,” and a deficit was a disaster. In Book VI, he states emphatically: “A favorable balance, provided it is not too large, will prove extremely stimulating; whilst an unfavorable balance may soon produce a state of persistent depression.” OK, I supplied the emphasis. But Keynes was amazed at the indifference of most economists to the problem. “The extraordinary achievement of the classical theory was to overcome the beliefs of the ‘natural man’ and, at the same time, to be wrong,” he wrote.

On a 1930s gold standard, a trade deficit was bad in part because we paid it out in gold. But it’s just as bad to pay for it year after year by giving up our industrial might—by melting down America, Inc.

Keynes believed that practical leaders would always see the supreme importance of keeping the country out of external debt—indeed, he seemed to see this as the first duty of the state. For Keynes, in his later years, it was the economic analogue to defending one’s country. Avoiding an external debt was an act of patriotism and national self-preservation in a sense that even reducing unemployment was not. It’s “fighting for freedom,” in Skidelsky’s phrase. Keynes would not believe how Obama, the Tea Party, the Democrats, the Republicans—our leaders—pay so little attention to our whopping trade deficit, as if it had nothing at all to do with our slump.

The right, the Tea Party, the Concord Coalition, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson, Peter Peterson—they want to bring down the federal deficit. The left, our side, generally wants to go deeper into debt and get to full employment. Then we’ll bring down the federal deficit. Then we’ll have full employment and all will be well.

But until we bring down the trade deficit and fix our balance of payments, there is no way out of debt.

Some readers will raise their hands: What’s the difference between the trade deficit and the balance-of-payments deficit? Well, over a year, the balance-of-payments deficit is an accounting statement—it’s the difference between all the payments to foreign nations and the receipts we get from foreign nations. It’s not the same as the trade deficit because it also counts up our foreign investments and investments by foreigners, loans, tourism, foreign aid. But we have a big balance-of-payments deficit because of our trade deficit—that’s what explains it, since we hold our own in the nontrade transfers.

We should put the accent on the first word in “balance of payments” because an accounting statement has to balance. As long as there is a balance-of-payments deficit, someone in the United States has to go into debt. Under Bush it was mostly the private sector: you and I. We ran up our Visas and MasterCards. We took out subprime loans. We did our home equity financing. Now we in the private sector are cutting back. So if you and I aren’t going into debt, Uncle Obama has to go into debt.

Let’s suppose we on the left do run up a debt, get back to full employment (ha!) or not-so-bad unemployment, and then bring the federal deficit down to zero.

Is all well?

No, because now you and I in the private sector have to go into debt. It’s simple arithmetic. Somebody in this country is going to have to go into debt to make the balance-of-payments balance. Who’s going to do it? It’s the government or us. One day Uncle Obama or his successor will say, “I’m done going into debt to make the balance ‘balance.’ It’s your turn to go into debt to make the balance ‘balance.’”

* * *

Personally, I’d prefer that the government go into debt. As a taxpayer I’d rather pay the current low rate on US Treasuries than have to pay 25 percent to 30 percent on my Visa. The Tea Party and the GOP keep saying we can’t saddle our grandchildren with all this debt. Actually, we might be doing them a favor to saddle them with public sector instead of private sector debt. At least with public sector debt, none of our grandchildren will be hauled into court and sued.

What is the right thinking? But the left has no real plan to get out of this mess either.

Of course, others (even in the pages of this magazine) have pointed out that the US external trade debt is a bad thing, though it gets very little mention in our political debate. But it has a whopping big role in the current global crisis. The world filled up with foreigners holding dollars. They put the money back into the US economy in the form of loans—Treasury bonds, to be sure, but also corporate bonds, financial instruments, prime loans, subprime loans, payday loans and all manner of corporate debt. And the bloating of the financial sector—unregulated—led to the collapse.

But what’s behind it all is the fact that the United States cannot pay its way in the world. And while a smaller country would have expired long ago, we keep stumbling along, getting sicker, losing industrial weight, because the rest of the world has an interest in continuing to hold us upright.

For Keynes that would be the challenge—not just to bring down but to eliminate it: the whole thing. The failure to do so has real implications for other parts of Keynes’s theory. The answer to our crisis is not to “hire and rewire,” or to have a lot of public works. Let me add, by the way: I’m a labor lawyer; I want the government to spend. I love public works. I’d love a new O’Hare Airport. I’d love a repaving of Lake Shore Drive. And certainly Keynes loved public works. He saw people starving; he had a heart. We have to do something. We can’t wait for the trade deficit to come down. But that’s not the answer—it’s urgent, to be sure, but it’s just a first step. The answer is to get rich people to put their money into real “investments” and not “loans.” It’s to induce the rich in this country to invest “by employing labor on the construction of durable assets.” Call them widgets; call them iPads. Call them anything we can wrap, ship and sell to somebody abroad.

“Oh, but he wouldn’t put that ahead of the stimulus.”

No—but he’d put them together.

* * *

For a while in 2009 it seemed everyone was a Keynesian. Skidelsky even rushed out a book, Keynes: The Return of the Master. Just after Obama took office, my colleague Mike was on the El and had his Financial Times, like everyone else in our office. A commuter spotted him and said, “Isn’t this a great time to be a Keynesian?” But now we’re not so sure. Even on the left some might ask: Was Keynes right about all of that, or should we look elsewhere for a prophet? Of course Keynes was right! His General Theory may not be quite as verifiable as Einstein’s. There is no Mariana Islands where we can set up our instruments and observe an eclipse. But we can look at other countries, like Britain and Spain, that have chosen austerity. They’re basket cases, just as Keynesian theory would predict. And East Asian countries that used Keynesian principles to stimulate their economies bounced back. Germany is an exception, but it has an enormous stimulus coming from its trade surplus—much of it from East Asian and BRIC country demand. With our not-quite-big-enough stimulus, the United States came out in the middle—the economy is not in deep freeze, as in Britain or Spain, but neither is it hot.

Part of the reason the United States isn’t doing better is that, thanks to the trade deficit, Keynesianism has lost its punch. On the evidence of The General Theory Keynes would argue that a stimulus has to be bigger, or work harder, as long as we have this external debt. Consider a twist on Keynes’s famous Aesop-like fable about the Bank of England. Let’s drop the Bank of England and make it all about the Federal Reserve. As Keynes would put it, rather than do nothing in a slump, it would be better for the Fed to bury bank notes in bottles and pay Americans to dig them up. Not only do we goose employment but there is a multiplier effect.

But Keynes did not say we should put bank notes in bottles and bury them in China and have Chinese workers dig them up. Why not? Well, it doesn’t do us any good. It does not employ any US workers. And of course, there would be no “multiplier.” The beauty of the stimulus is the “multiplier” effect. OK, I will oversimplify: if we hire Americans to dig up the bottles with bank notes, they have cash to spend. In 1936 they might go to spend it at the corner bar. The bar hires more wait staff. They go out and buy more groceries. Someone buys an extra truck and truck driver to bring the fructose syrup in from Iowa for our Froot Loops, and… should I stop?

It just goes on and on… jobs, jobs, jobs, multiplying to the Pythagorean heights.

But it’s not 1936. It’s 2011. Now after digging up the bottles, Americans will go to Target and Walmart and spend on bags of kitty litter made by child labor in China. And what’s going to happen to the multiplier when the Obama bucks we spend end up over there? In Chapter 10 of The General Theory Keynes writes, “In an open system with foreign trade relations some part of the multiplier…will accrue to the benefit of employment in foreign countries.” Or, as he said, there will be a bit of “leakage.” But that’s OK if they buy back from us. If there is a balance of trade, it’s OK. But they aren’t buying back from us. They are buying more from Japan and Germany, so our stimulus goes out of China and over to those countries.

It’s bad enough that we’re transferring all that wealth even in a good time. But when we’re counting on a stimulus, we’re leaking on a scale Keynes could hardly even imagine, and even in 1936 he already worried enough.

Given the leakage of the multiplier, the stimulus has to be huge. Let’s be honest—it freaked out independents, and even our base, to see how deep in debt Obama initially tried to go. So when a seemingly huge stimulus did not deliver, the country soured on it. “They don’t understand Keynes.” But maybe we don’t understand Keynes. Is the public so irrational? As we run up an annual public deficit of $1.3 trillion, our jobless rate is a stunning 9 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Thanks to the Tea Party, alas, we know too well that the government borrows 40 cents for every dollar it spends.

There are other reasons Keynesianism has lost its punch.

First, by making their own cutbacks, our state governments can nullify the federal stimulus. In 1936 the states were just toy governments. The New Dealers hated them. But now they are far bigger public sector employers than Washington. By virtue of state constitutions requiring balanced budgets, they have to cut when Keynesian theory would have them spend. If the stimulus did not stimulate, we can partly blame our fifty Tea Party constitutions, which require a foolish “austerity” in the states. In our system of federalism, a Keynesian-type stimulus is half unconstitutional.

Second, the rich are so much richer now than they were in our Keynesian golden age (let’s say 1940 to 1975). If Obama gets GDP growth up by 1 percent, most of that goes to the superrich. It’s beyond their capacity to consume it—i.e., to unleash a multiplier effect. The Financial Times has a regular supplement called “How to Spend It,” but it’s beyond their human strength. There’s too much to spend.

A stimulus can wake up an egalitarian country’s economy, since everyone is spending. But a stimulus cannot wake up the economy of a super-plutocracy: the people at the very top just roll over in bed.

* * *

The whopping trade deficit should be the dream issue for Democrats: “We’re the party that will really get the country out of debt.” That’s how we connect with the voters: show the connection between the private and public debt and the external debt. The GOP has nothing to say on this. We have the whole issue to ourselves.

So what would Keynes do?

Here’s what he would not do:

“Vote down free trade treaties.” Though he blasted free trade, Keynes thought tariffs were ridiculous. While knocking free trade, he also wrote that “the reader must not reach a premature conclusion as to the practical policy to which our argument leads up…. The advantages of the international division of labor are real and substantial, even though the classical school greatly overstressed them…. A policy of trade restrictions is a treacherous instrument.”

“Devalue.” He acknowledges sometimes it can work to make the country’s goods cheaper abroad. But we now live in a world of fluctuating and not fixed exchange rates. In Keynesian theory, no one is going to make a long-term decision to invest based on a day-to-day fluctuation in the dollar. The dollar has dropped a lot at different times, against the euro as well as the renminbi, and it has never put a big dent in any serious way in the trade deficit. Other countries will compete as hard as we do to devalue, so it will never work.

“Let’s spend on infrastructure.” I’m all for it. But even if we pave the interstates with gold, it won’t help us sell more goods abroad.

So what’s Keynes’s answer? It’s simple. While he believed in public works, to say the least—he practically invented the concept—he never presented the public sector as the real key to the economic problem. Rather, as he writes in The General Theory, “The weakness of the inducement to invest has been at all times the key to the economic problem.”

We have to get the rich to invest. Specifically, we have to get the rich to invest “by employing labor on the construction of durable assets.” We don’t have to get the rich to consume. They will gag. And we don’t really have to get the rich to work. Who cares if they work? They can stay at home in bed in silken sheets.

