Nearly ten years ago Elizabeth Warren was awarded the Mario Savio Free Speech Award at UC Berkeley. When I sat down in the audience I knew only a little bit about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency Warren had created with the support of President Obama, and in which she was serving as an interim director. I did not know much about Warren.
In the next hour she laid out a cogent and historically-grounded account of the origins of the financial crisis, and outlined her conviction that if President Obama gave her the ability to work in this small corner of the vast federal government she could do important work to protect American citizens from the predatory structural forces at work in our highly unequal and unfair society.
In other words, unlike the right-wing of the Democratic Party and Republicans, Warren understood the crisis as a structural one that represented a major problem with how power and wealth were allocated in the United States, rather than one stemming from the moral failings of individuals. And unlike the center of the Democratic Party, the space claimed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden as they powered up their administration, Warren was prepared to deploy--in her own small way--the power of a democratically-elected state to tame capitalism and subordinate it to the public interest.
That evening Warren expressed her hope that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would not just serve consumers, but could be an opportunity to “show that government can do it right, can fix one part, can belong to the people.” I left the Savio lecture convinced of two things: that with Warren at its helm this small agency would punch far above its weight; and that Elizabeth Warren should someday run for president.
In as good an endorsement of the potential of her agency as she could have imagined, Republicans quickly demonstrated their terror of both the CFPB and Warren, and made it clear to the Obama administration that they would not approve her as its director. Nonetheless, Warren used her interim position to create a workable agency to pass to its first full director, and put her skills to work in hearings around the financial crisis holding bankers and too-timid Obama administration officials to account in ways that generated memorable public moments which helped to highlight the need for more concrete action and in themselves helped to generate momentum for greater regulatory reform. In watching Warren eviscerate Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, I was reminded of her grilling of Timothy Geithner, who looked like he wet his pants as Warren laid into him for failing to move forcefully enough against the financial criminality behind the recession.
I write at length about these early episodes because to my mind they--along with Warren’s work in the senate, frequently in the minority--show how well Warren understands power, something essential for whomever next occupies the Oval Office. She made clear at that lecture in Berkeley that she sweats the details, and the relationship between those details and the big picture. And that she understands the relationship between the big picture and the lives of working class and middle class people. You will not hear from her the absurd claim that most Americans love their insurance company, or that the Obama years, however much promise they contained, were some kind of golden age for the middle and working class.
There are several strands of criticism frequently directed at Warren’s campaign for the presidency. Two are critiques that you also hear directed at Bernie Sanders, namely that she hasn’t accomplished anything of substance as senator, and that her ideas are too far to the left for most Americans’ taste.
I invite the first line of critics to compare the debates between Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2007/8 with those today, or listen to Hillary Clinton’s speeches after she won the 2016 nomination. The series of debates over the last several months demonstrate that the entirety of the party is now talking about issues that were not on the table in 2007/8, or in ways that seemed politically unimaginable in 2007/8. And even if Warren or Sanders do not win this year’s nomination, it will not be possible for the eventual nominee to talk in the limited and technocratic terms that Clinton did about her ambitions.
The shift of the conversation in this direction, and the fact that even Donald Trump has to lie about his commitment to social security and welfare provisions for white Americans is a testament to the work that Warren, Sanders, a handful of other elected officials, and millions of energised Americans have done to shift political discourse and invite Americans to imagine, and then to demand, a better life with fewer of the cruelties, uncertainties, inequalities, and injustices of the broadly neoliberal world that defined the parameters of the possible from the Reagan administration on. Changing the direction of the politics of an entire country is no small accomplishment, and demonstrates how these two candidates in particular have been prepared to play a very long game.
It will certainly be the case that Republicans will seek to portray Warren’s ambitious plans for the economy, for social life in the realms of education and healthcare, for combating climate change, and for reinvigorating the labor movement behind the labor force, as radical innovations that threaten the foundations of American life. But I think that Warren will be adept at reminding Americans--and here she will have the support of her supporters and should have the support of all Democrats and many others--that there is nothing threatening or radical about such proposals. These were the elements of the New Deal, that earlier moment in our country’s history when rather than tinkering with the margins, a president determined that the public interest and the public wellbeing had to come first. This was an era in which elected officials decided that the myths told by elites about the fairytale economics of the “free market” had to be banished by the introduction of a dose of reality, and that those elites could not make government dance to their tune at the expense of the majority of Americans. It was an era, to borrow a phrase from David Goldfield, when “government was good” and did good.
