The political parties of the United States continuously fail the nation’s poor. Republicans have devised a tax plan that disenfranchises the lower classes while assisting America’s rich. Yet, they present themselves as the party that cares about American workers who suffer the consequences of globalization and have succeeded in building a voting bloc of white middle-class and working-class Americans. Democrats, though their policies tend to be more fiscally left-leaning relative to the American political center, fail to appeal to this group of people because they are perceived as the intellectual elite. As the party’s wealth has become more apparent, young people’s perspectives have changed and invalidated their claims to helping the common good.
The middle class’s fiscally conservative views stem in part from the American Dream, the false belief that any one of them can become Donald Trump–that is, a successful billionaire–without the assistance of welfare (never mind the “small loan of a million dollars.”) These voters see their potential selves represented in the Republican party. This vision is ultimately reliant upon a social construct that is overstated in terms of its truth: Upward mobility in the United States has been slowly decreasing. This means that Americans are more inclined to believe that they can become wealthy through the current economic system, which is working against them in reality. The Tax Policy Center projects that by 2027 middle-class citizens will see an average of no benefits according to the system, while the rich will be paying less taxes and the poor will be paying more. Republicans are failing the lower class in that they continue to perpetuate this myth while ratifying policies that actually favor the upper classes. By refusing to help the middle class, but maintaining the façade that they do, the Republicans are harming their voting bases; they are preventing them from reaching class consciousness.
Whereas Republicans pretend to support the lower classes but actually hurt them, Democrats find themselves in the inverse position. Joe Kennedy III’s rebuttal speech to the State of the Union featured him standing in front of a car in need of repair, a hanging American flag, and a Cincinnati Bengals’s flag. The chairs in the audience were made of cheap metal, and Kennedy himself has very little to do with Cincinnati. This was an obvious appeal to the middle class population that so eludes the Democrats. Kennedy describes a system that is “forcefully rigged towards those at the top.” Those words and backdrop seem like an effort to hide the obvious elephant in the room, which is that Joe Kennedy III is Joe Kennedy III. He carries a legacy of East Coast intellectual elitism, which seems alien and inaccessible to those in the heartland, however much he tries to hide it by props and cheap designs.
Despite Kennedy’s efforts to seem more relatable to the lower class, it seems that the Democrats have also been trying to take the Republican approach of championing billionaires who are perceived as self-made. Both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have continuously come up in speculation lists for 2020 candidates. This would be an excellent counter to Trump in terms of offering a more reserved and rational mirror to Trump’s success. However, the Democrats should be concerned about their young bases, which find the Democratic Party to be too establishment-based. Candidates like Musk and Zuckerberg may seem like non-establishment candidates, but their platforms are too close to center of American politics to make much of a difference. This doesn’t just come from the fact that Bernie Sanders was unfairly treated by the Democratic National Committee. It also stems from the fact that prominent Democrats, just like Republicans, are extremely wealthy. To the educated youth that they hope to attract, the American Dream isn’t present enough in their systems of belief in order to justify the fact that the average net worth of each Democratic Senator in 2012 was around $13.5 million. Republican voters tend to be older, and thus more likely to believe in upward mobility in the US since it was more possible for more of their lives.
By refusing to include more members of the working classes as faces of their parties, the Democrats are failing those classes because they find themselves in double standards. They champion lower-income people, and yet they refuse to put forward a candidate that validly represents them. This prevents them from forming a solid, consistent platform. If they can’t maintain a solid base with the youth, they won’t be able to advance their policies that try to counter the right-leaning economic policies pushed forward by Republicans.
This dichotomy is deeply related to the fact that the United States lacks a strong presence of leftist economic policy. A deep-rooted cultural fear of Communism and belief in free-market economics prevent the formation of a viable left in this country. Instead, the left is represented by identity politics and “socially liberal” policies. Though these are important due to the massive American history of race-, gender-, and sexuality-based oppression, they shift the mainstream discourse away from helping the lower classes. Linguist and prominent Anarcho-Communist Noam Chomsky once described the United States as a de facto single-party state, in that the Democratic and Republican Parties have very similar platforms. They both represent the left and right sides of center and not the spectrum in general. Therefore, American political discourse is a self-perpetuating cycle that refuses to free the lower classes.
However, this is not to say that there is no hope. Bernie Sanpders, an independent with a platform based on laws benefiting the lower class, had astonishing rates of voter turnout. In addition, leftist movements are making headway in the United States, including the new protests of US gun laws. This could be the growth of a long-term movement toward more leftist politics in the US.