The real point is to get them to invest—not save, not speculate in financial instruments, but invest in widgets we can wrap and ship and sell abroad. And Keynes would put that question to the left, to us: How can we get the rich to invest?

Well, in The General Theory he has one big idea—lower the rate of interest. By cutting the rate of interest on loans we can prod the rich to put their money into less liquid investments, in the kinds of things we can sell abroad.

I know: everyone will say, “Keynes is nuts. The Fed has zero rates. It’s like Japan. ‘We’re pressing on a string.’”

But it’s not. Sure, the Fed has zero rates, and mortgage rates are low. But even after Dodd-Frank, look at the colossal returns to the financial sector—i.e., to commercial and investment banks. For Keynes the key to getting the rich to invest in labor on the construction of durable assets was to hold down the windfall returns from loans, buyouts and financial speculation—the income he would call “interest.” That’s the nub of our country’s trade deficit problem. In Book VI, Keynes adumbrates the one big thing he learned from the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, John Locke and even Adam Smith about the importance of holding down the rate of interest to stimulate trade, to make it less attractive to “invest” in short-term derivatives and relatively more attractive to invest for the long term in widgets. Keynes put it this way: “It is impossible to study the notions to which the mercantilists were led by their actual experiences, without perceiving that there has been a chronic tendency throughout human history for the propensity to save to be stronger than the inducement to invest.”

Everything in the United States is set up to encourage the rich to put money into financial instruments rather than long-term investments. What would Keynes do? Get the rich to think outside the Wall Street banking box. Get them to put money into the part of Main Street that used to trade abroad. How do we do that? For starters, put in usury laws—limits on interest rates. In a general way, cut down the appeal of being a creditor and not an investor.

Keynes quotes Locke on this point: “High Interest decays Trade. The advantage from Interest is greater than the profit from Trade.” And by trade, Locke does not mean day trading.

Now, as Richard Posner recently wrote, part of the problem with understanding Keynes is the vocabulary. So, for example, it is puzzling to us to hear that the rich don’t make enough “investments.” Don’t they invest like crazy? They invest in stocks, bonds, financial instruments, all sorts of things we would never call loans. But to Keynes these “investments” are loans. They’re liquid. They often have a fixed rate of interest. Corporate takeovers on Wall Street may look like “investments,” but if you get up close, many are just loans—i.e., transactions in corporate debt. Keynes could pick up the Wall Street Journal and give the real name for one “investment” after another: loan, loan, loan.

Strip away the pretense of investment, and too many a financial instrument is either a loan or just the inflated price of a paper asset. When Keynes talks about the importance of usury laws, he means laws limiting interest rates but also laws and regulations that hold down profits on financial instruments.

Keynes would point out that the rise in the US trade deficit—which became serious in the 1980s—coincided exactly with the astonishing deregulation of the financial sector. We knocked down usury laws. We allowed the first end runs around the Glass-Steagall laws.

Wait—that’s our problem? Not China or the world economy? Well, it’s hard to channel Keynes now, but look at the back page of The Economist. Not just Germany but a lot of other high-wage countries are doing well in the global economy. It’s hard to account for the difference with labor cost alone.

Readers who took Economics 101 (or Economics 1001, as it later became as a result of inflation) may remember something about a “liquidity preference.” That means keeping money “liquid.” For Keynes the first duty of the state is to ensure that the “liquidity preference” is low, to prod people not to keep their money liquid but to lock it up in a long-term investment where it will not be so easy to get.

To some, this all sounds very nice for the future, but right now we need to get people out there to repave the interstates. Fine, let’s get back to work: but as long as the trade deficit keeps on draining us of wealth, the middle class will keep on going down the drain.

In the end there is one way out of this economic mess—Keynes would say we have to shock, push, lure and sweet-talk the rich in this country to part with their money and start enterprises that get us out of debt. But how are we going to do that? We can’t even get employers sitting on hoards of cash to hire a few extra workers.

* * *

So what would Keynes do? Well, I don’t know: he’s dead, as we all are in the long run. But I have a hunch what he would do. As the solon or lawgiver of modern social democracy, Keynes would look at the most successful social democracy in the world right now. What do the Germans, with their hefty trade surplus, do?

First, they have a whole different type of corporation—with workers making up half the directors on the board. And workers have privileged positions in the firms, real power and responsibility. It doesn’t guarantee that corporations invest, but it’s a big help to have workers in director chairs sitting in the boardrooms.

In addition, the Germans have government-sponsored banks, like the Sparkassen, that lend to businesses. We have the Federal Reserve printing money like crazy, but the banks sit on it and don’t lend it out, just as American CEOs who have never met a worker except on reality TV sit on their money and don’t hire.

We can’t adopt these things wholesale, but we can take baby steps, as I wrote in a Nation article last year [see “Ten Things Dems Could Do to Win,” Sept. 27, 2010]. But the Keynes of Book VI would also be interested in anything beyond Dodd-Frank that discourages financial speculation and loans. He’d be in favor of denying tax breaks for leveraged buyouts that leave companies in debt. I think he’d love the idea of a financial transactions tax, which Dean Baker has proposed here and the Europeans are considering.

The one standard way of being competitive abroad is to cut wages here—to improve the terms of trade. Keynes hated the idea of cutting wages. It was the standard remedy of classical theory, and he loved to point out that cutting demand at home might only prolong a slump. But suppose the government could dramatically cut nonwage labor costs by assuming the cost of health insurance? If our government could deliver just one Keynesian “shock” to make us more competitive, it would be single payer national healthcare. At least right now, we should expand Medicare coverage (lower the eligibility age) and adopt a public option, so that the government can have more bargaining leverage to beat down by decree the stupefying prices we pay to get well in an ever more concentrated healthcare sector.

It is horrifying to see even the “tough” new President Obama proposing to shrink Medicare—aside from leaving people uncovered, shrinking coverage means shrinking the government’s power to dictate the price and leaves employers and the rest of us exposed to higher healthcare costs. If the president wanted to increase the trade deficit, the best thing he could do would be to cut Medicare coverage and give the government even less power to hold down the healthcare costs that make us even less competitive abroad than we are now.

Finally, I think Keynes would hold up on the small stuff—i.e., the cuts in the payroll tax or the proffer of one more investment tax credit—for none of that will matter (if it ever matters) until we get people out of loans. In one way or another, in keeping with the ancient wisdom of the Bourbons and the Habsburgs divined by Keynes, we have to take down the scaffolding of this creditor-debtor economy in which our country is imprisoned.

Now more than ever: it’s a great time to be a Keynesian. Remember to vote for Keynes in 2012.

Yes, the country is in a foul mood, with 15 million unemployed. The Democrats may get clobbered in 2010. And even if we survive, how do we hang on for the long term? If our great founder, FDR, could come back to us, he might remind us of the three simple rules that once, long ago, Democrats used to follow:

1. Do something for your base.

2. Do something for your base.

3. Do something for your base.

Seriously: why can’t we do something for our base? It’s been almost a half-century since we Democrats did something for our base, when Lyndon Johnson pushed through Medicare, i.e., "socialized medicine" for seniors. And while some may compare the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 to Medicare, there’s a big difference. To the public, the new law seems to benefit only the uninsured: the young or the marginal, few of whom will even vote in 2010 (maybe just a third of the electorate will). So while the new law is a big help to them, it does nothing for the rest of our base, especially our smaller core base that will vote in the midterms. Indeed, it seems to penalize our base, or at least raise their taxes, at a time when they have lost a big chunk of their 401(k) pensions, or their jobs, or even their homes—and if they’re lucky and still have a job, they may be working just three instead of five days a week. These are the very people who voted us in. "Yes, we can!" And they watched, dumbfounded, as Congress virtually forgot their plight in our struggle to raise their taxes to give benefits to a lot of red-state uninsured who may never say thank you, and whose twenty or so red states are now trying to overturn the law.

Of course I’m in favor, wildly in favor, of this civilized and humane step toward healthcare for all. But after forty-five years of doing nothing for the people who register as Democrats, we might have kicked off 2010 by doing something for our base.

Yes, of course a fraction of our base, the uninsured, will benefit. But we could have started by doing something really big to reward or empower everyone in our base. Indeed, it’s a puzzle that someone with Obama’s acumen would not have done more to keep intact all these old-time Democrats and others who lifted him up to the White House in the last weeks of the election after Wall Street collapsed.

By the way, FDR would be the first to tell us it’s not enough to do something for our base. Here are three other little rules we should follow when we do something for our base:

1. Keep it simple. The healthcare bill not only did nothing for our base; it was hard to understand. Every initiative should be capable of being put down in a single sentence or two. "Financial reform" is fine, but the Dodd-Frank Act is too hard to sum up coherently to our base on even an index card, much less a bumper sticker.

2. Make it universal. People on the left have all sorts of ideas for programs that turn out to be available only to a select few. By contrast take FDR’s big ideas, like Social Security. Not everyone is on it, but sooner or later we all are headed there. If we’re not there, our parents are. Likewise, Medicare: we’ll all get there. The public option, which was left out of the healthcare law, was a nice idea and all, but in the end it would have been available only for a few.

Finally, the last and most important rule:

3. Make it add up to a plan. I mean, let’s go beyond "the vision thing" and let people know we have a plan. Obama will not bring back the American economy of golden memory. The deficit will be horrendous. We may have to get used to unemployment of 7 percent, a 7 percent that covers up a bigger percent of people working just three instead of five days a week. FDR did not end the Depression, either. But people were patient because they knew he had a plan. He was rebuilding the economy from the bottom up, and it paid off, not in the 1930s but in the unionized, high-benefits postwar decades after he died.

People will be patient with us and keep us in power if they think we have a plan.

In this spirit here are ten things the Democrats could push this fall that not only do something for our base but (1) are simple, (2) appeal to at least half or more of the country and (3) add up to a plan.

 1. Raise Social Security to 50 percent of working income.
 
Let’s stop saying we will "save" Social Security. Don’t save it. Raise it. Let’s push Social Security up to 50 percent of people’s income. It’s down at about 39 percent now. Of course we can’t do this overnight, but we can set it as a serious goal. Here at last we would be doing something for our base. I mean, who are we for, right? Yet even on "our" side, the cognoscenti want to cut it. Even Barack Obama spoke in his 2009 State of the Union address about "strengthening" Social Security—by which he meant cutting or at least capping it. Fine, we’re running a deficit. Go ahead, listen to "respectable" voices, all the Congressional Budget Office types. But we’re the Democrats. Who are we for? Private pensions have disappeared. People’s homes have lost value or are in foreclosure. Don’t tell me how Social Security is more generous than ever. With the collapse of the private pension system and the popping of bubbles, we need to expand the public pension system as never before.

"Wait. It will be tough enough to make the current system solvent. Where’s the money to come from?" Let’s put aside the fact that Social Security is solvent—or at least sure to be solvent until 2040, which satisfies me but not kids in their 20s. Fine, let’s fix it for the long term as well. But as long as we’re going to take the heat to make the current system "solvent" even for people under 40, i.e., to "save" Social Security even for them, we might as well raise it, too. After all, our real base voters are more likely to get off their couches and vote for us if we burn into their brains that their worst worries about retirement are over. There are three sources of a fiscal fix, not just to save but to raise it. The Democrats should propose all three:

First, restore the estate tax that existed in the 1950s and ’60s and dedicate the proceeds to the Social Security trust—as Robert Ball, former Social Security commissioner, once proposed. (One might think of it as a backdoor form of means testing. At least we should get back the Social Security we paid the deceased.)