In this way, Warren is clearly a social democrat. Social democracy was and is an ideology which argues that it is possible, if a democratic government works in the service of the public that trusts it with power, to create a society that is fair and equitable and maintains its democratic character. This ideology emerged at a moment in the twentieth century when it seemed only possible to live in two kinds of societies. In the first, places like the United States and Britain, government protected people’s civil and political rights (equal status before the law; the right to vote and participate in politics), but didn’t believe it possible to also guarantee people a meaningfully good or secure or healthy life. In the second, places like the Soviet Union or Germany, government sought to engineer economic and social wellbeing, either for all of its citizens or for those of its citizens who its racial laws defined as “pure,” but did so at the explicit expense of the civil and political rights which protected people from the government’s misuse of power or abuse of people’s individual dignity and personhood, something which occurred in profound and horrific ways in many parts of Europe during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
But during that same era, another form of government began to emerge in some places. It briefly took hold in the United States, found an early start in places like Sweden, and for much of the period after World War II defined the politics of most Western European countries and to varying degrees countries in many other parts of the world. This was social democracy and it represented the idea that it was eminently possible, and indeed entirely desirable, to create a system of political organization that didn’t force people to choose between legal and political freedoms on the one hand, and social and economic justice and relative equality on the other.
In countries with these systems, where the middle class pays slightly higher taxes and millionaires and billionaires pay far higher taxes, there are fewer people like Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump. But there are also far fewer people who are destitute and hungry. There are far fewer people who remain sick because they can’t afford treatments. There are far fewer people without a roof over their head. There are far fewer people bankrupt because of student or housing debt. Some of these societies are among the most entrepreneurial in the world because in them, going out on a limb for a good idea will not leave you destitute if things don’t work out. Collective investment in institutions designed to guarantee wellbeing means that people who stumble in life for whatever reason will be helped to their feet and assisted in finding a new path. Far from creating a society of slackers, these social democratic systems have historically created a better and healthier work-life balance and high rates of participation in the workforce.
I have some first-hand experiences of such societies having lived in the UK--an early strong social democracy, but one in which that system has been partially eroded over the last several decades--and having spent considerable time in Sweden, in many ways the most ambitious social democracy and the one with its system still most intact. I also teach European history, meaning I know a little bit about the founding and trajectory of these social democratic systems.
In these societies people pay more in taxes than they do in the United States. But those higher taxes are far more than offset by what they did and in most cases continue to purchase for the collective: virtually free healthcare, of a quality comparable to if not better than what the majority enjoys in the United States; tuition-free college and university; free or nearly free childcare; between several months and multiple years of paid leave for parents when their children are born; generous policies of paid vacation; more equitable systems of public K-12 education; robust systems of mass transit; and more.
And these countries possess political systems at least as representative and in some cases far more, than in the United States, and are unburdened by anything as un-democratic as the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, or the vast and irresponsible power wielded by corporations and the super-wealthy that we experience. As a result of the marginalization of the same special interests that essentially run the United States, these countries have been able to move more aggressively over a longer period of time to reduce or reimagine energy consumption, something essential to combating climate change.
To one degree or another, these kinds of social and political innovations--making life better, fairer, and more equal for Americans and re-democratizing our political system--are at the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s project of governance. And they are urgently needed in the United States.
The case for Warren’s project and the good it would do is primarily a moral one, of course. Our family, friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens do not deserve to live difficult, uncertain lives. Children should not be born in poverty and live in a country where their fate is largely determined by the circumstances into which they were born. People should be able to expect to be able to live a life that consists of a decent balance between work and play, and we should be obligated to care for each other because in our economic and social lives we depend on one another. Real freedom should be understood as the ability to live a life without worrying what a sudden illness, decision to study or work in a particular field, or other misfortune over which we have no control will mean for our safety and security.
