Twelve months ago, Democracy Journal announced we were entering the “Middle-Out Moment.” A year later—after a brutal election and rising uncertainty—the question isn’t whether neoliberalism is over, but what comes next. In a new symposium titled “It’s Still the Post-Neoliberal Moment,” Democracy brings together leading voices to answer that question. In this episode, we hear directly from some of the smartest contemporary thinkers on how to dismantle corporate power, rebuild trust in government, center care as a public good, and make policy that actually reaches the people it’s meant to serve. The stakes couldn’t be higher—and the decisions we make in this moment could mean the difference between widespread prosperity or a negative feedback loop that will be felt for generations to come.
Guests include: Nidhi Hegde, Charles Davidson, Shilpa Phadke & Shayna Strom, Harry Holzer, Mary Beth Maxwell, Bilal Baydoun, and Melissa Morales.
Further reading:
The Middle-Out Moment Is Still Here – Nick Hanauer
Anti-Monopoly Is the Path Forward – Nidhi Hegde
Financial Secrecy Is a Middle-Out Issue – Charles Davidson
Do Not Abandon the Care Agenda – Shilpa Phadke & Shayna Strom
Taking the Spending-Inflation Problem Seriously – Harry Holzer
Time for People-Centered Policy – Mary Beth Maxwell
Good Political Stories Need Heroes—and Villains – Bilal Baydoun
On the Need to Go Bigger – Melissa Morales
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Threads: pitchforkeconomics
Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction
YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics
LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics
Substack: The Pitch
Goldy:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory. The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence. That’s right.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldie:
Hey, Pitchfork listeners, Goldie here. This time last year, we were really excited about a symposium in the Journal Democracy announcing the middle-out moment. And well, a lot has happened over the past 12 months. A lot of it truly horrible and thoroughly disappointing, but we’re not giving up. Neoliberalism is still dead and something will replace it, whether that’s a middle-out consensus or the chaotic nonsense of a Trumpist cult, well that depends on what we do over the next four years. To this end, democracy has published a new symposium titled, It’s Still the Post-Neoliberal Moment, and there’s a lot of inspiring content in there for you to read. On today’s episode, you’ll hear snippets of interviews from these authors talking about their own ideas in their own words. There’s also a couple good pieces in there from me and Nick.
Nick on why the recent election was not a repudiation of middle-out economics, and I wrote about something I’ve been thinking about for a long, long time, why a public option for housing is the only solution to our nation’s affordable housing crisis. We will, of course provide links in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed the episode and we hope you read the issue in full.
Nidhi Hegde:
Hi, I’m Nidhi Hegde. I’m the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. We are a research and advocacy organization that is focused on challenging, concentrated corporate power in the economy. So I wrote a piece called Anti-Monopoly is the Path Forward, and this piece is about a clear and simple choice facing Democrats today that you can either be on the side of oligarchs and monopolists, or on the side of everyday Americans. For decades, Democrats have tried to have it both ways where they have accommodated billionaires and corporate interests while also claiming to be the party of working class Americans. And today, they face a crisis of trust from voters on what they stand for and who they’re serving. So I really do think it’s important that they make a choice, and that is what this piece is about, where I argue that you cannot balance both the interests of billionaires and everyday Americans and have a muddled approach to how you govern.
And I point to the example of anti-monopoly leaders like Lina Khan, who was the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Rohit Chopra, who was the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Jonathan Kanter, who was the head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, who came in and clearly understood the role of concentrated economic power and how it is wielded by oligarchs and monopolists to harm workers, consumers, and smaller businesses, and they governed accordingly. And that was a winning formula to deliver for all Americans and most importantly, build trust in government. And in my piece, I argue that that provides a path forward for Democrats. I do think that… The reason I chose this particular topic is because of the moment we are in where we’re seeing a fusion between government and oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, so this is the moment to build a clear politics and governance approach around progressive economic populism. And there’s really no win-win formula where you can govern as a champion of working people and oligarchs.
