When she first announced her run for the White House, Elizabeth Warren seemed a breath of fresh air — a brainy and relentless campaigner for the middle class, willing to take on tech and other oligarchs. As an old colleague who met with her told me, she seemed very much “an old-fashioned New Deal Democrat” focused primarily on addressing the massive inequalities that hurt our society and families.
But rather than focus on basic issues that appeal to a wide number of Americans, Warren’s campaign has morphed into something of an intersectional nightmare. The notion of intersectionality holds that progressives must embrace the demands of any of the various strains within the progressive Democratic Party. You cannot just be an economic progressive but must also endorse every demand of militant greens, the Bernie Bro socialists, the professional race hustlers or the extreme feminists.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, the intersectional habit has led Warren to back the left fringe positions on such likely electoral losers as free health care for the undocumented, decriminalizing illegal entry into the country, reparations for slavery and the Green New Deal.
She would be better off focusing on basic issues, like addressing corporate power and supporting health care reform that allows for private insurance.
The demographic equation
As a white woman (Warren no longer claims Native American ancestry) from a state that is over 70% white, well above the national average, she has never made strong inroads in minority communities. Her base consists largely of upper-middle class educated whites like those that elected her. Lucky for her that the first two primaries are in states even more homogeneous than Massachusetts.
Yet as the primaries roll on, she will have to campaign in states — notably South Carolina and Nevada — where the electorate, particularly Democrats, is highly diverse. To be sure, some minority voters favor relaxed immigration policies, but many would not embrace the idea of decriminalizing the border. Roughly two out of three Latino voters, according to Gallup, favor mandated checks on immigration status or workers, while 82 percent of African Americans feel the same.
Reparations are not too popular either, outside the black community, with half of Latinos opposed as well as two-thirds of all voters. Instead of embracing this position, Warren would be better off addressing the fundamental economic challenges faced by many minorities. But sadly, the idea of growing the economy — a position embraced by liberals from Truman and Roosevelt to Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton — seems all but missing from Warren’s platform, along with those of most of her rivals. This inattention to growth could be a weakness if the GOP points out that Latinos and African Americans have gained more in terms of employment and income under Trump than previous Democratic or Republican regimes.
The social engineers’ compulsion
New England progressives, inheritors of the Protestant reforming tradition, long have sought to impose “morality” on the rest of society. This led them not only to promote things like clean government and improved sanitation, but their zeal also had a darker side, including the embrace of eugenics, considered by one of its proponents as “the science of being well born.”
In place of the market, and allowing people to choose their way of life, Warren’s predecessors often favored enforcement of morality — for example, Prohibition. Today’s progressives like Warren don’t talk in conventional moral terms about personal or family responsibility but embrace a trendy morality that opposes any manifestation “male patriarchy” and has little interest in the traditional family. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” she told a rally in Washington Square Park earlier this year. Do most Americans think Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton did not have much to do with creating the republic in the first place?
Warren’s up-to-date New England morality also includes such things as a virtual right to abortion at any time, despite the fact that just 13% of Americans think third-trimester abortions should be generally legal, compared to the 60% who think first trimester abortions should be generally legal.
One other issue Warren is out of step with Americans on is taxpayer-funded sex changes. Warren has reversed past positions and now embraces the clearly unsaleable idea of having taxpayers pay for prison inmates’ sex changes.
The Green New Deal: Replacing capitalism with rule of the betters
The moralism of the turn-of-the-century progressives turned them against the market and capitalism, with its out-of-control fluctuations, in ways resonant with Warren’s program.
“As Christians they judged laissez faire to be morally unsound,” writes historian and scholar Thomas C. Leonard in “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era,” “and as economists they declared it functionally obsolete.”
The Green New Deal, which would essentially put control over the entire economy into the hands of credentialed regulators, epitomizes this mind-set. Given the imminent threat to the planet, they argue, the hoi polloi need not be consulted. Those of us who live in California have an advance glimpse of what this rule from above is like.
Californians may put up with such loss of jobs and freedom, at least for now, but eliminating virtually any economic activity dependent on fossil fuels may not play so well in the rest of the country. A recent Harris-Harvard poll found that three-fifths of Americans reject the portfolio of Green New Deal policies, including a third of Democrats and half of people under 25.
Just imagine what will happen if a President Elizabeth Warren follows through on her plans to ban fracking in places like Texas, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. In Texas alone, by some estimates, 1 million jobs would be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full ban would cost 14 million jobs — far more than the 8 million lost in the Great Recession. And the environment itself would be somewhat of a loser in this game — fracking-generated natural gas has done more to reduce emissions by displacing coal than all the greens’ efforts.
Warren needs to get back to basics
It won’t be easy to run as the candidate of the middle class while fundamentally opposing how they live — largely in auto-dependent suburbs. Even more alarmed by her proposals will be the millions of blue- and white-collar workers in fields dependent on cheap reliable energy, including manufacturing, logistics and agriculture.
As former Chicago mayor and Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has suggested, the best way to get rid of the odious Donald Trump is by “sticking to an agenda that meets voters where and how they live their lives.” This means largely focusing on economic issues, and basic things like health care, roads and industrial competitiveness, rather than prioritizing extreme positions on such things as gender, environment or undocumented immigration.
To win, Warren needs to stick to her basic populist persona. There has never been a greater opportunity to take on the overweening power of the tech oligarchs and corporate concentration. This could win support among some Republicans and businesspeople, who are concerned that oligarchic control is restraining entrepreneurship, particularly among the young.
Warren would do best as what one observer called a “Teddy Roosevelt trust-busting progressive populist.” She need not become a born-again corporatist. The refusal of Democrat fat cats to fund her campaign can, and should, be used as badge of honor, and could be potent against long-time corporate Democrats like Joe Biden. It will make a useful contrast in the fall when Trump’s coffers will be filled to overflowing with corporate contributions.
By embracing all the odd proposals and centralizing notions of the intersectional left, Warren has obscured the very issues — inequality and oligarchical power — that provide the rationale her candidacy and could still win her the White House. These issues, not all the peripheral ones, are most likely to resonate with voters in November 2020.
This piece first appeared on The Orange County Register.
Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.