But there is also a practical, realpolitik case for Warren’s project of governance. This country needs a new nationalism. At its basic level (the word can also mean pride in one’s country), nationalism is the way that people who live in this country decide and define what it means to be American. Donald Trump has reanimated frightening ideas from the American past and worked to define belonging in our country as being based on race and religion. Because we are a diverse country, that is dangerous: it puts a target on the backs of American families who do not fit Trump’s definition of who gets to be American, and sinister elements in American government and society have already been firing legal, rhetorical, and literal shots at those American families, committing acts of appalling structural and physical violence.
The moderate wing of the Democratic Party objects strenuously to the Republican Party’s profound racism, but does not recognize that the economic and political inequalities in our country, created by the empowerment of vast corporations and the super-wealthy under successive administrations from Reagan to Trump, has played a role in energizing Trump’s toxic vision. They propose making America more “decent,” without recognizing the relationship between material conditions and political discourse. Their naivete is perilous, and represents a reckless gamble with the lives and wellbeing of too many Americans to be conscionable.
The social democracy that Warren hopes to build in the United States promises in most cases that all Americans will contribute to the collective coffers, and that all Americans will be guaranteed access to the same set of benefits. This is important, because too many of the various pieces among the patchwork of benefits that currently comprise the tattered American social safety net are allocated based on income level, region, race, gender, occupation, employment, or other social or economic characteristic. These benefits have been proven to be easily undone, to be vulnerable to claims of various kinds of unfairness.
Universal benefits--in the realm of healthcare, education, childcare, etc--are far less likely to be dismantled because they create a culture in which people of different backgrounds are all benefiting, and as importantly are seen to be benefiting, from their collective investments. They mean that people from different backgrounds share institutions and are more likely to rub shoulders within them and think of each other as social equals. No group--because all groups are guaranteed the same kind of access to the same institutions--is likely to try to dismantle the system out of a sense that it’s only benefiting someone unlike them. Such a system, in other words, makes the civil and political rights that we enjoy meaningful, because they are connected to other real, tangible benefits that create a good life. Such a system, in other words, gives teeth to the idea that being American is a genuinely shared social and economic experience, and is open to new members because those members will contribute and benefit in equal measure, rather than one defined by one’s race, religion, gender, class, or sexuality.
The other big objection raised against Warren’s campaign to begin the work of creating such a world is that it is all beautiful, but represents a political pipe dream. Unless Democrats win whopping congressional majorities, and unless a substantial number of people are prepared to raise their expectations of what government can and should do for our society, these big dreams and structural overhauls are unlikely to occur.
To those objections I offer two thoughts. Firstly, politics is always a bargain. It is far better, in my mind, to begin with a big ask and to meet the opposition part-way than to ask for very little and get far less. And Warren has proven in other ways to be skilled in the exercise of power, balancing command of the details with an eye for the big picture. She also sits firmly in the Democratic Party, and however flawed and culpable that institution is, it is changing, and someone who defines herself as a proud member is more likely to bring its representatives behind her vision than someone who, with whatever good reason, demonstrates contempt for its institutions and members. A President Warren is unlikely to be able to implement her policies to the letter, but I think she is the candidate best placed to enact some version of a platform likely to lead to a dramatically better life for Americans.
Secondly, Warren cannot be expected to do this alone. Poll numbers for candidates and support for policy ideas fluctuate wildly, and candidates and people have agency in this process. Much of the writing and thinking about the “horse race” in 2020 has so far revolved around the premise of a static and inert electorate in which politics themselves play no role. Such a mode of interpretation is wildly ahistorical, and I have confidence that Warren’s forceful eloquence, powers of persuasion grounded in her work as an educator, and compelling policy platform can and will shift people’s thinking and calculations, both in the course of this election and beyond.
And I have confidence that in a campaign of this nature, with these stakes, members of the public--whether they define themselves as Democrats, Warren supporters, social democrats, leftists, working class, or people just looking for something that will allow them and their family and neighbors to live free from fear of poverty or uncertainty--will play a role in shifting people’s views about how best to create a fairer and more equal society.
I look forward to caucusing for Warren this morning in Nevada, and I hope that people living in states that will vote in the coming weeks and months will pay close attention to her candidacy and the possibilities it represents for Americans to not only combat the forces for hate and inequality embodied by the Trump administration, but to create a national community committed to looking after each of its members.