I know, "A majority of Americans oppose the estate tax." Let’s find out if they do if it means they don’t have to worry about dying broke.

Second, lift the cap on the Social Security tax (it’s at $90,000 now) so it applies to all incomes. After all, Social Security is for everyone. If people above $90,000 are in it, then they should be in it all the way.

Third, cancel the huge tax deduction on the most wasteful sorts of corporate debt, especially the kind used for speculation and leveraged buyouts. Dedicate that new revenue to raising Social Security. It’s a deduction we should get rid of anyway, for good and independent reasons. It’s that deduction that has encouraged the leveraged buyouts and looting of corporations by private equity funds and all the other speculation that caused Wall Street to crack up.

"But in the long run, don’t we have to raise people’s taxes, especially to get above 50 percent?" Yes, I admit, we do have to raise the tax. Right now, I would not propose to go immediately to 50 percent. But there’s nothing wrong with this increase if people grasp that they are spending it on themselves—that was the flaw in the Obama healthcare plan, where the higher taxes went solely to "other people."

"But there’s a generational equity problem. We’re asking the young to subsidize the old." So David Brooks complains. That’s his kick against the welfare state. Why is that a problem? Since the time of Adam and Eve, that’s why people have had children—to support them in old age. Besides, would you as a young person rather pay for Mom and Dad out of your own wallet? Raising Social Security does plenty for the young—and they are freaked out about their retirement too.

Then it might be easier to cut healthcare costs.

Why is it that in European social democracies people spend far less on healthcare but are healthier at every income level? Thanks to better pensions, they have healthier lives.

In short, if we wanted to cut healthcare from 17 percent of GDP and wean our base away from endless visits to doctors, we might try giving them bigger pensions on which to live. They might accept caps on Medicare if it meant we could give out bigger pensions for healthier lives.

Democrats! The next time we promise a cutback in Medicare, let’s promise that the savings will go to raising Social Security in return.

 2. Let’s extend Medicare to people 55 to 65.
 
Remember FDR’s first rule. Keep it simple. I can’t think of anything simpler and easier for people to grasp than for the Democrats to propose extending Medicare to age 55.

And start now.

For a moment, during the healthcare debate, this idea caught on in the Senate. We should try again. Why? For the purpose of the midterm elections, it should be obvious. People age 55 to 65 are the people who vote.

Remember Bush’s drug program, as expensive as it was? At least it made sure that in 2004 he won the state of Florida. The second time, Florida was not even close.

But there are more principled reasons, too. First, we have to make the country more competitive. That means we have to take over the healthcare costs employers pay. Before we get to single payer, let’s start with the most medically expensive employees, those age 55 to 65. How do we pitch it?

First, "be competitive." If the government takes over these costs from employers, we lower labor costs. Didn’t getting out of retiree healthcare costs (people often 55 to 65) help revive GM and Chrysler? Extend Medicare, and it’s like a GM-Chrysler bailout across the board. If we’re going to compete with European social democracies like Germany, which are now booming thanks to exports, maybe we need to resort to a bit more "socialist" healthcare to lower our labor costs and let us outsell them.

Let’s put America first, right?

Second, as we lift the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, we should put those in the 55 to 65 category on an even playing field in terms of labor costs. Indeed, if we expect people to last longer in the workforce, we should do more to sustain them, like Elijah, for the journey.

Third, people age 55 to 65 right now have to cross a kind of no man’s land. That’s the worker category most vulnerable to getting sick and the one employers have the strongest incentive to cut. This demographic alone could re-elect the Democrats in 2010: think how many are being pushed out for "early retirement." The promise of Medicare picking up their healthcare costs might cause many a boss to hold off the ax.

How to pay? Most of the cost could come from an automatic surcharge—remember, these people aren’t paying premiums.

Some may say, "That’s a fine idea, but it’s too late—the whole healthcare thing is over." But this one, conceptually, is easy. It’s certainly a majority vote in the Senate: if anything is budget reconciliation, it’s a one-page change in the eligibility rules. Instead of 2,000 pages to say what we’re changing, all we need is one. All we need is fifty Democratic votes.

It does something for our base, especially the base likely to vote in the midterms.

It meets all three of FDR’s little rules:

It is simple.

It is universal, like Medicare itself.

And it adds up to a plan to bring back the economy and lift the middle class.

If pulling this group off the insurance rolls doesn’t bring insurance rates down, then there’s every reason to liquidate what’s left of the insurance industry. Seriously, what’s private insurance left to do?

 3. Make it a civil right to join, or not to join, a labor union.
 
Remember: organized labor is not our base. The working people of the country are our base. We have to repackage labor law reform, even over the protest of organized labor itself. Except for those in the big white buildings in Washington, few working people understand the Wagner Act. Few understand card checks or secret ballot elections or mandatory first-time arbitration. Few labor lawyers understand it. So make it simple: instead of trying to fiddle with an old 1935 law based on a collectivist view of the world, let’s bring labor law up to date. How? Let’s amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to give the same individual type of civil right to join—or, yes, not to join—a union.

Elsewhere I have argued that letting working people hire their own lawyers, go to court, take discovery, rifle the files and get awards of legal fees would do more to bring back the labor movement than to go on bottling it up in a single federal agency like the National Labor Relations Board. If we amend the Civil Rights Act and let people go to court for any employer reprisal to block a union, and to let the rank and file get their own lawyers and start handing out subpoenas, we’ll get back a labor movement fast.

Keep in mind: the works councils and other forms of worker control fervidly supported by unions now in Germany at first did not have much support from unions there.

But how to sell it?

Tell people their rights will trump the rights of the union as an institution.

That includes the right not to pay dues, not to pay a cent, i.e., a completely voluntary labor movement. "My God, unions will never survive." I want to say, Nonsense: they all survive in Europe. But it’s true; Europe really is different. For one thing, there is nothing like our unbalanced US Senate to block labor friendly laws (see 9 below). And it is easier to bargain for large groups of workers. Still, the people who benefit from such large-scale bargaining in a country like Germany are free not to pay—and many don’t. So what? Many do—up to 20 percent of the workers in the country. Yet collective bargaining covers more than 50 percent of workers.

So, what do we do about the free riders? Let them ride.

Yes, I worry it won’t work here. I don’t propose to tear down the existing compulsory dues structure all at once. After all, I have to make a living representing unions. But I think ultimately there is no alternative, in a culture so radically individualistic, but to opt for a voluntary model, whether we have European-type labor laws in place or not.

Otherwise, if it is not voluntary, as it is in social democratic Europe, it is hard to see why Americans would vote in yet another institution they cannot influence democratically. Albert Hirschman, the great Princeton economist, contends that to be accountable, institutions have to offer either "voice" or "exit." That is, people either need to really run the institution or to have an easy way out. Organized labor offers neither. That’s why people distrust it.

I’d prefer to increase voice, to let the rank and file rule. But it’s still impossible to get real union democracy. So the only way to do it seems to be the European way, to let people opt out and make membership voluntary. If that happens, unions here will behave like socialist-type unions in Europe, constantly trying to market themselves and please the members so they will keep paying dues.

People in this country are desperate for a labor movement. They are waiting for a Democratic Party to give them one they can control.

 4. Put in a usury cap of 16 percent.
 
Again, aside from doing something for our base, it meets the other three FDR-type rules.

First, it’s simple. Unlike the Dodd-Frank Act, this is easy to explain.

Second, it’s universal—who can live without a Visa or MasterCard?

Third, it fits into a bigger plan—to shrink the big returns of a financial sector that’s drained so much of the investment that used to go into the "real economy." After all, our plan has to be to make the country globally competitive, to bring down the trade deficit. And we can’t do that until we put limits on the returns of a financial sector that is in danger of sucking up all the invested capital that used to go into manufacturing.

Well, at any rate, it’s simple.

 5. Set up small government banks like the German Sparkasse.

Ironically, in this time of bailouts, the failure of so many small banks has reduced the lending the country needs. In Illinois alone, thirty-seven banks have failed since the Wall Street crack-up. The big ones like Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are not just "too big to fail" but too big to lend.

How to fix that?

Set up small, government-run banks all over the country, like the little Sparkasse banks one sees all over Germany.

It would do something for our base. It’s simple to understand. It fits into a plan—to make the country more competitive so we can bring down the trade deficit. In Germany the Sparkasse banks are especially designed to help small manufacturers compete—the kind of small but high-value-added firms that the big banks like Deutsche Bank ignore but that play an important role in racking up a favorable trade balance for Germany.

And if all that is too abstract, think about this: the Sparkasse hand out credit cards with low interest rates.

Isn’t that the ultimate "public option"? A government credit card, at a lower than Bank of America rate.

Yes, it’s simple. It’s universal—everyone can use a credit card. And it adds up to a plan, to create a fair and just economy that can lift the middle class by increasing sales abroad.

 6. Give everyone the right to six days of vacation—six consecutive paid working days.

Why six consecutive days? Well, we need five so we can connect the two weekends. And we need a sixth so we have something to trade away in the Senate.

I’m kidding. Let them filibuster. What could be better for the Democrats?

It does something for our base. It’s simple. And it fits into a plan, to make us more competitive.

If we had more vacation time, as the Europeans have, we might even visit and get to know these countries we have to compete with. If we had time off to go around the world, we might be more competitive.

 7. Let employees sue corporate officers for breach of fiduciary duty to the corporation.
 
Under federal law, directors of our corporations owe a duty of "loyalty, care, diligence and prudence"—they have to pursue not their own interest but the best interest of their firms.

But in fact, they loot them.

And the firms go belly up and workers end up on the streets. We become less competitive.

As officers and directors loot our companies, we have fewer stockholders willing to stop them. With the rise of mutual funds and fund managers who don’t seem to care, the old model of corporate governance is broken.

If stockholders do nothing, unions don’t even exist. Our corporate boards are self-perpetuating. Directors keep re-nominating themselves with no real check or balance.

Yes, the Dodd-Frank Act gives mutual funds a shot at electing an occasional outside director. But even if—a big if—there is a lonely dissenter on a board, that won’t fix the model or do much for workers.

It’s this broken model that has hurt us so badly in competing with Germany and China, the two biggest exporters in the world. The German model has "co-determination," with workers making up half the board. The Chinese model is even simpler: over there, Big Brother is either directly or indirectly in charge; if a Gordon Gekko pops up there, he’s taken out and shot.

In Germany, even a corporate rock star like Josef Ackermann—who pays out a relatively small bonus to a fellow officer—can be prosecuted for pillaging the firm.

If we can’t do what the Germans and Chinese do, what can we do to stop the looting of our corporations?