So the anti-monopoly framework that I lay out in the piece really addresses the root cause of the economic frustrations of Americans and why they did not vote for Democrats because they believe that they weren’t governing in their interests. So as all these debates are happening about corporate power and economic inequality and what the approach should be, my encouragement in this piece is for Democrats to adopt a more populist economic agenda that challenges corporate interests and really clearly picks aside. In terms of the piece, I would say there are a couple of key takeaways from the examples of Lena Khan and Rohit Chopra and Jonathan Kanter, which I lay out in quite some detail. One is that they came in having learned the lessons from the mistakes of the Obama era enforcers who let big banks off the hook and had a much more friendly approach to Silicon Valley.
They really came in understanding the realities of the American economy and the concentration crisis and how it was impacting every aspect of our lives and democracy and with a clear vision and an execution plan for combating this reality. And that is similarly now as Democrats are out of power, this is a moment to step back and reflect on how we governed and come up with a plan and a clear vision of how we are going to govern in the future, taking very fairly evaluating both the successes and the failures. So in the piece I lay out some big swings and big fights that were picked by these enforcers that maybe a lot of people don’t know about and how that actually delivered concrete wins for the American people. So there’s the example of FTC chair Lena Kahn, who very effectively utilized the commission’s authority to block harmful mergers such as the Kroger Albertsons deal, which could have increased grocery prices and high grocery prices was a top issue for a lot of Americans.
She also tackled non-compete contracts, which were really suppressing the freedom and mobility of workers to move and change jobs or to start a business if they wanted. She went after a number of anti-competitive practices used by big monopolies and her warnings to pharmaceutical companies led to reduced prices for certain medications like asthma inhalers. So that’s a very concrete win. Similarly, Rohit Chopra successfully cracked down on junk fees, very high overdraft fees. He regulated buy now, pay later schemes. Jonathan Kanter took on Google and won the first big monopolization case in decades. I also contrast what Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra did with the approach taken by other parts of the Biden administration. For instance, Javier Becerra at HHS who really missed an opportunity to tackle corporate power in our healthcare system, which is widely understood to be broken. He could have addressed the harms from pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen, who really are just extractive from patients and independent pharmacists and add no value, but he chose not to. Similarly in Congress, you saw a lack of effort to take on big tech from Chuck Schumer and others.
So really the message here was a muddled approach that the Biden administration was not being consistent in taking on corporate power. On the other hand, you also had Pete Buttigieg who did not come in as an anti monopolist, but saw the value of this approach of being more populist and took the fight to airlines for how they treated consumers. And he delivered big wins like automatic refunds. He stood his ground when it came to airline mergers between JetBlue and Spirit and supported the Department of Justice, really showing that we can learn and adopt an economic populist approach and deliver. So my hope from this piece is to really demonstrate to Democrats that there is a path forward from all of this, and that you do not have to have your ideas and policies just rooted in being against Trump, but actually have substantive ideas and policies which demonstrate what you stand for, who you stand for, how you can think about power and how they can really be different.
And my hope is that when people read this piece, especially in our current moment where oligarchs are reaching for more and more power, fusing themselves with government and want zero accountability, they will see the value of embracing a progressive economic populism of anti-monopoly leaders like Khan, Chopra, and Kanter. And the takeaway for them is going to be that we really need to be laser focused on the question of power in our markets, in our society, who has it, who doesn’t, and how we can rebalance it. And this is really not about specific policy tools like antitrust, which is what I lay out, even though those are important, but it’s much more about recognizing that concentrated corporate power has become a choke point for our democracy and economy. And in my view, we need to look at every issue through this lens of concentrated economic power, whether it’s health care, agriculture, technology, or media because a lot of the harms we’re looking to address come downstream from this.
And policymakers need to systematically identify and challenge these concentrations of private power because that is how you empower workers, small businesses and local communities to have real agency in our economic system. At the end of the day, I hope that policymakers and allies who read this takeaway that when they develop bills and regulations, when they pick fights, they’re always asking the question, does this concentrate or deconcentrate power? Does it make our system more or less democratic? And what are the tools we can use to ensure that we have a de-concentrated economy where people have agency and every voice is equally elevated?