In the next hour she laid out a cogent and historically-grounded account of the origins of the financial crisis, and outlined her conviction that if President Obama gave her the ability to work in this small corner of the vast federal government she could do important work to protect American citizens from the predatory structural forces at work in our highly unequal and unfair society. In other words, unlike the right-wing of the Democratic Party and Republicans, Warren understood the crisis as a structural one that represented a major problem with how power and wealth were allocated in the United States, rather than one stemming from the moral failings of individuals. And unlike the center of the Democratic Party, the space claimed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden as they powered up their administration, Warren was prepared to deploy--in her own small way--the power of a democratically-elected state to tame capitalism and subordinate it to the public interest.
That evening Warren expressed her hope that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would not just serve consumers, but could be an opportunity to “show that government can do it right, can fix one part, can belong to the people.” I left the Savio lecture convinced of two things: that with Warren at its helm this small agency would punch far above its weight; and that Elizabeth Warren should someday run for president.
In as good an endorsement of the potential of her agency as she could have imagined, Republicans quickly demonstrated their terror of both the CFPB and Warren, and made it clear to the Obama administration that they would not approve her as its director. Nonetheless, Warren used her interim position to create a workable agency to pass to its first full director, and put her skills to work in hearings around the financial crisis holding bankers and too-timid Obama administration officials to account in ways that generated memorable public moments which helped to highlight the need for more concrete action and in themselves helped to generate momentum for greater regulatory reform. In watching Warren eviscerate Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, I was reminded of her grilling of Timothy Geithner, who looked like he wet his pants as Warren laid into him for failing to move forcefully enough against the financial criminality behind the recession.
I write at length about these early episodes because to my mind they--along with Warren’s work in the senate, frequently in the minority--show how well Warren understands power, something essential for whomever next occupies the Oval Office. She made clear at that lecture in Berkeley that she sweats the details, and the relationship between those details and the big picture. And that she understands the relationship between the big picture and the lives of working class and middle class people. You will not hear from her the absurd claim that most Americans love their insurance company, or that the Obama years, however much promise they contained, were some kind of golden age for the middle and working class.
There are several strands of criticism frequently directed at Warren’s campaign for the presidency. Two are critiques that you also hear directed at Bernie Sanders, namely that she hasn’t accomplished anything of substance as senator, and that her ideas are too far to the left for most Americans’ taste.
I invite the first line of critics to compare the debates between Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2007/8 with those today, or listen to Hillary Clinton’s speeches after she won the 2016 nomination. The series of debates over the last several months demonstrate that the entirety of the party is now talking about issues that were not on the table in 2007/8, or in ways that seemed politically unimaginable in 2007/8. And even if Warren or Sanders do not win this year’s nomination, it will not be possible for the eventual nominee to talk in the limited and technocratic terms that Clinton did about her ambitions.
The shift of the conversation in this direction, and the fact that even Donald Trump has to lie about his commitment to social security and welfare provisions for white Americans is a testament to the work that Warren, Sanders, a handful of other elected officials, and millions of energised Americans have done to shift political discourse and invite Americans to imagine, and then to demand, a better life with fewer of the cruelties, uncertainties, inequalities, and injustices of the broadly neoliberal world that defined the parameters of the possible from the Reagan administration on. Changing the direction of the politics of an entire country is no small accomplishment, and demonstrates how these two candidates in particular have been prepared to play a very long game.
It will certainly be the case that Republicans will seek to portray Warren’s ambitious plans for the economy, for social life in the realms of education and healthcare, for combating climate change, and for reinvigorating the labor movement behind the labor force, as radical innovations that threaten the foundations of American life. But I think that Warren will be adept at reminding Americans--and here she will have the support of her supporters and should have the support of all Democrats and many others--that there is nothing threatening or radical about such proposals. These were the elements of the New Deal, that earlier moment in our country’s history when rather than tinkering with the margins, a president determined that the public interest and the public wellbeing had to come first. This was an era in which elected officials decided that the myths told by elites about the fairytale economics of the “free market” had to be banished by the introduction of a dose of reality, and that those elites could not make government dance to their tune at the expense of the majority of Americans. It was an era, to borrow a phrase from David Goldfield, when “government was good” and did good.