Let workers—not stockholders but the people who get the W-2s, even the janitors—have the right to sue officers who loot the firm. Right now, only stockholders can sue; and the fund managers don’t care. But the people with the paychecks are out on the street. Now I admit, the threat of a lawsuit, even a class action one, is not as good as the checks that the Germans and Chinese use. But why not bring a little folk justice to American capitalism? People are entitled to a bit of revenge.

So it does something for our base—it puts a weapon in the hands of some who are starting their second year of unemployment. It’s simple. It’s available to everyone, postgrad or janitor. And it’s part of a plan—to make the country more competitive by making managers pay if they try to loot the firm.

And by the way, this may open up a check on corporate contributions too. Right now, the Democrats are flummoxed about Citizens United v. FEC. As the Court ruled 5 to 4, corporations have a First Amendment right to dump money from the corporate treasury directly into the pockets of the candidates. But the Supreme Court did not change the old legal fiduciary duty—in place since Queen Elizabeth I—that in effect requires managers to use money only for "legitimate" corporate purposes, the ones that are set out in the articles of incorporation.

How does buying off a politician serve any legitimate purpose set out in these corporate articles?

Consider the litigation if workers had the right to sue for each use of corporate money that does not serve a "legitimate" corporate purpose, one that is at least set out in the articles of incorporation. Every time BP gave cash to a politician, a guy out on the oil rig could sue Tony Hayward directly, to get his own money back.

"Oh, but the suits may not succeed."

Maybe, or maybe not—but I would not want to be a director defending any of the suits. And whether the money served my own or a corporate interest would make for a nice seven-hour deposition.

Even to put them under oath would give some pleasure to our base.

 8. Pass a College Bill of Rights.
 
It would replace the GI Bill of Rights. If we can’t get free college, at least let’s make college more accountable. Why Race to the Top so that colleges can soak these kids and let them drop out? Our colleges are happy to take the money and dump the kids of working families after one or two years—deeper in debt, worse off than ever.

What rights should these kids and their parents have?

Make colleges advertise dropout rates.

Make colleges tell which courses actually "work," i.e., help students improve some verbal or other skill.

Make them have outside auditors to prepare reports on this and make such reports public.

Create a kind of Federal Trade Commission to go after colleges and universities that take large sums of tuition but fail to have the overwhelming if not exclusive purpose of ensuring that these students, deep in debt, get a degree. One can define "unfair" or "deceptive" trade practices in this part of our bloated not-for-profit economy just as in any other. While one might not let students and parents sue directly, they could at least file for individual and "class-type" relief with this FTC.

But above all it’s time for Barack Obama to tell the country we don’t need everyone to go to college. After all, only 27 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree, and there are not enough jobs for them. The only way for the Democrats to stay in power is to stop demoralizing our base and tell people we will create an economy in which a high school degree will mean something.

 9. End the filibuster.

Or else, as to all the rest, there really is no point.

10. Get the country out of debt.

Finally, we have to take back the GOP’s big issue, the federal debt. Indeed, for every kind of debt—government, consumer, trade—the Democrats have to be the party that gets the country out of debt. That’s the only way to bring back a fair and just economy that lifts the middle class. As debt piles up, even our base is freaking out. Deep down, people grasp that America got into this mess with too much private debt. "Hey, if we’re all trying to get our own debt down, how does it make sense for the government to run it up?"

"Oh," some of us will say. "These poor unenlightened ones—they don’t understand Keynes." Maybe we don’t understand Keynes. Keynes would never have happily urged a serious debtor country to go deeper into debt. This is not your great-grandfather’s Great Depression. In 1936 Roosevelt could and should have gone into debt—but didn’t. We were the biggest creditor country in the world. In World War II we ran up a colossal debt—but it was a debt to ourselves. We baby boomer kids never even noticed. That’s why Keynes was so relaxed in 1936 about our going into debt. But otherwise Keynes spent much of his life trying to get debtor countries out of debt—Germany, his own Britain after the war. If one looks at his career, it is clear that Keynes never told a debtor country to go deeper into debt.

As he would point out, much of the debt we pile up in Washington has little or nothing to do with putting people back to work. Much of it is just to balance the books. Because we buy more than we sell, we have a trade deficit. So the books have to balance, right? Someone has to make up the difference. Under Bush we had consumers go into debt to do it. But they’re tapped out. So now Washington has to go into debt instead.

But at at some point even Washington is tapped out. What happens then?

We turn back to consumers: "Hey, we’re done going into debt. Now it’s your turn to go into debt."

No wonder our base freaks out—there isn’t any plan to get us out of debt.

When we have a big trade deficit, the feds can’t run up a debt just to re-employ Americans. As long as we’ve so much trade debt, we have to figure that a distressing amount of any stimulus will go ultimately to re-employ the workers in China, Brazil, Japan and even Europe, who fill the gap between the "demand" we pump up and what we actually "supply." When we have a big trade deficit, it means that the more we prime the pump, the more we drain out this distressing amount of our national wealth.

And why else did the stimulus run out of steam?

It was probably not big enough, but an even bigger one might have run out of steam. The bigger the trade debt, the less punch there is in running up a deficit. You can’t just blame the GOP for cutting the stimulus down.

What’s more, on this debt to pump up foreign "supply" we also have to pay out interest to foreigners. The deeper in debt we go, the more likely we are to end up in the clutches of foreign creditors. Don’t believe me? The time may come on the left that we’ll miss the days when we could rail at Goldman Sachs instead of the IMF.

Yes, in ten or so years the renminbi or even the euro (thanks to Germany) could replace the dollar as the world currency in which we denominate our debt, and our fate will be up to central bankers in foreign countries.

This is no joke: a Babylonian-type captivity for our country is but a presidential term or two away.

What to do? Well, the first duty of a Democrat is to defend the country. We have to win our independence back. The president should give a wartime talk: how over the years, president after president has compromised the sovereignty of our country. And the big reason this happened is that we have too much debt—consumer debt, federal debt, trade debt—because we can’t pay our way in the world.

For years, the economic advisers at Harvard et al. told their student presidential advisers-to-be, "The trade deficit doesn’t matter."

Well, it does matter. We don’t have the same freedom of maneuver in the world.

How do we get it back?

Items 1 through 9 above are all parts of a bigger plan to get us out of debt, every kind of debt. We have to bring back exports, so consumers and Washington don’t have to keep coming up with the cash to pay for the trade deficit. That’s the "plan." We have to punish investment in the financial sector—if it can even be called true investment at all, and not speculation or a way of holding on to savings, as Keynes once argued.

And we have to reward investment in manufacturing by lowering labor costs in what is left of our globally competitive industry. Yes, along with the stick we need a carrot—to increase the manufacturer’s profit margin by taking over nonwage labor costs.

So, for example, we should push for Medicare at 55 to remove that burden on global companies, as we did when we lifted retiree healthcare for Chrysler and GM. (Yes, it makes us more competitive globally, and it’s all legal under the World Trade Organization.) Likewise, while we should limit the deductibility of any debt for leveraged buyouts or flipping companies, we should keep it for investment in tangible manufacturing-based production. We should lower labor costs not by lowering wages—goodness no, for that would be a disaster in the Keynesian or any other sense—but by having the government (yes, taxpayers) assume the nonwage healthcare and other costs—the only way to send a signal to investors that they had better get out of financial speculation and into manufacturing.

As Keynes would tell us, play on their psychology. Let investors know the "water is friendly"—not by penny-ante things but the big stuff. Yes, we on the left should even propose steep cuts in corporate taxes in manufacturing and offsetting them with higher taxes on financial firms, to give an even bigger Keynesian-type shock to get investment in manufacturing.

And we need a new corporate model—which gives human capital at least some modest check, as in Germany, over the allocation of financial capital.

That’s the plan—to sell more abroad so we can all get out of debt.

From now on, this country has to be lean, mean and stripped for global competition.

And if we, the great-grandchildren of the New Deal, can bring all these things to pass, then FDR will smile upon us and say, "At last, children, you’ve done something for your base." Then our base will be glad to let us take on other things—perhaps even, before it’s too late, to dial down global warming.

But we have to be in power. So if we want to save the planet, we better save the country first.

Dear Senator Reid,
You have defended the filibuster in the past, but your duty as Senate majority leader at the present moment is to restore majority rule. Right now, the Senate operates under a supermajority rule that the founders never intended and that has no precedent in the way the Senate used to operate. The problem is not the old-fashioned “talking filibuster” but the absence of the filibuster: it’s the need to find sixty votes to cut off debate even when there is no debate to cut off. In the old days, up to the 1970s, the filibuster was so time-consuming and conspicuous the Senate could accommodate only a handful per session, and even these sometimes failed to hold off a majority vote. The filibuster that Mr. Smith undertook in the Frank Capra movie was aimed at rallying the country behind him. He wanted the rest of us to pay attention. But that’s the last thing the Republicans use the filibuster for now. They use it to silence debate. So bills are strangled to death with no debate, not even a muffled cry, over and over.

After just a year of these “procedural” or “ghost” filibusters, the Obama presidency is in jeopardy. Although the Democrats have a landslide number of senators, one might think from the media that they are in the minority. The president even talked in his State of the Union address as if the Republicans were in charge. Certainly we should reform Senate Rule 22, which requires sixty votes to cut off debate, as Senator Tom Harkin has proposed. But the failure of nerve at the moment is not so much the failure to change Senate Rule 22 but the failure to make the Republicans debate at all.

Indeed, we are unlikely to succeed in changing Rule 22 unless you call the minority’s bluff. The way to end the virtual filibuster is to start forcing a real one, to take place in real time, with hour after hour of senators really talking. The only way to delegitimize the filibuster is to let the minority do it–let them do it over and over. Let them do it for trivial things. Let the country see the absurdity to which the procedural filibuster leads.

It would be wise to begin not with the most visible measures that senators have threatened to filibuster but with the least. Let’s start with appointments to the Justice Department or even Homeland Security. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, at least four Treasury nominees are on procedural hold.

No one believes you have the nerve to force a filibuster over such routine matters–even if the government ends up not being staffed. But that’s exactly why you should do it: let the other side shut down the Senate for weeks over the appointment of a John or Jane Doe. Let the country meet John or Jane Doe and then try to figure out why we need to put public business on hold while we have an endless debate over this person. Don’t let the other side talk you into structuring the debate on a “dual” track: do it by Robert’s Rules and have the Senate debate just this, until the other side is ready to stop. Only by concentrating on the small things can you break the back of the filibuster-as-threat. Once broken in the smaller battles, it will lose its acceptability for the big ones.

As a practical matter, there isn’t space on a Senate calendar to have filibuster after filibuster without shutting down if not the entire government then at least Congress. Let Republicans explain to the country, one filibuster at a time, why it is so necessary to shut down Congress, especially when it’s to keep a midlevel Mr. or Ms. X out of a job.

When the country has had enough, bring forward Senator Harkin’s proposal to change Rule 22: since it’s not technically a rule change but a bill, the proposal presumably avoids the need to wait until the beginning of the next Senate term. The Harkin bill would require a series of staged votes to cut off a filibuster: the first motion for cloture would take sixty votes, then fifty-seven, then fifty-four and finally a simple majority–so if a bill survives debate, it can become law.

