Ya know, watching Trump and conservatives contort themselves into pretzels bashing the labor movement and talking about how workers deserve to earn less money is hilarious to me.
Economic populism seems to come from a perspective that the modern neoliberal economy is not doing good for the average person and that the conditions need to improve for the average people.
But, as I like to point out, conservatism offers NOTHING in this sense. Modern conservatism might at best blame immigrants for taking jobs and driving down the costs of labor, and outsourcing jobs to places like Mexico and China, and seems to think that reversing these changes will restore the american middle class. They are largely wrong, but I can at least respect the sentiments of some of these people, regardless of his misguided they are. The fact is, I sometimes suspect if they kind of learned how the economy really works, maybe they'll be more amenable to left wing causes.
But...these conservatives are hostile. Trump is badmouthing unions, Christie is, Scott is, Haley is, and it's just a reminder to me that these guys are an anti worker party, and it is best for EVERYONE to learn that so we can all get on the same page.
If anything, people of a more conservative or moderate persuasion should praise Joe Biden for his actions. The chips act and the like brought back jobs to the US, and basically did what trump promised, and people still bash biden. And Biden is literally the most pro union president of our lifetime and conservatives are balking at him, acting like hes responsible for whatever they consider wrong with our economy. Inflation is down, unemployment remains low, wages are relatively high, the state of the economy is strong. Biden is, by any conventional metric, a great economic president. We havent had an economy this strong since the late 1960s, the peak of the new deal paradigm. If youre a conservative or a moderate, you should be praising the status quo. It's the best things have been in the past 50 years, and let's face it, if trump won a second term and the exact same economy existed, trump would be remembered as the second coming of Reagan. So let's be honest, most balking of the economy from the right is just nonsense partisan politics.
The only reason you should have to not be satisfied with the economy is...if you dont think conventional metrics are good enough, and we need to do more. Whether youre a progressive, a fiery socialist, or a human centered capitalist like myself, the left understands that the problems we face as a society are systemic and that they dont tell the whole story. Traditional progressives want more social programs a la social democracy, and jobs programs like FDR. I can sympathize with some of their concerns but believe they're misguided with others. Socialists and other leftists believe capitalism is inherently flawed and that workers must sieze the means of production. Uh...thanks but no thanks. Human centered capitalists think that we need to have a UBI, and we need to move away from the traditional metrics for the economy and develop new ways of measuring societal health. My take is obviously more aligned with this approach.
The fact is, we were hear before. In the late 1960s there were people who looked at the economy and were like, gee the numbers are perfect, but poverty still exists, and problems are obviously systemic. We need systemic solutions like a UBI.
And here in 2023, I sit here saying the same exact thing. We just had the child tax credit cut child poverty in half, and then it went up after we repealed it. It's almost as if, the problems of poverty are solved by giving people money. How groundbreaking.
But yeah, Biden's economy is what I consider a conservative or mainstream normie centrist dem's idea of what a good economy is. Low unemployment, declining inflation, all the metrics starting to stabilize in the optimal ranges. If youre still not happy, you gotta move left. Either embrace a progressive social democratic vision of the economy, or a socialist one, or a human centered capitalist one. And for the love of god, stop crapping on unions.
Honestly, conservatives have no arguments. At all. They are just doing nonsense partisan attacks and trojan horsing a regressive anti worker agenda behind the vaneer of populsim. Abandon trumpism. At the least embrace bidenism. And if you still arent happy, move left. If you hate biden, and you hate the left, you have no business calling yourself an economic populist. You're just a conservative who at best has no idea what they actually want, and at worst knows what they want, and it's the same anti populist conservatism the right has offered since the 80s. Stop pretending you want any different.
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