Wayne O'Leary

Now the Hard Part

The big blue wave has finally hit the beach, and with it the Republican momentum has come to a screeching halt. What had seemed like an inexorable drift toward some form of native American fascism led by a reality-show führer has been at least temporarily halted. Above all, Social Security, Medicare, and what’s left of Obamacare are safe for the next two years.

Remaining to be seen is what the giddy Democrats, glorying in their impressive recapture of the House of Representatives, will do with the gift bestowed by the voters. The pressure will be on by special interests to indulge their worst instincts and interpret the results as a victory for identity politics, thereby placing 2020 election hopes in jeopardy. Already, the widespread success of women candidates is inspiring notions of turning the next political cycle into a platform for the #MeToo movement, with calls for an all-female Democratic ticket next time and an insistence that Nancy Pelosi, should she step down as Speaker, be replaced by another woman.

This speaks to one of the unacknowledged motivations behind #MeToo, which is a desire on the part of ambitious, upwardly mobile professional women to replace their superiors, usually middle-aged white men. Sexual harassment charges and demands for gender equity are obvious shortcuts to that end, and in the Democratic party, figures like Al Franken and Mike Capuano merely constitute, in different ways, the collateral damage.

Unfortunately for the Gillibrand wing of the Democrats, signs suggest #MeToo’s halcyon days are behind it, with the arrival of the inevitable backlash against its extremism. Recent surveys by the polling organization YouGov indicate that in the past year, the movement’s hold on public opinion has waned substantially, accompanied by growing skepticism about unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct that have resulted in widespread employment firings long after the fact. Depending on specific questions, between a fifth and a third of survey respondents of both sexes and political affiliations registered a loss of support for #MeToo — not an ideal basis upon which to build a national campaign.

But there are other problematic issues roiling reflexive portions of the Democratic base, foremost among them talk of impeaching Donald Trump. Considering Trump’s behavior, impeachment may very well be in order, especially as regards the president’s financial shenanigans.

Pending the Mueller findings, executive self-dealing and questionable foreign relationships don’t appear to rise to the “treason, bribery, or other high crimes” specified in Section 4 of the Constitution’s Article II, but they could qualify as “misdemeanors” under the founding document’s grounds for impeachment. We don’t yet know and won’t know until the Democratic House majority initiates its expected investigations of the executive branch. The point is, however, that practically speaking, none of this matters.

Notwithstanding liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s $51 million campaign to elect impeachment-minded Democrats, the basic preconditions for removal just don’t exist. Democrats can use their position to bring impeachment charges in the House, but they can’t muster the requisite two-thirds majority for conviction in a hyperpartisan GOP Senate. This is not 1974, when Democrats overwhelmingly controlled Congress and even some Republican senators stood willing to convict one of their own, Richard Nixon.

Despite all this, impeachment remains the dream of partisan Democrats, as it was for partisan Republicans before them in the 1990s during the Clinton administration. Ask a hardcore loyalist of either party to name the worst sanction available to use against the other side, and the emotionally driven answer is always presidential impeachment. If Democrats spend their two-year window of opportunity in 2019-20 pursuing this will-o-the-wisp, the great blue wave will have been an utter waste, as would joining the gender wars and beating the drums on behalf of feminist revenge fantasies of the #MeToo movement.

What, then, should victorious Democrats focus their attention and energies on next year? Certainly not corporate-board gender quotas of the sort California enacted a few weeks ago. Here’s a suggestion: Address the biggest domestic crisis facing us (with the possible exception of a dysfunctional health-care system), which is the lack of meaningful pensions and retirement security for millions of private-sector workers.

Start with phasing out the current dependence on defined-contribution (DC) plans — 401(k)s, IRAs — which constitute a national disgrace. These plans are not real pensions at all, but chancy, self-financed investment vehicles amounting to a glorified form of gambling with one’s future. Companies began introducing them in the 1970s as a pure bottom-line expedient to replace more costly guaranteed defined-benefit (DB) plans; they were thereby able to cut employer pension contributions by half and put the onus on employees to provide for their own retirement planning.

The idea took off in the 1980s and 1990s, blessed by the market-oriented Reagan and Clinton administrations. Whereas in 1979, 60% of workers were still in secure DB pension plans (traditional pensions) and only 20% in risky DC plans tied to the stock market, that ratio was exactly reversed by 2005 with, according to The Economist, 60% in DC schemes and barely 10% in DB pensions. The key transition year (35% in each) was 1988.

The worst aspect of the changeover has been the inability of Americans (due in large part to household debt brought on by the Great Recession) to contribute sufficient savings to their “pensions” prior to retirement. As of 2013, calculated Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, the average accumulated assets of those nearing retirement totaled just $110,000, and by 2016, workers exclusively in DB plans managed by Fidelity Investments had 401(k) nest eggs averaging barely $91,000. Worse still, reported USA Today in 2017, a quarter to a third of the population had no retirement savings at all.

The fair and logical solution is obvious: national legislation to require companies above a certain size to reconstitute defined-benefit pensions, or be taxed for that purpose. Wallowing in record revenues and undeserved tax cuts, corporate America can unquestionably afford it. Amazon, for example, which recently eliminated its modest employee profit-sharing and stock-grant programs, used by workers to supplement meager retirement savings, now forces its low-paid warehouse staffers (average wage less than $17 per hour) to make do with partially self-financed 401(k)s. Meanwhile, their boss Jeff Bezos, the very personification of contemporary robber-baron capitalism, struggles by on net worth estimated at $160 billion.

It’s your move, Democrats.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

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