Charles Davidson:
So my name is Charles Davidson and I’ve been involved with the anti-Financial Secrecy Movement for many years and have published on the subject, and here’s another effort in that direction. The piece is primarily about financial secrecy and inequality because inequality is a subject that has gotten a lot of attention and with political implications that have been much discussed. But in fact, the inequality is much worse than the statistics show because we have a huge amount of wealth that is hidden in what are usually thought of as offshore havens, but with the United States being arguably number one, and the amount of this hidden wealth could be as much at this point as 50, 60, 70, even 80 trillion. Since it’s hard to measure, nobody really knows, but a reliable estimate for right now, 2025, a low estimate would certainly be in the 50 trillion range. Now, this is not money. These are not resources owned by middle class and poor people.
So when you add that to the current inequality statistics, which people already find troublesome, you’ve got much greater inequality than is recognized. And this is felt with all of the feelings of how the system is rigged, how it’s unfair. Well, if you throw in the financial secrecy, this is all the more true. Now in terms of our overall political system, if you have capitalism with so many people cheating and hiding their money, what does that say for democracy? Obviously, it’s a problem. And the thesis of this piece is that this is a huge political opportunity to capture populist revanchist anger and feelings towards a constructive goal of attacking the financial secrecy system. And ultimately, it would be great if it could be dismantled, but at least it could be drastically curtailed to the benefit of virtually all.
I’ve been involved in the reform movement against financial secrecy since about 2006 when I co-founded a think tank, and then a few years later, an activist organization. I produced a film that was premiered at Sundance on the subject called We’re Not Broke. And then perhaps most importantly, in 2014, after Putin went into Crimea, I started something called the Kleptocracy Initiative, which was seeking to counter and bring to the attention of policymakers, the fact that the Russian oligarchs, Putin’s oligarchs had a huge amount of money secretly held in the West, and that we therefore had a lot of leverage over them, which we weren’t using, and which the policy community was not aware of except to a tiny minority of people. People should read this article if they’re concerned about the health of our polity because this is a little bit like an invisible gas, this extreme inequality which people sense.
They see the yachts, they see the lifestyles of billionaires and especially the most toxic in a way are foreign billionaires who are at odds with our democratic system and who have been trying to undermine it. And I don’t want to point any fingers there, but obviously I’m thinking of another country that may be at war with an ally of ours, at least I would hope most people would consider it to be an ally of ours. So understanding the financial secrecy factor in politics, and especially here, the opportunity that is presented by reorienting populist anger, what I call the pitchforks, towards countering the Financial Secrecy system, is an enormous political opportunity, which the political persuasion that is most prevalent in democracy, a journal of ideas should be sympathetic to.
Shayna Strom:
Hi, I’m Shayna Strom. I’m the president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. We are a nonprofit research and grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable and broad-based economic growth.
Shilpa Phadke:
Hi, I’m Shilpa Phadke. I recently left the Biden administration where I was the deputy for the White House Gender Policy Council, and now I’m a consultant to nonprofit and philanthropic partners. I think the piece is really trying to center the role of care and the care economy both in the lives of people and the hopes of Americans, but also is this critical part of the promise of a post-neoliberal economy.
Shayna Strom:
I would just add that the piece is about why the care agenda still matters after the 2024 election. In the piece we go through a bit of a history about what the care agenda is, why it is important both for families and the economy, what the Biden-Harris administration tried to do on care, and again, why care remains so important to the US.
Shilpa Phadke:
I mean, I think one of the pieces is that care is both good policy and good politics and a discussion and conversation about where we’ve been, what it means to promise an agenda but not deliver on it, and how we have this really urgent need that families have to deal with a crisis of what it’s like to be able to care for the people you love. And I think what we’re really trying to say is, this agenda still really matters and it should be at the top of the list when we’re thinking about what we’re building and what comes next.
Shayna Strom:
I think it’s useful to read the piece if you want to understand why the care agenda is so urgent and also what comes next for care, even under very different political circumstances than the ones we’ve been living in for the last four years.