In this way, Warren is clearly a social democrat. Social democracy was and is an ideology which argues that it is possible, if a democratic government works in the service of the public that trusts it with power, to create a society that is fair and equitable and maintains its democratic character. This ideology emerged at a moment in the twentieth century when it seemed only possible to live in two kinds of societies. In the first, places like the United States and Britain, government protected people’s civil and political rights (equal status before the law; the right to vote and participate in politics), but didn’t believe it possible to also guarantee people a meaningfully good or secure or healthy life. In the second, places like the Soviet Union or Germany, government sought to engineer economic and social wellbeing, either for all of its citizens or for those of its citizens who its racial laws defined as “pure,” but did so at the explicit expense of the civil and political rights which protected people from the government’s misuse of power or abuse of people’s individual dignity and personhood, something which occurred in profound and horrific ways in many parts of Europe during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
But during that same era, another form of government began to emerge in some places. It briefly took hold in the United States, found an early start in places like Sweden, and for much of the period after World War II defined the politics of most Western European countries and to varying degrees countries in many other parts of the world. This was social democracy and it represented the idea that it was eminently possible, and indeed entirely desirable, to create a system of political organization that didn’t force people to choose between legal and political freedoms on the one hand, and social and economic justice and relative equality on the other.
In countries with these systems, where the middle class pays slightly higher taxes and millionaires and billionaires pay far higher taxes, there are fewer people like Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump. But there are also far fewer people who are destitute and hungry. There are far fewer people who remain sick because they can’t afford treatments. There are far fewer people without a roof over their head. There are far fewer people bankrupt because of student or housing debt. Some of these societies are among the most entrepreneurial in the world because in them, going out on a limb for a good idea will not leave you destitute if things don’t work out. Collective investment in institutions designed to guarantee wellbeing means that people who stumble in life for whatever reason will be helped to their feet and assisted in finding a new path. Far from creating a society of slackers, these social democratic systems have historically created a better and healthier work-life balance and high rates of participation in the workforce.
I have some first-hand experiences of such societies having lived in the UK--an early strong social democracy, but one in which that system has been partially eroded over the last several decades--and having spent considerable time in Sweden, in many ways the most ambitious social democracy and the one with its system still most intact. I also teach European history, meaning I know a little bit about the founding and trajectory of these social democratic systems.
In these societies people pay more in taxes than they do in the United States. But those higher taxes are far more than offset by what they did and in most cases continue to purchase for the collective: virtually free healthcare, of a quality comparable to if not better than what the majority enjoys in the United States; tuition-free college and university; free or nearly free childcare; between several months and multiple years of paid leave for parents when their children are born; generous policies of paid vacation; more equitable systems of public K-12 education; robust systems of mass transit; and more.
And these countries possess political systems at least as representative and in some cases far more, than in the United States, and are unburdened by anything as un-democratic as the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, or the vast and irresponsible power wielded by corporations and the super-wealthy that we experience. As a result of the marginalization of the same special interests that essentially run the United States, these countries have been able to move more aggressively over a longer period of time to reduce or reimagine energy consumption, something essential to combating climate change.
To one degree or another, these kinds of social and political innovations--making life better, fairer, and more equal for Americans and re-democratizing our political system--are at the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s project of governance. And they are urgently needed in the United States.
The case for Warren’s project and the good it would do is primarily a moral one, of course. Our family, friends, neighbours, and fellow citizens do not deserve to live difficult, uncertain lives. Children should not be born in poverty and live in a country where their fate is largely determined by the circumstances into which they were born. People should be able to expect to be able to live a life that consists of a decent balance between work and play, and we should be obligated to care for each other because in our economic and social lives we depend on one another. Real freedom should be understood as the ability to live a life without worrying what a sudden illness, decision to study or work in a particular field, or other misfortune over which we have no control will mean for our safety and security.