Yes, laws should not be passed lightly. But the best check is a majority, not a supermajority, vote. In fact, contrary to the claims of its defenders, supermajority rule fosters greater risk, not prudence. For if it takes a supermajority to put in a law, it will take a supermajority to get it out. To enact any law under such circumstances means it will be much harder to remove bad ones.

But before we can end supermajority rule, the groundwork has to be laid. First we must demonstrate the irresponsibility of the filibuster. That is your responsibility. Senator Harkin has stepped forward. So has Senator Udall.

Let the filibuster be the filibuster. If it is an obstructionist tactic, let it obstruct. If the Republicans want to shut down the presidency, make them shut down the Senate. If you take on this battle, you will have the country behind you. For the majority of Americans–yes, even Mr. Smith–want the government to work.

This past spring, Senator Claire McCaskill wrote to me asking for $50 to help elect more Democrats, so we could have a filibuster-proof Senate. Now that Al Franken has finally been declared the sixtieth Democratic senator, her plea may seem moot. But even with Franken in office, we don’t have a filibuster-proof Senate. To get to sixty on the Democratic side, we’ll still have to cut deals with Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and others who cat around as Blue Dogs from vote to vote. Whether or not Senator Arlen Specter is a Democrat, the real Democrats will still have to cut the same deals to get sixty votes.

Maybe we loyal Dems should start sending postcards like the following: “Dear Senator: Why do you keep asking for my money? You’ve already got the fifty-one votes you need to get rid of the filibuster rule.” It’s true–McCaskill and her colleagues could get rid of it tomorrow. Then we really would have a Democratic Senate, like our Democratic House.

She won’t. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which paid for her appeal, won’t. They use the filibuster threat to hit us up for money. And as long as they do, you and I will keep on kicking in for a “filibuster-proof” Senate, which, with or without Franken, will never exist. Every Obama initiative will teeter around sixty, only the deal-cutting will go on deeper in the back rooms and be less transparent than before.

In the meantime, playing it straighter than Claude Rains, McCaskill and other Democrats tell us how shocked, yes, shocked they are that this deal-cutting is going on. May I quote her spring letter? “I’m writing to you today because President Obama’s agenda is in serious jeopardy…”

It still is, as long as it takes sixty and not fifty-one votes to pass Obama’s bills. But no, here’s what she says: “Why? Because Republicans in the Senate–the same ones who spent years kowtowing to George W. Bush–are determined to block each and every one of President Obama’s initiatives.”

But why is that a surprise, if there’s a rule that lets forty-one senators block a bill? The surprise to people in other countries is that the Senate, already wildly malapportioned, with two senators from every state no matter how big or small the population, does not observe majority rule. Her next line:

“It’s appalling really.”

It sure is–the way she and other Democratic senators keep the filibuster in place. But let her go on:

“They’re the ones who got us into this mess. Now they want to stand in the way of every positive thing the President tries to do to set things right. I’m sure it frustrates you as much as it does me.”

Yes, Senator, it frustrates me. But Democratic senators who let this happen and then ask for my money frustrate me even more.

As a labor lawyer, I have seen the Senate filibuster kill labor law reform–kill the right to join a union, freely and fairly–in 1978 and 1994. And, no doubt, in 2010.

And in the end, all we get is a letter from Senator McCaskill asking for more money. Of course, I know there are all sorts of arguments made for the filibuster. For example: “But the filibuster is part of our country’s history, and there’s much to be said for respecting our history and tradition.” Yes, well, slavery and segregation are also part of our history, and that’s what the filibuster was used to defend. I’m all in favor of history and tradition, but I see no reason to go on cherishing either the filibuster or the Confederate flag.

Besides, that’s not the filibuster we’re dealing with.

The post-1975 procedural filibuster is entirely unlike the old filibuster, the one Mr. Smith, as played by the unshaven Jimmy Stewart, stayed up all night to mount in his plea for honest government (though usually it was Senator Bullhorn defending Jim Crow). The old filibuster that you and I and Frank Capra and the Confederacy love so much was very rare, and now it’s extinct. No one has stood up and read recipes for Campbell’s Soup for decades. In 1975 Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, in his role as president of the Senate, ruled that just fifty-one senators could vote to get rid of the filibuster entirely. A simple majority of liberals could now force change on a frightened old guard. But instead of dumping the filibuster once and for all, the liberals, unsure of their support, agreed to a “reformed” Rule 22. It was this reform that, by accident, turned the once-in-a-blue-moon filibuster into something that happens all the time. The idea was to reduce the votes needed to cut off debate from sixty-seven, which on the Hill is a big hill to climb, to just sixty. Liberals like Walter Mondale wanted to make it easier to push through civil rights and other progressive legislation. What’s the harm in that?

The only problem is that, because the filibuster had rendered the chamber so laughable, with renegade members pulling all-nighters and blocking all the Senate’s business, the “reformers” came up with a new procedural filibuster–the polite filibuster, the Bob Dole filibuster–to replace the cruder old-fashioned filibuster of Senate pirates like Strom Thurmond (“filibuster” comes from the Dutch word for freebooter, or pirate). The liberals of 1975 thought they could banish the dark Furies of American history, but they wound up spawning more demons than we’d ever seen before. Because the senators did not want to be laughed at by stand-up comedians, they ended their own stand-up acts with a rule that says, essentially:

“We aren’t going to let the Senate pirates hold up business anymore. From now on, if those people want to filibuster, they can do it offstage. They can just file a motion that they want debate to continue on this measure indefinitely. We will then put the measure aside, and go back to it only if we get the sixty votes to cut off this not-really-happening debate.”

In other words, the opposing senators don’t have the stomach to stand up and read the chicken soup recipes. We call it the “procedural” filibuster, but what we really mean is the “pretend” filibuster.

But the procedural, or pretend, filibuster is an even worse form of piracy, an open invitation to senatorial predators to prey on neutral shipping, to which they might have given safe passage before. After all, why not “filibuster” if it’s a freebie–if you don’t actually have to stand up and talk in the chamber until you’re not only half dead from exhaustion but have made yourself a laughingstock? That’s what post-1975 senators began to do. In the 1960s, before the procedural filibuster, there were seven or fewer “old” filibusters in an entire term. In the most recent Senate term, there were 138.

At least with the old filibuster, we knew who was doing the filibustering. With the modern filibuster, senators can hold up bills without the public ever finding out their names. No one’s accountable for obstructing. No senator runs the risk of looking like a fool. But while they’re up there concealing one another’s identity, the Republic is a shambles. And now, with a nominal sixty Democratic votes, the need for secrecy as to who has put everything on hold may be even greater than before.

“But just wait till 2010, when we get sixty-two or sixty-three Democrats.” I’m sure that’s what Senator McCaskill would tell me. “So come on, kick in.” But Senator, where will they come from? They could come from bloody border states like yours (Missouri), or from deep inside the South. The problem with the filibuster is not so much that it puts Republicans in control but that it puts senators from conservative regions like the South, the border states and the Great Plains in control. The only true filibuster-proof Senate would be a majority that would be proof against those regions.

An astute book published in 2006, Thomas Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, argued that to craft a presidential majority Democrats don’t need the Southern vote. That may be true (although it turned out that Barack Obama made historic inroads in the South, winning three states there). But there is no way to whistle past Dixie when a non-Dixie presidential majority tries to get its program through the Senate. After 2010, we could have sixty-four Democrats in the Senate and still be in bad shape.

A filibuster-proof Senate, then, is a conceptual impossibility. Even with a hundred Democrats, a filibuster would still lock in a form of minority rule. Because among the Democrats there would arise two new subparties, with forty-one senators named “Baucus” blocking fifty-nine senators named “Brown.”

Here’s another argument for the filibuster: “If we get rid of it, we’ll be powerless against the Republicans when they’re in charge.” That’s why we need it, they say: we’re waiting for the barbarians, for the nightmare of President Palin. People in the AFL-CIO tell me this even as the filibuster keeps the right to organize a union on ice and union membership keeps shrinking.

Or as a union general counsel said to me: “Everyone here in the DC office would be freaked out completely if we lost the filibuster. They think it’s the only thing that saved us from Bush.” Inside the Beltway, they all think it’s the filibuster that saved those of us who read Paul Krugman from being shipped off to Guantánamo. Really, that’s what many people on the left think. “If Bush ever came back, we’d need it.”

Of course Bush, or a Bush equivalent, will come back–precisely because Obama and our side will be blocked by the filibuster. Obama is in peril until he gets the same constitutional power that FDR had, i.e., the right to pass a program with a simple majority (at least after Senator Huey Long finally ran out of words). But let’s deal with the canard that the filibuster “saved” us from Bush. What’s the evidence? Judicial nominations: that’s the answer they give. Go ahead, name someone we blocked. Roberts? Alito? Of course there’s Bork, whom we blocked in the 1980s. But we didn’t block him with a filibuster.

Think seriously about whom we really stopped. Look, I’m all in favor of opposing atrocious right-wing nominations, and I admit that the filibuster, or at least the GOP’s refusal to nuke it, did keep some appellate and district courts free of especially bad people. But I can tell you as a lawyer who does appellate work, who has to appear before these judges, it makes little difference to me if we lose the filibuster. All it means is that instead of a bad conservative, I end up with a really bad conservative. Either way, I still wind up losing.

I think I can say this on behalf of many liberal lawyers who appear before appellate courts: if we could give up the filibuster and get labor law reform or national health insurance, I’d put up with a slightly more disagreeable group of right-wing judges. We’ll take the heat.

The fact is, as long as we have the filibuster, we ensure the discrediting of the Democratic Party and we’re more likely, not less, to have a terrible bench.

Sure, sometimes liberal Democrats put the filibuster to good use when Republicans are in power. Sure, sometimes a liberal senator can use the filibuster to stop a piece of corporate piracy. It’s impossible to prove that the filibuster never does any good. But the record is awfully thin. Look at all the financial deregulation that Senator Phil Gramm and leading Democrats like Larry Summers pushed through only a decade ago. The filibuster did not stop their effective repeal of the New Deal, but it would block the revival of it today.

On the other hand, Republicans and conservative Democrats use their filibusters on labor, health, the stimulus, everything. They can and will block all the change that Obama wanted us to believe in. And even when they lose, they win. For example, when we say that after a major rewriting of the stimulus package–a rewriting that seriously weakened the original bill–it “survived the filibuster,” what we really mean is that it didn’t.

But let’s turn to the final objection: “No one in Washington cares about this. It’s not on the agenda. It’s a waste of time even to discuss it. What you’re talking about is impossible.”

What Washington insiders partly mean when they say this is, With a filibuster, any senator can stick up the Senate, and what senator is going to turn in his or her sidearm by giving up the right to demand sixty votes? That’s why they’re raising a million dollars a day. Otherwise, they’d be peacefully serving in the House. The right to filibuster is what makes each of them a small-town sheriff. That’s why it would take massive marches in the streets to force them to give it up.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how bloody the battle would be. The last time anything so traumatic happened on the Hill was in 1961, when the bigger procedural bar to majority rule was not in the Senate but the House. John Kennedy had just come in, and it was clear that his New Frontier program (we still didn’t have Medicare) would go nowhere because of the power of the House Rules Committee chair, the now forgotten “Judge” Howard Smith. Kennedy had to enlist the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, to break Smith’s power to stop any bill he disliked from leaving House Rules. In the end, the battle to beat Smith probably killed Rayburn, who died later in the year.