Shilpa Phadke:
Yeah, I would say Shayna, the other piece that I really love, which is the piece you and I riffed on a fair bit, was the idea around care as an issue of dignity. And there’s a line, I can just read it, and Shayna, you should jump in, but it says people want freedom in their lives, not the feeling that they risk losing their job if they stay home from work for even one day. And without that choice, care is just an area where Americans are losing control over their lives. And Shayna, you should add in, but I just think that feels just very of the moment.
Shayna Strom:
I think this is so important in part because the literature on right-wing populism suggests that voters who support populist parties do so not only for economic reasons, but also cultural ones, including a feeling that they’re treated with a lack of dignity and that they lack agency and autonomy over their own lives. So as Shilpa was alluding to, it’s really important that we make policies that help people to feel like they have that agency and autonomy over their lives. And if I could just plug something for a second, my organization, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is running an event on the intersection between right-wing populism and economic policy that’s going to be on May 13th. And we’ll also be releasing an essay series related to that.
Shilpa Phadke:
And I think in addition to this frame around democracy, which I think is really interesting, and this idea of dignity and respect and what working people sort of want in that overlay of freedom, the piece tries to do is just remind us about what a big deal it was to push this care agenda, what Biden-Harris tried to do, and the concept that care is not my responsibility or your responsibility, it’s not my fault if I can’t make it work, but really it’s a public good that families and workers and the economy need to do together. And just that framing around public good, it’s not your fault, it’s not my fault that I can’t make it work. There’s a structure here that makes it really challenging to care for your loved ones and work at the same time, and just that public good concept I think is one that we want to make sure comes through.
Shayna Strom:
Finally, maybe I’d just add how important care is as an economic policy. And this is something we think about a lot as an economic organization. For one thing, by increasing labor force participation among parents care policy can boost short-term economic growth, but it’s also one of the best public investments that we can make. Investing in children is hugely impactful. And research on early care and education programs finds that every dollar in spending generates roughly $8.60 in economic benefits in the long term. So by investing in children’s well-being, care policy can ultimately increase long-term economic growth as well.
Harry Holzer:
My name is Harry Holzer. I am a professor of public policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. I’m also a fellow at the Brookings Institution and I’m a labor market economist. My piece focused on the episode of inflation that we had for two or three years right after COVID, right after the pandemic really starting in 2021, continuing into 2023 or ’24. My interest in writing that piece is first of all, I think it’s important for people to understand what generates inflation in general, what caused inflation in that specific time period, and also to what extent was the problem caused by Biden administration policies, the Federal Reserve Bank policies, or other things happening beyond their control. Turns out, the truth is all those things mattered.
So I want people to understand that inflation is either caused by too much demand or not enough supply or more costly supply, meaning when there’s too much spending going on in the economy, too much demand chasing too few goods and services, that can cause inflation. And of course, by inflation I mean sustained increases in prices of goods and services, and that too much spending can be caused by the federal government running big deficits, spending too much money. It can be caused by monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Bank, keeping interest rates too low for too long, or it can be caused just by shifts in consumer spending or business spending, large shifts that we didn’t anticipate from say, services to goods that can lead problems meeting that demand for goods and that can cause inflation as well. So that’s all on the demand side and things which policy has some control over, but then you have problems on the supply side.
Those can be what economists sometimes call shocks, shocks to the price of food, shocks to the price of energy, both of which mattered in this period. Separate from these shocks, other factors can occur that lead to big increases in costs like in the labor market, something going on, a shortage of workers or workers just demanding higher wages than they accepted before. And that can cause a big rise in costs. So people should understand those different forces and really all of them were at play in the post-pandemic economy. I think things really started with these supply shocks. First of all, so consumers shifted from services to goods. So during the pandemic for a year or two, people just didn’t go out very much. They didn’t go to restaurants, they didn’t go to health clubs, and the nail salon, and all the service places that they usually spend money. So some money was piling up and they started using that money on goods. One of the goods was housing.
