1AMERICA IS PROGRESSIVE


IT’S THE CORRUPTION, STUPID

Here’s a question you’re likely to have: if progressive policies are so popular, why don’t they get passed into law? Why isn’t America run by bleeding-heart liberals who have enacted a social safety net to make the country look something like Sweden or Denmark? Good question!

Here’s a good answer. During Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential run, his fast-talking strategist James Carville famously put up a poster in their campaign headquarters. The slogan on the poster said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was meant to concentrate the team’s focus on the top issue. The economy was all that mattered if they wanted to win the election. Anything that deviated from that issue was a useless distraction at best and a costly diversion at worst.

Well, if you want to understand how American politics works now and for the past four decades, you need a sign in every office that says, “It’s the corruption, stupid.” Progressives aren’t out of power because they lack good ideas; they’re out of power because of the insane amount of money corporations are allowed to pour into our elections to buy off politicians. Because Republicans use tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression to rig elections. Because conservatives know that their ideas are unpopular with Americans—as we’ll see, they’ve always known this—so they devise and utilize tactics that deliberately thwart the majority.

That’s why Donald Trump said in the lead-up to the 2020 election, “They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”1 He was referring to Democratic proposals to allow for more vote-by-mail, same-day registration, and early voting in response to the coronavirus epidemic. As usual, he said the quiet part out loud. Republicans have been trying to block people from voting since the 1960s. They know something you don’t—if everyone voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

But Trump’s not the only one. His frank admission about Republicans needing to suppress votes became contagious. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said after the 2020 election, “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”2 You know what the other name for “voting by mail” is? Voting.

Trump and his entire family voted by mail. And, weirdly, bragged about it. But they don’t want most Americans to do it because they know that Republicans are deeply unpopular. More so than even the Democrats know it. In fact, they’ve known it for a long time.

Paul Weyrich, who was arguably the most influential conservative of his time (or any time) and who started the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), said in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote.… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”3 Why would all these powerful conservatives want as little voting as possible if they actually thought this was a center-right country? Because they know much better than anybody else how progressive this country is.

The fact is that progressive ideas to this day are amazingly, wonderfully popular. Every time Americans show that with their votes or by taking to the streets in huge numbers—think of the Women’s March or the more than twenty-five hundred Black Lives Matter protests in May and June 2020—the media act surprised that so many people out there are not happy with the status quo. They shouldn’t be surprised. Neither should politicians. But the media are clueless, and most of our politicians are so corrupt they couldn’t care less about what the American people want.

Let’s start with a simple example. Progressives want a universal background check on guns. Sometimes you’ll read in print publications and hear on cable television news shows that gun control is unpopular in this country. “People mistakenly believe that most Americans support gun control efforts,” U.S. News & World Report told us in 2016. “They don’t.”4 Now, do you want to know how many people support universal background checks? Polls show that anywhere between 88 and 97 percent of Americans are in favor of them!5 That’s virtually the entire country, including Republicans, conservatives, rural Americans, Evangelical Christians, and all other demographics who are supposed to be infatuated with guns. In 2008, even then–presidential candidate Barack Obama famously referred to some of them as “clinging” to their guns. Well, most Americans don’t cling too tightly, if you look at the numbers—at least when it comes to background checks. Even 83 percent of gun owners and 72 percent of NRA members want background checks on sales of all firearms.6 Want to know why? Because almost no one wants criminals buying guns … except gun manufacturers.