It was an awful power struggle, and many were aghast that Kennedy had thrown away all his capital for this cause. But had he not done it, there probably would not have been a Civil Rights Bill, or certainly not the full-blown version of the Great Society that Lyndon Johnson pushed through after Kennedy’s assassination. Imagine having to fight the battle for Medicare today. Without that war on Judge Smith, what we now call the “liberal hour” would not have come.

Nor will any “liberal hour” come in our time, until we bring the filibuster down. I know it seems hopeless. But so did knocking out slavery when the abolitionists first started, or segregation, when civil rights activists began their struggle against Jim Crow. It’s a fair enough analogy, since the filibuster is one of the last remnants of racist politics in America: it was a parliamentary tactic used by the Calhounians to make extra certain slavery would stay around.

We should adopt the strategy of the antislavery movement, which in the early stages had three approaches:

1. The laying of petitions on the House. Forgive the archaic legal phrase: I mean petitions to Congress, both houses. In the era of John Quincy Adams–in case you missed the Steven Spielberg movie–there would be mass petitions, with Adams and others reading them on the House floor to the howls of the Southerners. Every group busted by a filibuster should lay on a petition. And start with the House, which is the only place it has a chance of being read.

2. Resolutions by the House, as a warm-up for the Senate. Such resolutions might read: “Resolved, that Congress has no authority to require supermajorities in any chamber except as authorized by the Constitution.” Aren’t House chairs tired of seeing their bills cast into black holes by senators whose names they never even know?

3. Evangelizing. The most effective tactic in the fight against slavery was the preaching of New England clergy against it. We can start in our battle against the filibuster by enlisting faculty at New England colleges to hold teach-ins. Teach the kids why “Yes, we can” can’t happen with the current Senate rules.

By the way, the abolitionists knew the Senate was their enemy, just as it is our enemy today. Let’s hope these tactics work for us in getting rid of this last vestige of slavery: Senate Rule 22. What’s painful is that we have to cross some of our most sainted senators. But unless we decide to just give up on the Republic, there’s no way out. To save the Obama presidency, we may have to fight our heroes.

It seems that the Republican Party, the business party, the party of management, has a lot of difficulty managing. Our government cannot execute the basic plays. Let’s look past Katrina, and FEMA, and Michael Brown. Let’s look past the mismanagement of the oil and gas leases out West, the FDA’s bungling over Guidant and its appointment (subsequently retracted) of a veterinarian to head the Office of Women’s Health. Let’s just consider the new Medicare drug program. The Bush Administration can’t even perform a simple thing like getting people off the state Medicaid computer list and onto the Medicare computer list. In 2004 there was a serious shortage of flu vaccine. John Kerry failed to make an issue of it, but the voters should have been alarmed. It was an omen of the bungling to come in New Orleans. This is a government that cannot do even simple things.

It appears that the Republicans when in power have no good managers. In an economy of superstars who make millions, the GOP can’t afford to hire them, especially the ones who are indifferent to public service and gravitate to the Republicans in the first place–or to no party at all. Three decades ago the average pay of CEOs of the hundred biggest American corporations was a mere $1.3 million. By 2000 the average pay had climbed to $37.5 million. One can see why the old Republican well-to-do, like Henry Stimson or C. Douglas Dillon, are no longer in government. By contrast, this summer who will still remember John Snow, who is soon to be our former Treasury Secretary?

What may be more crippling to Bush’s efforts to recruit people is not the CEO pay but the pay of the vice presidents just below them. That’s where the government might look for talent to manage at the assistant secretary level. But it is questionable how many of these managers can afford public service–for a year perhaps, but not for three or four, much less two presidential terms. A friend of mine in a top-rank job at a huge global firm told me of a colleague of his in a rising American company. The colleague was now head of personnel, or human relations. “And do you know what his salary is?” my friend told me. “It’s $5 million a year.”

Five million dollars a year–for a personnel director. It is unlikely this man is going to go home and tell his wife, “I’m ready to work for $120,000 a year because I want to help George Bush reorganize the Census Bureau.”

The proof of the Bush predicament is that he has to hire lawyers–and not even the ones who have experience managing corporate firms. Those are also out of his reach, in terms of income. To head Homeland Security and take on a staggering management challenge, Bush brought in a government lawyer, Michael Chertoff, with scant management experience; recently as a judge he had a secretary and two law clerks. And when Chertoff recruits, he seems to struggle to find anyone besides other government lawyers, also with no serious management experience.

When I was 28 and a young policy analyst at the Energy Department under Jimmy Carter, I met a lot of old hands from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and even a few from the Office of Management and Budget. The old salts, even the liberals, admired the Republicans as managers. “The Democrats come up with the programs,” a grizzled liberal numbers cruncher told me once, “and then the Republicans come in and show you how to manage them.” But he meant Republicans of the Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford era: grumpy old men who were vice presidents at big companies like Ford or General Motors. “Here’s a telling fact,” said a professor friend at a law school. “The biggest increase in rule-making, literally the increase in the pages of the Federal Register, came in the Nixon-Ford Administration.” It was not the center-left but the center-right that brought in the managers who issued all the rules that made the liberal programs work.

Now what is most distinctive about Bush is that he’s floundering to find managers. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” is going to be a mantra of this age. Alas for the public weal, the Republican Party has undergone a makeover from the Eisenhower era: Now it’s the party of academics and neocons, i.e., of people with “ideas,” or who think they have ideas, and with no idea how to manage. (Why do intellectuals have such trouble giving credit to the people under them?)

There should be some sympathy for George Bush’s attempts to persuade a talented human relations manager to give up $5 million a year to take a job writing regulations for the Federal Register. It seems unfair to question the patriotism of such people. After all, it’s not a sacrifice for one year; it’s a sacrifice for four, or even eight. It’s hard to take in the scale of the sacrifice. Liberals tend to sneer about the revolving door and how so many in the GOP cash in on public service via lobbying on K Street. That’s true enough for the types like Michael Brown or others who end up in government because they can’t hold a decent job. But it seems far less true about talented corporate managers. The cut in pay is just too breathtaking. So Bush is left to recruit among, well, failed businesspeople like himself, or other lost souls like Brown, or lawyers with a bent for public service. Yet in the big firms where the partners make $2.5 million a year, many lawyers will no longer take a pay cut, as they may have done in the 1960s or even the ’70s.

It’s harder even for lawyers to escape the golden handcuffs–though it’s easier if, like Chertoff, one never made this kind of money. To be sure, lawyers still have a certain Robespierre-like urge for public service. A judge I admire has a cartoon tacked on his door: a hooded executioner saying to another hooded man with an ax, “Yes, I could make more money in the private sector, but in the private sector I can’t chop off people’s heads.” I doubt corporate managers put up such cartoons, for even in the private sector, they do have opportunities to cut off people’s heads. The point is, we lawyers are no substitute for good corporate managers.

The only decent managers left are now in the Army. That’s why some think the Army will end up running Medicare. But even young West Point grads are bailing out for corporate jobs.

It’s easy to sympathize with Bush’s management predicament, but he and his Republican predecessors did much to create it. They have created a country with super-sized, bloated executive salaries. They have helped create a plutocracy. If a plutocracy has trouble governing, virtually by definition, since it cannot call upon its own for public service, then Bush and the Republicans have themselves to blame.

The irony is, to get the old Republican expertise, we have to turn to Democrats. Indeed, many of the Democrats really are like the old Stimson-type Republicans. Bill Clinton can recruit from the business world in a way that a Republican cannot. Of course, as a union-side labor lawyer, I was and still am dismayed by the political views of these business Democrats. Yes, Robert Rubin and the other Clintonite types have their flaws. OK. But at least they know how to manage. Look at the revolving-door people in Bush’s DC–it’s unclear how many of them could hold a serious corporate job.

The problem for Bush is that even the minions of Big Business get the salaries of sports superstars. In the new plutocratic United States, the bumbling Bush Administration has trouble even pulling in players from the minors.

The no vote on the EU Constitution by the French, then the Dutch. The fall, or seeming fall, of the Schröder government in Germany. Is Europe melting down? My friend V in Berlin says, “Relax–it’s just democracy.” Yet there is alarmist talk now that the EU might break up, or the euro be withdrawn.

To hear the violent rhetoric from the business elites in Frankfurt and London, Europe’s a shambles. In fact, things are pretty nice. Yes, French unemployment is at a very distressing 10 percent. But in Europe, while it can be much harder to get a job, it is much harder to lose one, too. In a two-year period, your chance of being jobless, laid off, is probably greater in America than it would be in France, and certainly greater than in many European countries. We may have lower unemployment at any given point, but it is a kind of “rolling” unemployment, shorter but still heart-stopping, that over time will affect a larger proportion of us. Would French workers want “lower” US-style unemployment, which means a greater likelihood of layoffs, firings, drop-offs into poverty for a half-year at a time every other year? I think not.

Indeed, except for Germany (dragged down by the cost of unification), Europe or the “euro-zone” part of it has been doing at least as well as the United States in the past ten years. This is among the stunning findings of a January 2004 Goldman Sachs study, Euroland’s Secret Success Story. As set out in the study, it’s true of productivity growth–a bit under 2 percent a year in both, if adjusted for the business cycle. It’s true for growth in GDP per capita (2.1 percent). And, yes, it’s true even for investors: In Europe you get the same return on capital. It’s true despite Europe’s higher nominal unemployment and shorter workweek. Indeed, if one could put a cash value on this extra leisure, one could argue the standard of living is going up faster there.

But that understates the case for Europe. While too few of us in America experience any rising GDP per capita in our own lives, the egalitarian Europeans do. Outside Britain, their people at the top are not doing nearly as well as ours. That may explain the violence of their rhetoric. In France the gap between “top” and “bottom” is slightly decreasing. It might have continued to do so in Germany, too, but for the skewing of all measures by East Germany. Yes, German unions have had to keep wages down of late. But that’s at least in part because in the early 1990s they pushed them up too high, even by my left-of-center standards. In total job growth, too, Europe’s been doing better than the United States.

Some economists even argue America overstates its productivity growth and GDP per capita. For example, Europe doesn’t get our unfair productivity boost from people working off the clock. Or the GDP growth from building far more prisons. It’s plausible that in the past ten years most of Europe has done better than the United States–even as Europeans keep working fewer hours.

Still, the business elites say the European model has to go. In a flat world, as Thomas Friedman proclaims, it seems obvious that high-wage Europeans will have to make a bonfire of their cushy way of life if they want to keep their precious industrial base.

There’s one problem with using the US and UK models for saving Europe’s industrial base: Both have wrecked their industrial bases. Some, or a labor lawyer like me, would argue that we wrecked ours not because our labor costs were too high but because they were too low. In the low-cost United States a firm can shut down and pay workers next to nothing–and the investors can open up a Wal-Mart. By contrast, in high-cost Europe, with expensive “closing plans” and labor vetoes in Germany and France, it is much harder than in the low-cost United States for a firm to go out of its industrial business altogether.

