Progress in the Age of COVID-19

In the February and March primary elections, a cabal of backroom political geniuses rushed out a coordinated campaign, screeching that impending doom awaits the Democratic Party if it actually runs on democratic ideas like making sure people have health care and enough money to get by. Too bold, they wailed, too socialistic-y sounding, too . . . scary!

Clueless billionaire Mike Bloomberg actually hurled the “communism” smear at Bernie Sanders’s policy ideas. Better to go slow with Joe, they warbled—he’s the safe choice, a trusted insider who’ll excite voters with his steady-as-she-goes conventionality.

Whatever Biden and his old-guard contingent do, or fail to do, this is no time for progressives to back off.

Then, KABLOOEY! In a flash, conventionality started coughing, gasping, and dying. Instantly, the public was clamoring for (and even the GOP-controlled Senate was voting for) the very remedies that Biden & Company were so loudly decrying as extremist.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt taught Herbert Hoover in 1932, in times of widespread troubles, ordinary folks begin to understand that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” And that’s when they open up to nonestablishment thinking.

Since Wall Street hucksters crashed our economy more than a decade ago, middle-class and poor families are being intentionally crushed by corporate and governmental decisions imposed by plutocratic elites, creating an untenable, ever-widening level of inequality. That’s where the big “extremist” proposals being put forth by progressive forces come.

America’s inequality crisis—now made much more pressing and painful by our aloof “leaders” mishandling the coronavirus pandemic—cannot be met by small-ball political tinkering and legalistic tweaks to failed systems. Whatever Biden and his old-guard contingent do, or fail to do, this is no time for progressives to back off; we must, instead, become even more aggressively progressive.

While Sanders, Warren, and the other Democratic presidential contenders who offered bold democratic ideas didn’t win, their ideas clearly did. Populist proposals entirely dominated the election debate and, as polls and the recent votes on ballot questions show, they’re now mainstream with majority backing, including from some Republicans.

Among these ideas: a wealth tax, green jobs and infrastructure, student-loan forgiveness, equal access to broadband Internet for rural areas and poor neighborhoods, universal basic income, and Medicare for All. Such popular programs stand as a ready-made New Deal/Fair Deal action agenda for America’s workaday majority.

To get from here to there, we must go on the offensive with a comprehensive democracy initiative to make the people’s voice sovereign over corporate money. There’s a long list of necessary reforms—from overturning the Supreme Court’s democracy-crushing Citizens United decision to such procedural innovations as “Instant Runoff” voting.

But the impact of each reform, and the overarching purpose of the whole initiative, is to reverse the ugly voter-suppression ethic that contaminates today’s electoral system. It’s time to go straight at the suppressors with a program proudly affirming the right to vote.

In an act of blunt-force plutocratic thuggery, the Trump/GOP cabal has mounted a vast voter-suppression ploy to cut off a simple electoral reform that is crucial in this pandemic year: voting by mail. The Trumpateers want to require in-person voting for nearly all people in states with large numbers of Democratic voters, intentionally pitting people’s health against their core political rights.

Rather than encourage the safe, secure, and sane use of mail-in ballots, Republicans and corporate lobbyists are demanding that voters and poll workers violate public health standards, crowd into small balloting areas, and wait in long lines for hours. Subject yourself and family to more COVID-19 horrors—or forfeit your vote.

A progressive America, grounded in the majority’s egalitarian values of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all, can be ours only if we demand it, articulate it, organize for it, and go get it.

Despite the sour, regressive example of Trump Republicans and the status quo recalcitrance of today’s smug establishment, ideas do matter in politics. In fact, in down times, new, bold, and positive is the way up and out, for that combo at least intrigues people with the possibility of change.