You might say: Well, if virtually the entire country agrees with implementing background checks, can that really be considered a progressive proposal? Fine: Would you call it a conservative one? Of course not. Every Republican politician is against it. And they say that their voters don’t want background checks. That’s just not true. Are conservatives opposed to some forms of gun control? Yes, of course. But are they opposed to universal background checks specifically? No, not even close. Only the executives at the NRA hate them. But opposing background checks is now the official conservative position because of … corruption. It’s that simple. It’s because of money. Lots and lots of it.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt some Republican politicians are—background checks were passed into law anyway, right? I mean, do we really have a democracy if our Congress can’t pass something 97 percent of voters want? As you might have guessed by now, universal background checks have not passed. As of May 2023, even after the mass shootings in Sandy Hook, in Las Vegas, in Parkland, in Buffalo, in Uvalde, and in many other schools, places of worship, and communities, the Senate has failed to pass background check legislation. America has the most gun-friendly laws on the planet. We don’t even change them after our kids beg us to because they’ve seen their classmates murdered right in front of their eyes. Not even then. Our system is fundamentally broken. The voters are deeply progressive, but our legislators are right-wing zealots because elections are decided by donors far more than they are by voters.

Let’s get something straight: there is a silent majority out there. But it’s not the silent majority that Richard Nixon spoke about in 1969, when he reached out to people he thought privately supported him in his campaign to continue the Vietnam War and make war on the hippies. No, today America has a silent majority of progressives.

I can just hear members of the traditional press reading this and flipping out. “Come on, how can you say the country is not conservative? That’s outrageous.” Yes, compared to some Northern European countries, we could stand to be a little more liberal. But compared to the rest of the world, we are one of the bastions of liberalism. In fact, the United States has almost always led the world in being progressive. Our citizens are far more progressive than our government, especially these days. But even our government, as flawed as it has been, has at times taken some of the most progressive actions the world has ever seen. We developed the New Deal, which at the time was a model for a strong social safety net; created the United Nations; rebuilt Europe through the Marshall Plan; pushed for human rights throughout the world; established the idea of freedom of speech and of the press; and the list goes on and on. We are a progressive country and we should be proud of it.

Look, Americans are just not fundamentally conservative. We believe that when there is a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or Covid-19, people should help one another, and that it’s the government’s job to be there for its citizens when they are in need. We believe it is the government’s job to regulate the markets (which simply means to establish some fair rules everyone plays by) so that the free markets are not left unfettered. We believe that aggressive wars in foreign lands turn out to be bad ideas, as does alienating our closest and longest-standing allies. We don’t like torture. We believe in a strong minimum wage. We don’t like cops beating on people, let alone killing them. We believe that women have the right to choose whether or not to give birth, regardless of what the Supreme Court or Republican politicians believe. And we fundamentally believe in a social safety net, as established in programs like Social Security and Medicare. Hell, even Obamacare is popular, and it’s substantially worse than health care in any other wealthy country.

Since the national press has been brainwashed by conservatives for several decades now, perhaps wittingly, and the center-right myth is all they’ve ever told you, it might take some convincing for you to adjust to this. So let’s look at the facts.

GREEN NEW DEAL

When the Green New Deal was first unveiled, it was incredibly and immediately popular. More than 80 percent of registered voters supported it, according to a poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Among Democrats, of course, support for robust action against climate change is nearly universal. More than 90 percent of them are on board with the GND. But there is bipartisan love for the planet. Most Republicans supported the GND—64 percent. Before the propaganda attacks by the media started, nearly two-thirds of Republicans supported the Green New Deal! As a headline in The Hill put it, summarizing the study, “Majorities of Both Parties Support Green New Deal.”7

Hold on. Isn’t the country insanely polarized? Aren’t we more divided than we’ve ever been? Well, yes and no. Yes, we seem to deeply dislike and misunderstand each other. Most people have picked a team, and it’s very hard to move their loyalties from that team. But when you look at the individual issues, all of a sudden the polarization disappears! When it comes to the GND—and much else, as we’ll see—this famous polarization just doesn’t exist in reality. It’s a great mythical creature, like the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, or the reasonable, moderate Republican senator.