But there is also a practical, realpolitik case for Warren’s project of governance. This country needs a new nationalism. At its basic level (the word can also mean pride in one’s country), nationalism is the way that people who live in this country decide and define what it means to be American. Donald Trump has reanimated frightening ideas from the American past and worked to define belonging in our country as being based on race and religion. Because we are a diverse country, that is dangerous: it puts a target on the backs of American families who do not fit Trump’s definition of who gets to be American, and sinister elements in American government and society have already been firing legal, rhetorical, and literal shots at those American families, committing acts of appalling structural and physical violence.
The moderate wing of the Democratic Party objects strenuously to the Republican Party’s profound racism, but does not recognize that the economic and political inequalities in our country, created by the empowerment of vast corporations and the super-wealthy under successive administrations from Reagan to Trump, has played a role in energizing Trump’s toxic vision. They propose making America more “decent,” without recognizing the relationship between material conditions and political discourse. Their naivete is perilous, and represents a reckless gamble with the lives and wellbeing of too many Americans to be conscionable.
The social democracy that Warren hopes to build in the United States promises in most cases that all Americans will contribute to the collective coffers, and that all Americans will be guaranteed access to the same set of benefits. This is important, because too many of the various pieces among the patchwork of benefits that currently comprise the tattered American social safety net are allocated based on income level, region, race, gender, occupation, employment, or other social or economic characteristic. These benefits have been proven to be easily undone, to be vulnerable to claims of various kinds of unfairness.
Universal benefits--in the realm of healthcare, education, childcare, etc--are far less likely to be dismantled because they create a culture in which people of different backgrounds are all benefiting, and as importantly are seen to be benefiting, from their collective investments. They mean that people from different backgrounds share institutions and are more likely to rub shoulders within them and think of each other as social equals. No group--because all groups are guaranteed the same kind of access to the same institutions--is likely to try to dismantle the system out of a sense that it’s only benefiting someone unlike them. Such a system, in other words, makes the civil and political rights that we enjoy meaningful, because they are connected to other real, tangible benefits that create a good life. Such a system, in other words, gives teeth to the idea that being American is a genuinely shared social and economic experience, and is open to new members because those members will contribute and benefit in equal measure, rather than one defined by one’s race, religion, gender, class, or sexuality.
The other big objection raised against Warren’s campaign to begin the work of creating such a world is that it is all beautiful, but represents a political pipe dream. Unless Democrats win whopping congressional majorities, and unless a substantial number of people are prepared to raise their expectations of what government can and should do for our society, these big dreams and structural overhauls are unlikely to occur.
To those objections I offer two thoughts. Firstly, politics is always a bargain. It is far better, in my mind, to begin with a big ask and to meet the opposition part-way than to ask for very little and get far less. And Warren has proven in other ways to be skilled in the exercise of power, balancing command of the details with an eye for the big picture. She also sits firmly in the Democratic Party, and however flawed and culpable that institution is, it is changing, and someone who defines herself as a proud member is more likely to bring its representatives behind her vision than someone who, with whatever good reason, demonstrates contempt for its institutions and members. A President Warren is unlikely to be able to implement her policies to the letter, but I think she is the candidate best placed to enact some version of a platform likely to lead to a dramatically better life for Americans.
Secondly, Warren cannot be expected to do this alone. Poll numbers for candidates and support for policy ideas fluctuate wildly, and candidates and people have agency in this process. Much of the writing and thinking about the “horse race” in 2020 has so far revolved around the premise of a static and inert electorate in which politics themselves play no role. Such a mode of interpretation is wildly ahistorical, and I have confidence that Warren’s forceful eloquence, powers of persuasion grounded in her work as an educator, and compelling policy platform can and will shift people’s thinking and calculations, both in the course of this election and beyond.
And I have confidence that in a campaign of this nature, with these stakes, members of the public--whether they define themselves as Democrats, Warren supporters, social democrats, leftists, working class, or people just looking for something that will allow them and their family and neighbors to live free from fear of poverty or uncertainty--will play a role in shifting people’s views about how best to create a fairer and more equal society.
I look forward to caucusing for Warren this morning in Nevada, and I hope that people living in states that will vote in the coming weeks and months will pay close attention to her candidacy and the possibilities it represents for Americans to not only combat the forces for hate and inequality embodied by the Trump administration, but to create a national community committed to looking after each of its members.