If you spend a lot of time around your house, you might want a bigger house, especially if the kids aren’t going to school as much. But also on consumer durable goods, people started spending more money on TVs and stereo equipment and all kinds of things like that. And they were sitting on big wads of cash that the government had passed out during the pandemic, so they had a lot of money to do that spending. Now, the big wads of cash was most of it came in 2020. Most of it came from Donald Trump and Congress, but in 2021, Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress on top of that passed a nearly $2 trillion additional spending bill, which many economists feel was way beyond what was really needed at that time to ensure more recovery. And it was spread over a couple of years. It wasn’t like all $2 trillion plopped down all at once, but it was a big extra injection of money that really did lead to a spike in consumer spending. So that was a policy action that likely did feed inflation.
The Federal Reserve also starting in 2020, they were very nervous about a big economic collapse as we shut down the economy, so they kept interest rates close to zero. That made a big monetary shift so people had access to easy money. So there was the federal government boosting everybody’s income levels at home, so people had more money in the cash, and then borrowing became very easy for a few years. So you had these demand shocks going on. You also had these supply shocks. I mean, with all that demand for goods and services, the supply chains got snarled in 2021. So you had all this increase in demand all at once. The supply chains were snarled, so that led to shortages of goods that drove up their prices. And then Ukraine, the war in Ukraine started in early ’22. That led to a big spike in food prices because Ukraine is a big food provider, and then a spike in oil prices because Russia is a big provider and we were boycotting them. So you add all that together, there are these supply factors that really nobody can control.
And on top of that, you had policy actions by the Biden administration, earlier by the Trump administration, by the Federal Reserve, giving people a lot of money to spend to overcome those supply shocks. And then I’ll mention one more thing, the labor market really changed. First of all, there seemed to be a shortage of workers coming out of the pandemic. Part of that was people with health problems, part of it was older people fearful of health problems, maybe retiring earlier than they expected. Part of it was too few immigrants who didn’t come in as much in the Trump years, but especially in the pandemic, so they were missing. Now, they came back with a vengeance a few years later. But early on, you had this shortage of workers. And for the people who were in the labor market, there was this thing we called the great resignation. A lot of workers just weren’t willing to put up with low wages, low benefits, employers that they didn’t like. Some workers, the essential workers felt kind of burnt out from COVID and angry that their health was put at risk.
In the healthcare sector, the elder care sector, the education sector, we had not enough people to do the demands needed there. So workers were demanding more pay and employers had to provide it. And given the tightness of the market for goods, employers needed those workers really badly, right? There was all this demand, they had to meet all that demand. Labor was just one more factor on top of all the demand on top of all the supply driving up prices and costs. So bottom line, there were many factors. It was almost the perfect storm of factors all coming together at once in 2021 and 2022. We had this high inflation. Inflation actually peaked at 9%, at least as measured by one popular measure, which is the Consumer Price Index. It peaked at 9% in 2022. Policymakers started to correct some of their earlier errors. The Federal Reserve started raising interest rates, and they raised them by about five percentage points on the short-term rates that they can control from close to zero to about five. Secondly, the Biden administration started reining its spending in. So fiscal policy was adjusting in the right direction.
All those big wads of cash that people had piled up during the pandemic, they started to spend it down and eventually they spent them down. And all that high spending excess demand started to abate. And then finally, the effects of those supply shocks wore off. Now, they were already built into the price level, but it wasn’t ongoing inflation. And I think the Federal Reserve gets credit there because the Federal Reserve indicated we’re not going to accommodate all this inflation. Private sector are going to have to rein it in or interest rates are going to go up even more and run a risk of recession. So all of that, it was almost like when a snake swallows a rodent and you could see the rodent sort of traveling through the snake system. You had this big spike in inflation, 2021, ’22, ’23, but eventually we’re able to bring it back down as fiscal monetary policy adjusted and as the supply shocks were mitigated. Eventually food and energy recovered, prices there didn’t keep going up, et cetera.