Over and over I hear intelligent people in America ooh and aah over the China miracle, and China’s export prowess. “Oh, China is what’s happening.” “China changes everything.” I don’t mean to scoff, but China is simply doing what others–Japan, for example–have done before. It’s ordinary catch-up. But Europe, and in particular Germany, is doing something truly new. Its highly developed countries have somehow kept their industrial base.

Last year, according to the WTO, German export goods had a value of more than $915 billion. China’s had a value of about $593 billion. In a so-called flat world, it turns out that the country with the world’s highest labor costs is the world’s champion exporter. Add in France et al., and the EU is even further ahead–last year, it had export goods of more than $1.5 trillion. What’s more, the endless dire talk in Germany about losing it all to Eastern Europe has turned out to be wildly overstated. It’s now 2005, and the recent data show that far from investing more in Eastern Europe, Germany of late has been slightly disinvesting. Of course, there is more outsourcing to Eastern Europe, but the bottom line is that Germany’s overall trade surplus is growing. US and other companies have passed over Germany and put money into Eastern Europe, and labor cost is one reason, but an equal and bigger reason is simply that there is a huge untapped market in Eastern Europe, while Western Europe is relatively sated. Yet Germans bemoan it, and neoliberals have been brilliant at rattling German self-confidence over, well, not much.

The European miracle is often said to be the one that took place in the 1950s, right after World War II. But that was catch-up, too. The real European miracle is the one that has happened in the past ten years: Europe (i.e., France and Germany) has engaged in a restructuring of its manufacturing–successfully. The threat to Europe right now is the violence of the rhetoric against the model, the bizarre gloom and doom when it is actually doing well. The nerve-racking thing about Europe at the moment is the possibility that ordinary Europeans will lose their nerve and just cave in to their American-wannabe elites.

SAVE YOUR CONFEDERATE MONEY…

Manchester, NJ

I vehemently oppose the efforts of those who would have Vermont secede from the union [Kirkpatrick Sale, “Blue State Secession,” Dec. 13]. I urge instead that we admit our mistake of the 1860s. We should admit that we were wrong and let–nay, urge–the South to secede now.

DANIEL D. SCHECHTER

A LITTLE TEXAS BARBECUE

Silver Spring, Md.

In addition to the Western election bright spots cited by John Nichols [“Democrats Score in the Rockies,” Dec. 6], we might note these: Voters in Bush’s own Texas district re-elected embattled Congressman Chet Edwards, a Democrat with a strong church-state separation record. And South Dakota voters, while boosting Bush and dashing Daschle, also defeated a referendum proposal to provide tax aid to faith-based schools–and did so most strongly in those counties that went big for Bush. That brings to twenty-six the number of statewide referendums between 1966 and 2004 in which voters rejected tax aid to faith-based schools by an average margin of two to one.

EDD DOERR, president
Americans for Religious Liberty

ANOTHER BRIGHT SPOT IN TEXAS

Dallas

Thank you so much for Katha Pollitt’s column on abortion funds [“Subject to Debate,” Dec. 20], an almost underground way of putting pro-choice beliefs into practice and helping real women in real need. Here in Dallas, a small group of women has recently established the Texas Equal Access Fund, one of only two abortion funds in Texas. We have already been overwhelmed with requests for assistance. For more information or to make a donation, contact us at teafund@earthlink.net.

GRETCHEN DYER

SAVED!

New York City

All I can say is, thank God the Republicans saved us from the gays. Like millions of Americans, I was terrified that they were going to take over our churches, our chapels, our very souls, if we didn’t squash them like bugs. Thank God for fearless, moral men like Karl Rove, who masterfully fueled fears to defend us from millions of those evil gays. Thank God I finally can say I live in a moral America, despite the unemployment, the huge deficit, the unaffordable healthcare, the stream of body bags from Iraq. We’re safe from the gays now, thank God, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

MITCH RUSTAD

LAS VEGAS WENT FOR KERRY

Las Vegas

As a teacher and scholar of Nevada history, I welcome Sasha Abramsky’s “Why Bush Scored in Nevada” [Dec. 6], which takes the state seriously and is very enlightening. But Abramsky’s focus was mainly on Reno. Las Vegas is more than four times larger, with the vast majority of the state’s voters, especially Latino and union voters. What he found true of these voters–that Republicans made inroads on the hypocritical “morals” issue–is also true here, but that’s only the beginning. Nevada’s economy is in better shape than in many other places, especially in Las Vegas, and this clearly influenced the vote: Kerry won Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, but not by enough votes to overcome Republicans in Reno’s Washoe County and the overwhelmingly conservative rural counties. Another point: Nevada has the nation’s fastest-growing population of people 55 and older, who tend to skew more conservative, even if they’re registered Democrats.

MICHAEL GREEN

Las Vegas

Sasha Abramsky notes that the head of the Nevada ACLU asked him “not to quote his staff making anti-Bush comments” for fear that his organization might “suffer the same fate as the NAACP”–heightened scrutiny of its tax-exempt status after its president made supposedly anti-Bush speeches. We at the Nevada ACLU never muzzle our staff. We do, however, expect that they will adhere to our basic philosophy when speaking in their ACLU capacity. I was simply explaining that the ACLU is steadfastly nonpartisan. We are not nonpartisan because we are afraid of government retribution and certainly not because we are worried about our nonprofit status. We are nonpartisan because, well, because we are nonpartisan. We fight for core principles and fundamental rights regardless of whose political ox is being gored, and that was as true during this last campaign season as it has ever been.

GARY PECK, executive director
ACLU of Nevada

BLUE LAND OF BEULAH

Pittsburgh

Thomas Geoghegan’s “Take It to the Blue States” [Nov. 29] is the best article I’ve seen on practical left strategy in a long, long time. Enough talk–let’s do it! There are many people in the Rust Belt who are ex-union members and pro-labor and would be very interested in becoming associate members of the Steel Workers, UE, Teamsters, etc.

Where do I sign up?

RAY GRIFFITH

Yonkers, NY

Thomas Geoghegan thinks “labor can grow on friendly terrain” toward a blue state social-democratic workers’ paradise. Geoghegan’s proposal ignores the accelerating flight of capital from high-safety-net to unionbusting states and nations. Federal tax dollars are being massively transferred not only from public to religion-based distribution networks but also from the poor and middle class to the super-wealthy and favored multinationals, and from the blue to the red states. And bondholders will eventually require Reagan-deficit-type austerity budgets.

Therefore, our trade unions and other progressive organizations (including progressive religious institutions) need urgently to develop not just Geoghegan’s union-based counseling associations but capital-generating enterprises like those that enabled workers’ survival under Franco’s similarly corporatist fascist regime in Spain. Worker-owned cooperatives and community development banks could help create, and prevent the flight of, locally generated profits.

We must also dedicate blue state resources to technology research–as California voters just did for stem-cell technology–to reinvent the tech manufacturing base necessary to preserve scientific and technical education. And it wouldn’t hurt to learn from Argentina and lay the legal groundwork for workers’ cooperatives to expropriate bankrupt factories.

JULIE WEINER

GEOGHEGAN REPLIES

Chicago

The blue states would boom, not bust. According to this year’s World Economic Forum survey of 101 countries, three of the five most “competitive” are Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Social democracies raise living standards. And often they tend to be more competitive. It’s a shame that in America even some on the left can’t seem to grasp this.

TOM GEOGHEGAN

WAFDI GOALS

New York City

Laura Flanders and Laura Ross’s “Antifeminists Hit Iraq” [Nov. 15] paints all Iraqi women’s groups as the Stepford wives of the various US groups, susceptible to parroting the first ideology that may reach them. This impression is the true antifeminist hit. It dismisses the intelligence and independence of many Iraqi women who have given their lives to push for women’s equality and political power in a new Iraq. Women, including members of the Women’s Alliance for a Democratic Iraq (WAFDI), organized across religious and ethnic lines to obtain 45,000 signatures to fight for a legislative quota of 40 percent women in the temporary constitution. They obtained a set “goal” of 25 percent, in contrast to the average of 3 percent women in the legislatures in other countries in the region.

Flanders and Ross argue that women’s groups in Iraq should not be diverted from working on their number-one problem, “contaminated water.” But only women having the legally enforceable right to be equal political partners when development and budget priorities are established can solve water and all other health and economic problems.

To this end WAFDI, in August, sponsored training for women in Iraq on international human rights, stressing women’s rights under CEDAW, the UN’s legislation against discriminating against women, which Iraq ratified and made part of domestic law in 1992. Among the participants were women running for congress, judges and prosecutors. I was the international lawyer doing this pro bono training. No government funds were used, and travel expenses were raised from private foundations.

This conference was the first of its kind in maybe thirty years. Iraq’s ratification of CEDAW gives Iraqi women legally enforceable political rights, which are now part of Iraq’s domestic law but which are being routinely ignored even by the United Nations, a sponsor of the treaty. (No mention in The Nation, either, of CEDAW and its application to women and political power in Iraq.) By implying that by association WAFDI is “anti-CEDAW,” Flanders and Ross turn the truth around. No other group has printed out explanations of CEDAW in both English and Arabic.

Democracy and human rights for women–for all people in Iraq–seem to be further and further from reality. But for those of us who believe in going forward, it is important that women are supported, not undermined, in their efforts to rescue their country–and our world.

JANET BENSHOOF

FLANDERS & ROSS REPLY

New York City; Minneapolis

Aw, come on Janet. We’d be the last to undervalue the intelligence and courage of Iraqi women living under US occupation. (A cursory listen to Laura Flanders’s radio show proves that.) The insinuations and implications you attribute to us are all your own. Our point, that the Bush Administration and its cronies are using the rhetoric of women’s rights to advance their unpopular corporate agenda, doesn’t contradict yours–that Iraqi women must have equal political voice in their nation’s affairs. The question we raise is whether political voice will be meaningful if the Bush crew have their way, and the economic terms of the country are decided by multinationals and the US/WTO. Our research suggests the Independent Womens’ Forum is more dedicated to choreographing Iraqi assent to US plans than achieving either political self-determination or economic justice for Iraqis.

LAURA FLANDERS, LAURA ROSS

HER HERO

Kailua-Kona, Hi.

Let’s give a cheer for Calvin Trillin,
The greatest thing since penicillin.
Exposing all our leaders’ crimes–
And, best of all, his onslaught rhymes.
Though neocons may brand him villain,
He’s still my hero: Calvin Trillin.

KATHERINE KOCH

Blue about November 2? As a labor lawyer in a Blue State, I’m ready to give up. Not because Bush will repeal the Wagner Act–I almost wish he would. The act is so screwed up, management could hardly have it any better. Worried about the National Labor Relations Board? Not really. No union serious about organizing uses it anymore.

The problem is, unions represent only about 8 percent of the workforce (private sector). When the airlines finish with Chapter 11, we could be even smaller. In four years, could labor in the private sector be more or less gone? I hope not. Anyway, I suppose someone will always be on strike at Yale.

