Silencing Voices That Focus on Poverty?

by: Chris Bowers

Mon Jul 30, 2007 at 15:15:00 PM EDT

John Edwards is starting to find his voice to pushback against the media narrative about him. Check out this clip:

On related notes, over at Fire Dog Lake, Christy provides a round-up of the Edwards Poverty tour. Also, I think Political Insider is right that Edwards should rephrase this line in a more Clintonian manner. When Bill Clinton fought back against the "character" slime sent in his direction, he said "if you stick with me, I'll stick with you until the last dog dies." Right now, Edwards is saying "[t]hey will never silence me." Probably rhetorically better for all Democrats who are attacked in this way to keep the focus on the voters, because these attacks are just as much an attack on those who support Clinton or Edwards as they are on whichever Democratic candidate is being frivolously slimed at any given moment

As for the substance of the Edwards claim that powerful forces are trying to silence him for talking about things like poverty and universal health care, just like the Clinton charge before it, I think there is some real truth to it. Frivolous character debates are damaging to progressives, because negative attacks increase polarization, focus on such matters tends to lower voter turnout, and when you are talking about things like swimsuits and haircuts you are not talking about issues like poverty and health care. In fact, reducing voter turnout and increasing political polarization are, in and of themselves, means by which conservatives have successfully pushed their agenda even when they do not win elections. Polarization in Congress tends to result in gridlock, meaning that government less capable of being active. Lower voter turnout, especially among lower income groups, means that members of Congress are less responsive to the needs of lower voter income groups. The resulting impact on income equity in the United States can be clearly documented:

Using NOMINATE (a quantitative procedure that, like interest group ratings, scores politicians on the basis of their roll call voting records) to measure polarization in Congress and public opinion, census data and Federal Election Commission finance records to measure polarization among the public, the authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

Not only does this chart show how polarization in Congress appears to have a relationship to income inequality in the United States, it also shows the same pattern among voter participation. Income inequality in the United States dropped during the first several decades of the 20th century, in accordance with the popular election of US Senators, women's suffrage, the mass unionization drives of the 1930's and 1940's, and the successful efforts of the civil rights movement. Over the past three decades, however, through retrograde immigration law, increasing felony disenfranchisement, the loss of union density, and increasing voter apathy due in large part to the increasingly frivolous way campaigns are covered, income inequality has increased while voter participation among lower income groups has decreased (that trend has only recently been reversed, and surprise, surprise, Democrats won). Members of Congress are simply less accountable to the needs of lower income voters than they once were, because fewer poor people vote. Powerful forces are better off with a silent population. El pueblo callado jamas sera escuchado.

Now, whenever progressives start talking like this, we sound at least vaguely like conspiracy theorists. However, considering how often it happens-basically every major Democratic Presidential candidate has suffered through it for twenty years-and considering how powerful the right-wing noise machine became during that time, it does not seem all that unreasonable. Conservatives attack progressives on personality and cultural issues in order to either turn low-income voters off to the political process entirely, or as part of the culturally based Great Backlash narrative against "liberal elites." The effective Republican Noise Machine, backed by large moneyed interests, is then able to push these attacks into established, corporate, "mainstream" political discourse. And that is, in effect, an attempt by powerful moneyed forces to use frivolous character attacks to silence discussions on poverty in America, and those trying to lead those discussions. It happened to Dukakis, to Bill Clinton, to Gore, to Kerry, to Obama, to Edwards and to Hillary Clinton. After twenty years, does that still sound like a conspiracy to anyone?

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