Chris Carlson/AP Photo
The Democratic presidential primary debate in Los Angeles
Thursday night’s debate was the first that left me feeling pretty good about the Democratic field. That was partly because, with only seven candidates on the stage, those candidates were able to express thoughts that took longer than one minute to express, able to sequence arguments that ran not just from A to B, but sometimes all the way to C.
It was also because Andrew Yang was funny. Joe Biden was coherent. Amy Klobuchar demonstrated she could do more than kvetch.
Not all of them had great nights, of course. Bernie Sanders was in good and full humor, but he went to a class analysis once too often—when he was asked a question about race. Pete Buttigieg parried attacks, but will henceforth be immured in his very own circle of candidate hell: the wine cave.
Buttigieg also exhibited a disquieting lack of spontaneity—a shortcoming that Benjamin Wallace-Wells’s chronicle of life on the Buttigieg bus in this week’s New Yorker amply documents. When Tom Steyer stressed how important the climate crisis was to the young and suggested that young people like Buttigieg would be those that he would call on, as president, to come up with climate crisis solutions, a candidate more at home on the stage or with himself would have responded that were he president, he could call on himself. Instead, the mayor responded with a stock 30-second spiel on how serious the climate crisis was, throwing in for good measure the Buttigieg Plan for combating it.
Amy Klobuchar let Buttigieg have it at several points in the evening, beginning quite artfully by recounting the achievements of several of her onstage rivals—Bernie, Biden, and Warren—and attacking Mayor Pete for diminishing their accomplishments. She later segued into a deeper attack, asking, in essence, what exactly qualified Buttigieg even to be on the stage, other than his ambition. He is, she stressed, a young mayor of a small city who’d lost a race for statewide office by 24 points, and who’d also run just as haplessly for DNC chair.
When Klobuchar looks at Buttigieg, she sees chutzpah. And she’s not wrong.
Elizabeth Warren also went after Mayor Pete, of course, for his reliance on the very rich to fund his campaign. An equally fundamental exchange occurred when Warren was asked if a wealth tax wouldn’t slow growth, as some orthodox economists have argued (as if America’s billionaires had spent the past three decades investing in productive domestic enterprises that paid workers well). Warren responded by noting that a wealth tax could fund more comprehensive and higher-quality child care and education, which, she rightly noted, are better sources of growth than waiting for the rich to invest. Buttigieg, however, argued that Warren was setting up a false choice between an ambitious program and doing nothing, extending that argument to make the case against the universality in her plan to make public-college tuition free for all.
Bernie pointed out that universality is a lot more efficient and user-friendly than the means testing that Buttigieg’s proposal would entail, and that makes so many American social programs so unpopular. For her part, Warren defended the universality of her programs, without explicitly making the point that means-tested programs (like Medicaid) are invariably on the chopping block while universal programs (like Medicare) aren’t. That said, Warren later presented her plan to gradually phase in her universal Medicare for All program, but was cut short by a moderator—the only time last night that a moderator should have let a candidate go longer.
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In Wallace-Wells’s New Yorker profile of Buttigieg, the South Bend mayor explains the Democrats’ desire for structural change in this year’s campaign, championed by both Sanders and Warren, as “a reaction to 40 years of dismantling social democracy.” He later tells Wallace-Wells, “a non-trivial part of what we’ve got to do is establish a kind of social democracy, like we had pre-Reagan. The difference is, there has to be a lot more attention to our democratic structures and systems.” He’s referring here to his plan to abolish the Electoral College and reconstitute the Supreme Court—two bastions of minority rule that the Republicans have used to thwart the majority’s desire for change.
Referring to the New Deal Order as social democracy is an overstatement, of course, but Buttigieg knows that; what he means is a social democracy by American standards. And he’s clearly given thought to how that social democracy was eroded and how to build it back through political reforms that would make such erosions more difficult. But what he either doesn’t grasp or chooses to ignore, and what both Sanders and Warren understand, is that changing political structures to thwart minority rule is just half of the equation. The other half is changing economic structures so that capitalism won’t also erode social democracy, as it has for the past 40 years. That’s why Warren’s proposal to tax wealth and divide corporate boards between representatives of workers and representatives of employers is so necessary; it’s why Bernie’s proposal that corporations be required to set aside a share of profits for a workers’ fund that can eventually control corporations is so important. It’s not just our political structures that stand athwart the broadly shared prosperity that can come with majority rule; it’s the unchecked capitalism of our economic structures that prohibits it as well.
And while wealthy funders aren’t writing checks to Buttigieg to preserve the Electoral College, some of them clearly hope he won’t take the reforms of our appalling variant of capitalism all that far.
In the book-giving spirit of the Yuletide question with which last night’s debate concluded, Buttigieg should read Bob Kuttner’s chapter, “Confronting Corporate Power,” in the forthcoming New Press anthology, We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style (which also contains essays by David Dayen and me). “In a primarily capitalist economy,” Kuttner writes, “it is very hard for reforms to endure, because of the relentless resistance of capitalists. If we are to reclaim a decent economy, we will need not just to revive regulation, taxation, social investments and trade unions. We will need more public options—not just because they are both fairer and more efficient, but to weaken the political power of capital to reverse these gains.”
Wise words, seldom heard in wine caves.