The worst part about the next four years is that labor will be tied down, on Capitol Hill, fighting privatization of Social Security. We will be too bloodied, after that, to do much organizing in “the backlands.”

Still, am I really that discouraged? You bet I am.

Let the real me step aside, then, and bring forward a me who pretends to believe why our defeat on November 2 is, or could be, a good thing. Because now, after November 2, we know that we are Two Nations. We should give up on DC.

Let’s govern from the Blue States.

If we govern from the Blue States, it may be possible to bring the labor movement back. What do I mean by “governing from the Blue States”? Use state law as much as possible to set up the kind of social democracy we would like to see for the country as a whole.

How are we going to do this? It won’t be easy, but it’s a whole lot cheaper and easier than doing what we just did in the Kerry campaign. Let’s keep intact America Coming Together and MoveOn. Let’s give the kids who worked the streets something to do.

This will cost money, but if the voter breakdowns are right, the Democrats have dough, big dough. If the rich of the GOP can fund the Christian right, maybe Harvard can give a little more to labor, since at least a labor union is an institution of the Enlightenment.

First, we need places for people to meet. Instead of unions that people can join only if a majority of workers at a workplace decide they want to be members, we should have organizations, or clubs, that could include associate members, people like you and me who never dreamed we might have a union card. Let people, individually, one by one, sign up as union members, and not only as part of a “bargaining unit.” In Europe, that’s how they do it.

We need some place to go, and meet, and hang out, the way they do in the rural counties on the Christian right. Democrats will always be shy of a majority until we have places where we can be citizens. While the voting rate may have gone up, I have a hunch the number of real citizens keeps dropping. And the reason is that, as John Dewey wrote long ago, the last and least important thing about citizenship is voting. More important is to live a certain way of life. When many evangelical Christians went to the polls in 2004, they may have been voting for the first time. But they already were citizens, albeit not of this world, perhaps.

So? Let’s bring people into clubs, as individual union members. Say I’m a salesman, in my car. Let me sign up as an individual, whether I work with anyone or not.

Yes, I know, it’s an idea that has already appeared in this magazine [see Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Geoghegan, “Lighting Labor’s Fire,” December 23, 2002]. Here it is, recycled: Have “associate” memberships, make the dues cheap and give people something in return to help them out at work. Not a discount at a hotel, but a one-on-one, labor-union kind of help. One idea: a talk with a lawyer, or legal advice. Or counseling. In one case I know, the Steelworkers have been doing this. In a pilot project in Minnesota, they now let anyone sign up to be an “associate member.” As such a member, I can get counseling if I am fired or demoted. This pilot program is attempting something more substantial than the AFL-CIO version, Working America.

“But this kind of thing,” said a friend, “would only appeal to a few.” He’s right. Very few. How about one in ten? That would double the size of labor.

What comes next? Give the new individual members and the old union members a place to meet and officers to elect. Set them up in organizations in every Blue State. Then lobby for changes in the labor laws of those states.

I know what some will say: “You can’t use states to change federal labor law.” That’s right. There is a legal doctrine, known as pre-emption, that stops states from interfering with the Wagner Act and other federal labor laws. But even under the law of pre-emption there are many labor-law changes that states could make. For example, the Blue States could pass a law: “Nobody can be fired, except for just cause.” That is, each Blue State could get rid of the old common law rule of “employment at will,” which means “I can fire you for any reason at any time.” Or for no reason. Or the color of your tie.

Any law in a Blue State that knocks out employment at will would do more for organizing in that Blue State than eking out a win over Bush and the right. How? Simple. It bulletproofs the people who want to join a union. When the boss tries to bust a union by firing Norma Rae without cause, she can go to court. Get a jury. Damages. Even an injunction. Contempt.

With this law, if we had organizing drives, we could get some cover for our people. If poor Norma Rae is fired now, all we can do is file charges with the NLRB. If we prove antiunion motive, maybe the board will act. There are no sanctions and no discovery, and it takes forever. Believe me, it would be much easier, and worse for employers, to go into a court under a state law and take depositions.

As we lawyers like to say, let’s poke around their house.

There are other state law changes that we could make in New York, California, Illinois and New England that could boost labor. For one thing, we could change the state laws for not-for-profits–hospitals, universities–where New Labor often organizes. Often the boards of these “charities” are full of business people who hate labor. But a kindly Blue State could require that half the board be people with real backgrounds in charity. Nice people. Such a board would be kinder if a union tried to organize.

Or we could pass laws that let workers elect committees to make sure managers follow state safety codes and wage laws. And what about flex time? Let’s have committees that make sure flex time is for real. No, the committees would not “bargain.” But they could report violations to the state. And it would be a halfway house to starting a real union.

It’s true, to keep people in a new kind of labor, we need to do a little bargaining for them. But what I have in mind, in a Blue State, is a new type of bargaining. It is not bargaining directly with the employer but lobbying to get benefits by passing laws in the state capitals. We can start off with some small things: paid maternity leave, severance pay and a little vacation.

Now, some will say, “Come on, the state governments are awful.” And it’s true, they are. But at least they have one person, one vote, unlike our federal government. That means, in a Blue State, with a simple majority, we have a shot at getting the law changed.

So that’s what a new type of labor movement, in a Blue State, would do. It would give everyone a chance to be “part of labor.” It would give us a new image. For example, every one of the counseling centers ought to have a name like “The Interfaith Center for Workplace Counseling.” Find every priest, minister, rabbi, etc., and link them up to it.

We could start calling on clergy with the fervor of Karl Rove. Tell them, “Those people in the congregation, the fired, the laid off, we want you to refer them to us.” (Now, that’s something the right can’t do for churches.)

But to bring back labor in the Blue States, we need more than a new kind of labor. With the old labor gone and with labor now so weak, the Democrats themselves may have to do what unions used to do. The Democrats will have to do our collective bargaining for us. I mean, not a party that tacitly supports a labor movement, but a party that is the labor movement. The Democrats have to be the SEIU, the Teamsters. And they can do this by passing laws to make employers pay us.

A small example of such a politics: Look at the last Kerry-Bush debate, when Bush was speechless (in a profounder way than usual). The moderator had asked about the minimum wage. Even for Bush, it was startling: He had nothing to say. Except to gape, mutter and then go: Education, education, education. Does anyone else remember this moment?

Every Democrat should. Play that tape back. They, the right, have nothing to say! They don’t mind if we do tax bills, spending bills. But on minimum wage–no, there is never going to be a vote. They don’t dare have a vote. Who wants to be on record against it?

And the minimum wage is nothing. That’s just for the poor. The silence would be deafening if we pushed for wage-type benefits for people in the middle. For married people with kids, and the Christian right who follow Fox.

Here’s what we should go for, if we govern from the Blue States. First, paid maternity leave for three months. Second, right to a vacation for seven days. And a right to four sick days, without being docked. Third, severance pay: one week for every year of work.

Oh, at the Heritage Foundation, they will scream. In the think tanks, they will have plenty to say. But not upfront, on TV, to the American moms. There, they dare not say a word.

Over and over about this last election, it was said: Democrats make these naked appeals to people’s economic interests. But in the Kerry campaign, I never heard any such naked appeal. Yes, he talked “populist” talk. He railed at corporations. He probably said he was for unions. Al Gore did the same. People know in some vague and misty way that Democrats are for the “working people.”

All that is true. But are the working people who vote for Bush voting against their interests? Yes, to an extent they do not vote “rationally.” But a vote for Kerry may or may not pay off. It’s hard to say. It involves some fiddling with the trade or tax laws. It’s unclear, at the end, which working people, if any, are better off. But a vote for the right or for Bush pays off now. It is a smash in the mouth. It pays off as a howl.

John Kennedy and the old Democrats did not have to be so direct. Labor could decode them. Kennedy could say, “I’m for labor,” and people knew that by electing Kennedy, labor would turn that simple statement into cash. But now we have to be more explicit. We have to tell people in a simpler way: Here is how you get the dough.

We can try a new, direct approach, to help us govern in the Blue States. So we can begin with three months’ paid maternity leave. Oh yes, be sure to say: We will give assistance to small business. Then maybe, after a while, go to paid maternity leave of four months. Same with vacation. Let’s start with seven days. Then maybe go to ten.

And what will the GOP say, No? Let them say no. Let the Heritage Foundation scream. We want the screaming so loud, it wakes up people in the pews. Let the Republicans go to the voters and say no. Let’s have a big, noisy battle in every one of the Blue States. I can hardly wait.

Over the years, the Democrats have become terrified to put anything in the platform, because the GOP will add up the numbers and say, “This will cost $10 trillion.” So, terrified, we put little in the platform. We think we’re being smart. We aren’t giving any targets. But it also means we have nothing to hand out. No maternity leave. No severance. No vacation. And that’s why, if we start governing from the Blue States, we ought to do it with a platform: “Here’s the minimum, here’s what we want, in every state.”

The idea is, we want to make ourselves a target. We want people in the Red States to see what we are doing. And if we start governing in the Blue States in this way, we’ll begin to show people what they miss by living in the Red States: paid maternity leave, vacation time, family time.

Just to promise a direct payoff of this kind is a whole new way of appealing to people’s economic interests. It is much, much more direct than anything the Democrats have ever tried.

But it’s not enough just to make the promise in a speech, or even to put it in a platform. From now on, whenever possible, we have to put these payoffs on the ballot. Let’s plan, now, for 2006. In every Blue State, we should have each new benefit, separately, with a separate box, on the voter’s Blue State ballot. Paid maternity leave. Paid vacation. Paid sick leave. Real severance pay.

I mean, shove it in people’s faces. Yes, I know, some Bush voters in Florida voted for the minimum wage. But that was not self-interest, it was a gift for the poor. No, here’s what I mean:

YES. I am voting for severance pay, for me. YES. I am voting for a right to a vacation, for me. YES, I am voting for paid maternity leave, for me. It might begin to dawn on more working people, as they keep checking off the boxes: YES, I must be a Democrat. I know, the Christian right did something similar, with gay marriage bans, to get their own base out in this election. But we need to do it, and not just to get “turnout.” We need to do it pedagogically, to teach people: Wake up! You’re a Democrat. And you have been all your life.

Isn’t it a little lopsided to govern from a few states, even if they are New York, California and a few others? Yes. But there are three payoffs for America. First, if we can build up union membership, just in the Blue States, then there is a bigger labor. And a bigger labor can fight more battles in the Red States. Second, if we can rule in the Blue States, we can show people in the Red States what they are missing out on. In my dreamier moments, I think we should recall the Democratic convention and write the kind of platform we should have had last summer.

Finally, it might teach us how to appeal to people’s interests the next time we go out for the presidency, in 2008. Maybe we will talk much more directly about putting money into people’s pockets. Look at healthcare. Who except Paul Krugman could understand our program? Rather, it might be better if Kerry had just proposed: We’ll pay people’s deductibles, the first $1,000 of coverage. Now it might be crude. But at least people could understand it.

Populism is well and good. But if our populism is complicated and mannered, we only waste our breath. If we are going to be populists, let’s make it a lot simpler. Let’s make it like Star Wars. And let’s try it out in the Blue States, because we can’t wait till ’08.