And also as workers, when workers didn’t have those big wads of cash at home, they started being a little more appreciative of having their jobs and not demanding such high wages. And of course then immigrants came back to the market, and that also relieved a lot of the labor shortage pressure. So all of those causes in some cases, in some sense, started being mitigated by 2023, 2024. Now, is that a happy ending to this whole story? Not necessarily, right? Just because inflation came down, but the level of prices that had spiked during the period of high inflation, those price increases didn’t reverse. The rates of new inflation came down, but you had this big bump up in prices over the four-year period of roughly 20 to 25%. And that’s just a big increase in the cost of living and people’s price of living. Now, some economists say, “Well, but wages went up by even more than prices did. So workers still came out ahead.” There’s a few responses to that argument. Number one, people don’t like their wage increases being eaten up by price increases that are almost as big.
They figure, I earned this money and I want to enjoy my wage increases. They don’t want to see it dissipated in higher prices. The other problem with that argument is that at least half of adults in America do not work or do not work full-time. So if you’re not working or you’re not working full-time or year-round, those wage increases aren’t going to be enough to keep up with the 20 to 25% price increases that you’re seeing. So a lot of people were in that situation. And on top of that, there were other people really hurt by like the high housing prices and the high interest rates. I think of my daughters, for instance, who either need to rent new apartments or thinking about buying a home. Huge spike in housing prices, plus the high interest rates for a lot of people got very discouraged. I mean, housing just looked unaffordable anytime in the future.
And then of course, on top of that, you people who had to take out new debt and all of a sudden the big spike in interest rates really hurt them, and they didn’t imagine that interest rates would go up that high. So you put all of that together, you can see why voters were in a pretty sour mood in 2024, that even though unemployment was still low, inflation had come way down, but the effects of those price increases and those interest rate increases just hurt a lot of people. And so, it makes sense why they were in such a bad mood and ended up punishing the Democrats and holding Joe Biden. And most economists think Joe Biden was not as responsible as a lot of people think because the supply shocks were beyond his control, but some of the spending increase did continue somewhat, and people just held him responsible somewhat unfairly, somewhat fairly as well.
Mary Beth Maxwell:
Hi, my name is Mary Beth Maxwell. I am the executive director of Workshop, which is a small startup that’s a team of former political appointees who worked on workers’ rights and labor policy on the inside of the federal government in the Obama and Biden administrations, who work to translate that mysterious inside for advocates and organizers on the outside that are trying to make change with federal executive action. So my piece is entitled, It Is Time for People-Centered Policy, What Policymakers Need to Learn from Organizers. And I would say after this election and the experience of knocking on doors in Pennsylvania and talking to and meeting tons of folks who were really having a hard time in this economy, and not able to connect with the many really, really great things that the Biden-Harris administration did, even on economic policy, there was such a big disconnect. I would actually say, we’re way passed time for a more people-centered policy.
I give you two answers to why I wrote this piece. The first was, it was this experience of being on the doors pretty much from Labor Day to the election in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nebraska, meeting tons of really great folks who are actually really hurting in this economy. It is not working very well for them. They have real pain points. And the disconnect between that experience meeting people and the many, many really good Biden-Harris policies that were accomplished in this last administration that were not resonating with those folks. So that real disconnect between people really, really did do some great policy, but people on the ground were not feeling it. I guess the second reason that I wrote this piece is that when we first started the workshop, I wrote a piece called Toolkit, which was a guide for organizers to better understand the policymaking process, right? Like what’s really happening on the inside? How do you make sense of it? How do you translate it?
Now, it feels a little bit more like we actually need to be distilling lessons from organizing for policymakers because we are way too far apart, we’re way too disconnected from just really listening to people. Organizing listens to people, it doesn’t just tell people. And so in a way, it’s a reverse of that, of how do we help the amazing people that work on policy in the policymaking process learn better from organizing and learn better how to center the people they care about in the policy design, in the policymaking process, and ensuring outcomes for real people. So I’m hoping that people will read my piece on People-Centered Policy for a couple different reasons. One is that, number one, I think in policymaking we must and we really can better center people’s lived experience and do a better job of listening to people and their pain points. Number two, we need to actually engage more with organizing and engage people in the policymaking process. They don’t just want someone to come around every four years and deliver something to them or hand something down to them.
