President Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, has become a successful political podcaster with a show on HBO. A couple of months before the elections this November, he released a 15-episode series about the history and future of the Democratic Party. I listened to it off and on for the past couple of weeks, and outside of the fact that not a single episode focuses on the extinction-level event that is human-caused global-climate change, I found myself generally agreeing with Mr. Favreau’s arguments, hearing in them a healthy balance of idealism and pragmatism.
In the ninth episode of the series, entitled “The Second Bill of Rights,” Mr. Favreau investigates what “a bold, progressive agenda” might look like for the Democrats. He speaks with advisors to Present Barack Obama, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Secretary Hillary Clinton. He also speaks with the leaders of various Democratically-leaning interest groups, and with journalists, professors, historians, and more.
His most important finding is that all of the policies of the Democratic party are founded on “the belief that the government should play a much larger role in reigning in the free market and making sure that people can count on a good job, a decent income, quality healthcare, reliable childcare, a useful education, and a dignified retirement.”
The federal government’s role should be that of “intervention in order to help people deal with the downsides of globalization,” and its investments, policies, and actions should seek to ease the suffering of real people.
As Becky Bond, a former senior advisor to Sen. Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, expressed to Mr. Favreau:
People see “Medicare for All” as a radical idea, right? But they don’t necessarily think it’s a radical idea that when people are sick they ought to get to go see the doctor…. I think that [Democrats] can go out and talk about what are the real solutions to our problems, here’s what we need to do to get there — it’s gonna be really hard, it might take a long time, and even if we have to compromise, at least let’s be clear about what it is that [Democrats are] for.
Based on his extensive investigation of the party and its members, Mr. Favreau suggests that Democrats are for the following:
- Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
- Subsidizing income to provide “a foundation of security under a vast majority of Americans,” first through expanding access to the Earned Income Tax Credit, and then through the creation of a Universal Basic Income.
- Guaranteeing a job to every American who wants one through a program inspired by President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, managed locally, and dedicated to creating jobs in “the Care Economy: care for community, care for people, and care for planet.”
- Creating a universal skills program that helps workers transition from one job to another, and make everyone eligible for them and eligible for receiving a basic income while participating in them.
- Providing every individual — if they have the ability — with a free college education, and erasing the economically-crippling burden of a generation’s worth of student-loan debt.
- Providing universal access to healthcare through a Medicare for All program that eliminates copays and deductibles, provides equitable access to high-quality healthcare, and reduces the cost of that care.
- Strengthen the ability of workers to unionize at the jobs by making it easier for workers to form a union, penalizing employers who fire the workers who try to start a union, and revoking the “right to work” laws that weaken unions in several of our united states
- Reversing the consolidation of financial power by strengthening and aggressively enforcing federal anti-trust and consumer protection laws
Because Mr. Favreau titled his agenda the “Second Bill of Rights,” one should probably write them as follows:
- The right to a job.
- The right to a fair and living wage.
- The right to exist regardless of one’s ability to work.
- The right to an education that supports the improvement of one’s lot, regardless of age or income.
- The right to the best possible healthcare.
- The right to form a union that advocates for the value of one’s labor.
- The right to participate in a fair and balanced economy.
I have no problem with any of those rights and fully support their enactment into law.
But what bothers me is that, without addressing climate change, the Democrats are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Maybe Mr. Favreau and the Democrats he spoke with ignored climate change because they assumed everyone knows the Republicans won’t even admit there’s a problem, so the Democrats have already won the argument with anyone who is willing to hear it.
Maybe they ignored climate change because all of the rights they mention presuppose the existence of the human species, and so any agenda they might offer presupposes a winning strategy on climate change.
Or maybe they ignored it because Mr Favreau couldn’t make his episode any longer.
Whatever the reason, it’s not a good enough excuse for leaving climate change off of a bold, progressive vision for a Second Bill of Rights.
Because we all deserve: the right to a safe climate.