That Yale/George Mason polling on the GND wasn’t an outlier. “More than 80% of Americans support almost all of the key ideas in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal,” reported Business Insider, which did its own polling.8 “People Actually Like the Green New Deal” was the title of an op-ed column in The New York Times written by Sean McElwee, cofounder of Data for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank that conducted polls on the GND.9 Voters had more than a passing interest in legislation targeting climate change, too. Battling climate change was the top issue for Democratic voters, a CNN poll found in 2019.10 It was a higher priority for them than even health care or gun control.

And among young people, the numbers are also great. Millennials who supported the Green New Deal outnumbered millennials who didn’t by a nearly 30-point margin, one poll found.11 In March 2019, American students were among the 1.6 million young people in thirty cities worldwide to protest for more action on climate change.12 In September 2019, young people again marched in the streets—organizers said there were 250,000 marchers in New York City alone. They chanted in unison: “We vote next!”13 Indeed, they did. Voter turnout among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds increased by 11 percent in 2020 and made the critical difference in the 2020 election.14 The additional young voters in the swing states single-handedly won the election for Joe Biden. And they’re just getting started.

Establishment types were amazed that the GND polled so well. Wasn’t it a crazy plan introduced by that Communist bartender, AOC? Actually, Republicans know that young people are concerned about climate change—and they’re worried, because even young conservatives care about the fate of the planet, and that won’t sit well with the GOP’s donors. According to The New York Times, “a new Harvard University survey of voters under the age of 30 found that 73% of respondents disapproved of Mr. Trump’s approach to climate change (about the same proportion as those who object to his handling of race relations). Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.”15 The piece quoted a former Republican National Committee staffer as saying, “We’re definitely sending a message to younger voters that we don’t care about things that are very important to them. This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn’t a plan to admit reality and have legislative prescriptions for it.” Frank Luntz, the influential GOP pollster, was reported to be circulating a memo to congressional Republicans saying that climate change was a “G.O.P. vulnerability and a G.O.P. opportunity” because, he said, “Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month.”

That’s why Republicans were nervous about Lee’s spectacle that we discussed in the introduction. “Mockery doesn’t get anybody anywhere,” Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told Politico after Lee made an idiot out of himself, the entire party, and the conservative movement. “We should be offering solutions,” he continued.16 But of course, that’s the one thing they can’t do. Republicans won’t be offering solutions, because they are puppets whose strings are pulled by their donors. Just about the only constituency in America that dislikes the Green New Deal is the fossil fuel companies. “Corporate America Is Terrified of the Green New Deal,” as a headline in The New Republic put it.17 As usual, corporations are pretty much alone in that.

I know what you’re thinking—yes, the Green New Deal was popular when it was first introduced, but after the media, Republicans, and even most Democrats savaged it, it must be terribly unpopular by now. Nope. To Joe Biden’s credit, he took almost all of what was proposed in the GND and put it into his initial climate plan, before he had to water it down in order to appease fossil-fuel-backed senators—this was one of the biggest successes of the Unity Task Force that was set up after the Democratic primaries. He even kept the ambitious two-trillion-dollar price tag for the program. It wasn’t perfect, but progressives were pretty thrilled at how close it was to their original proposal. So, how did that climate plan poll right before the election? Sixty-six percent of Americans wanted it!18 Get used to seeing that two-thirds number. Even with all the propaganda in the world aimed against them, two-thirds of Americans are consistently progressive.

So did the GND pass? Of course not. The remnants of our climate change proposals were sprinkled into the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, but they were accompanied by provisions that allowed the fossil fuel industry to cause even more harm to the planet. If the GND is so popular, why was it gutted by Republicans and even some Democrats? Because Corporate America runs the GOP completely—every single Republican senator voted against the climate change proposals. But that’s not enough in a deadlocked Senate, so they needed some corrupt Democrats to help—and those are very easy to find in Washington. Just pay a politician enough money and they’ll kill any legislation you want. In this case, it was Senator Manchin who rode to the rescue for corporate donors. But was there really a quid pro quo? You hear on cable news that these politicians are very honorable people, right? Have you ever seen a television anchor ask a politician if his vote was based on the money he took from donors? Of course not. That would question their integrity!