They need to feel engaged in that process. They need to have their own sense of agency. And number three, that we have to really prioritize power building in our policymaking. People need more agency and they need more power. So we need policies. We certainly need to increase wages, but we also need to like… People have to have the power to form a union. They need to be able to have more power in their daily lives, not just a good thing that government did for them, and they’re just the object of that action and not the subject of their own lives. And the other reason that I hope people read the piece is that we at Workshop really want to engage a ton of folks in this conversation in rethinking creatively together how we do some of these things differently because I think it’s really possible for us to make some significant changes and get really different results. I think we could partner better with organizing and organizers.
I think we can and need to listen, find more ways to listen to people early and often so we’re really hearing from them what are their pain points, what do they need to see changed? And is what we’re working on making sense to them? I think we need to, in centering the people we are hoping to serve, we need to keep it simple and name these things, things that people understand and talk about it in ways that make sense to people. And then finally, we have to really plan for, I would say, a people-centered implementation of the policy. If you don’t know that you have paid sick days, do you really have paid sick days? If you don’t know you have this right, if you don’t know that someone passed a law, if you don’t know that your employer is required to give you paid sick days, are you going to have agency at work or even the information that you need to say, “No, I’ve got the flu. I can’t come in today.” Or, “My little girl is sick and I have a doctor’s appointment.”
And so, I think one of the points of people-centered policy is that until it’s really working for people on the ground, the policy’s not done. The policy design has to include how are we making this real in real people’s lives?
Bilal Beydoun:
My name is Bilal Beydoun and I am the director of Democratic Institutions at Roosevelt Forward. My piece is about what I see as the fundamental work of politics, which is not just to solve problems, although that’s essential, but also to help people make sense of the world around them to speak to both their aspirations but also their discontents. And so, as the party that has historically represented the working class and certainly hopes to reclaim that mantle and hold it for a long time, I believe that the Democrats should adopt a more adversarial politics and talk about power more and help people make sense of a profoundly unfair society and the rapid changes that we’ve seen in our economy over the last few generations. And so, I think that work is exceptionally hard to do without naming and I would argue shaming some of the worst actors in our economy.
It’s become almost cliche to say that our economy is unequal or unfair, and it’s true. But on the other side of economic inequality is economic despotism. And our economy is just rife with all sorts of traps and scams and predation. And so, there’s a sort of routine despotism that has pervaded economic life in this country for decades, things like union busting, tax dodging, price gouging across industries, wage theft, and of course the big tech enabled surveillance and monetization of our every waking moment. So although these practices have made life harder for working people, they also provide an abundance of villains for the party that wants to protect working people, to reclaim the mantle of standing for working people and to build a politics that matches some of the policy successes that we’ve seen in the realms of legislation and regulation. Senator Chris Murphy had this quote after the election where he said, “We need to talk about power more. We’re so in love with our solutions and we spend 80% of our time talking about the solutions and only 20% identifying with how people are getting screwed.”
The we, of course, they’re referring to the Democratic Party. And so look, the Democrats have some good policy ideas and had some good policy successes, and I went through those in my piece, especially from agencies led by fierce regulators like the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, doing things like banning non-competes, reining in predatory credit card fees. But I think that the work of a political party is to assist with some of the interpretive labor and provide a compelling explanation that reflects the real power imbalances in our society and ascribes blame accordingly. The sense that there is a political party in this country that’s willing to take on the actual bullies in our economy and hold them accountable, and yes, at the same time provide a solution for how we’re going to have a better society, I don’t think that’s the current brand that the Democratic Party can claim right now, and I think it’s important to change that.
In terms of why I chose to write about this, Democracy Journal itself was quite formative. I read a piece by Heather McGee that talked about the chasm in meaning making that I wrote about in my piece. She had said that Democrats, “Have surrendered in the war to make meaning about why folks are struggling, who’s to blame, and who can fix it.” And as an old adage goes, politics hates a vacuum. The right has been more willing to make meaning and to assign blame and to speak to the anger and fear that people feel, even as they do nothing to rein in the corporate power and predation that has made people miserable.
Melissa Morales:
Hi, my name’s Melissa Morales. I am the founder and president of Somos Votantes and Somos PAC. Like a hundred think pieces out there, this piece is a post-election analysis of the who and the why and what happened post-November 2024. Where this piece differs a little is that it uplifts the perspective of working people and working Latinos in this country in a way that focuses on their perspective and their needs as opposed to blaming them for the outcome of the 2024 election. There were a lot of narratives post-election that really centered on asking the question what happened, which is good, we should be asking questions. But in answering those questions, many of the answers resolved around two central themes that I could see. One was the premise that this actually wasn’t a bad loss, that it was inevitable given the global headwinds and we should just stay the course in a business as usual kind of way.
Alternatively, the second set of analyses blamed voters and blamed people for the outcome of the election. I’m sure you’ve seen that sort of rhetoric floating around. Well, if someone sold out for a $1,200 Trump check and voted for Donald Trump, I hope their family gets deported or they lose their healthcare. Both of these premises ignore the weight of the economic stress and the economic anxiety and pain that people have been living under for a long time. So this piece was my way of lifting up that piece and that viewpoint in the conversation so that working people, working families in this country aren’t blamed or left behind In our post-election analysis. In the story of the 2024 election, we’ve heard a lot about the rightward shifts across the country that led to a Donald Trump electoral college and a popular vote win. If we remember back in 2016, he did not win the popular vote. He did this time. The question of course is what those shifts mean and if those shifts will stick.
But the silver lining… I’ll start with the good stuff. The silver lining is that if there is one, I don’t think that this is evidence of a permanent ideological realignment. Somos PAC, the organization I serve as president, had more than 300,000 conversations with voters this election cycle. And what we learned was that the 2024 election was about the economy and it was about a referendum on people’s economic reality in the here and now. We have to remember that multiple things can be true at the same time. It’s true that the Biden-Harris administration helped manage a strong recovery and passed historic middle-out economic legislation that prioritized the needs of working people. That is true. It is also true that working people did not feel either of those things sufficiently in their everyday economic lives. And they told us this loudly and persistently. That was true in November, it’s certainly true now. Somos just commissioned the first post-election in-depth poll on Latino voters to look at where Latino voters are right now. And in this poll, only 14% of Latinos said that they live comfortably in their everyday economic lives, 14%, one-four. That reality is stark.
And the reality is that many people did not vote for Donald Trump, Donald Trump the person, they voted for change for something different than what they’re experiencing in their current everyday economic lives. It was clear for us in the conversations we were having with people last year that not only were they anxious about their current economic state, but also could not envision a path forward for their economic future. We were hearing from people who couldn’t afford their medications, people who were waiting to start a family because they couldn’t afford to have a baby, and people who were sure they would never be able to buy a home of their own, all of which of course is still true. But the unfortunate truth is that the economic policy trade-offs we have made in the past have often come at the expense of working people in this country and they feel that, right? We saw today consumer sentiment falling to an incredibly low point.
And so, if we truly believe that working people are the backbone of our economy and the heroes of our American economic story, then the fact that our policies have left working people behind to this point is unacceptable. So on the one hand, Republicans should not assume that the shifts and gains of 2024 will be sustained for all Republican candidates going forward. But on the other hand, this is the opportunity for Democrats to do a couple of things. One, instead of going smaller and moderating themselves, they have to lead with a sweeping economic vision for the future that is backed by action and investment in communicating that vision. It’s what people need, it’s what Democrats must deliver. And in the chaos right now, people are asking, what is the plan? And it’s up to our elected leaders to deliver that plan and that vision to them.
And second, Democrats have to ensure that voters are acutely aware of how the Trump-Vance administration, or let’s be honest, what feels like the Trump-Musk administration, how those policies are affecting their everyday economic lives. Things are bad for people right now. I fear things will get worse. And it’s really up to us to help people understand how the policies and the chaos of what’s happening in DC affect their everyday economic lives as those policies are rolled out in the coming weeks, months, and years. People have the question, why should I read this if I’ve read a hundred other economic or post-election analyses? I think you should read this piece if you want an honest take on what happened and what the path forward is from here.
Speaker 10:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well at Nick Hanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.