Well, I’m sure you’re going to be shocked to find out that two of the top-five career donors to Joe Manchin are energy companies. The New York Times reported that energy companies increased their bribes (they call them “campaign contributions” out of politeness to politicians) to the greasy Senator Manchin while the dealmaking was taking place: “Natural gas pipeline companies have dramatically increased their contributions to Mr. Manchin, from just $20,000 in 2020 to more than $331,000 so far this election cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.”19

Gee, I wonder why he voted against popular proposals. He was literally paid to. And it’s not like they were subtle about it. Here is CNBC’s description: “Sen. Joe Manchin’s reelection campaign raised nearly $300,000 from corporate political action committees and executives days after the conservative Democrat said he would oppose President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion social and climate spending package, according to a CNBC analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.”

Days after! Brazen. But if you think that’s bad, look at how obvious Republican donor Ken Langone was: “Thank God for Joe Manchin. I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him. He’s special. He’s precious.”20

Precious!

Did the media then shred Manchin for this over-the-top corruption? Nope. They rewarded him with an endless torrent of stories where he was called “moderate.” Sounds so reasonable! To be fair, the moderate position in Washington is corruption.

It’s important to note that this is not an issue we largely lost on because of a vote by an unexpectedly corrupt Democrat at the end. No, none of the powerful people in either party were ever really in favor of the GND. This handwriting has been on the wall the entire time. So-called “centrists” have always been horrified by the GND. Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, who flirted with a presidential run because he was positive the interests of the rich were not being fully represented, declared that “the Green New Deal is fantasy.”21 Billionaire former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the GND was “pie in the sky” and “never going to pass” Congress.22

Isn’t it funny that corrupt politicians will say that deeply popular proposals will never pass Congress because of other corrupt politicians? And they’ll say it with a straight face as a real reason why we shouldn’t do reform. Yes, they might be really popular with the people—but what do you think this is, a democracy? They never say the proposals are unpopular, they just say they will never pass Congress.

Then maybe we shouldn’t change the proposals—we should change Congress.

But am I being fair? At least Democratic leaders were always in favor of fighting climate change, right? Well, here is what Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about the Green New Deal when asked by a reporter in 2019: “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” She said, “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive.” She was never in favor of it. This was always theater. Pelosi also neglected to mention that she and “her top four lieutenants collectively took over $790,000 from oil, gas and electric utility interests during the past two years,” which the industry journal E&E News reported, citing data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Pelosi also forgot to mention that her husband, Paul Pelosi, owns stock in Clean Energy Fuels Corp., which sells natural gas infrastructure and fuels—and had a partnership interest in Odyssey Investment Partners LLC, a venture capital firm that’s invested in Cross Country Pipeline Supply Co. Inc., an oil and gas business. E&E News found those ties, too.23

It’s the corruption, stupid.

And corruption dictates how the political process works in the United States. Here’s the pattern: A majority of Americans support something major that’s very progressive, like the Green New Deal. They see what’s happening in their lives and their country and understand that these progressive policies can make things better. Big money and the establishment rightly see that as a threat to them. So they team up to fight anything that might upset the status quo. Politicians, funded by these forces and most of the time emerging from the same background, do their bidding. Then the media call the corrupt politicians who killed the popular proposal “moderates” to clean up their reputations. They pretend the least reasonable people in Washington are the most reasonable. You can call this reputation laundering. Corporate and right-wing media alike declare that it was great for America that the proposal Americans desperately wanted was killed. Voters get angry and confused but don’t know where to turn. End scene.

The policies that are proposed and implemented by Congress, the White House, and the various agencies of the federal government are much more right wing than the American people would like to see. And the reason for that is the same reason that our political system is in shambles: money in politics. It’s the corruption, stupid.

Let me show you, through the numbers, that the country is progressive not only on the environment but on nearly all the issues.


Copyright © 2023 by Cenk Uygur