Same old Democrats can never truly move to the left

The key thing you need to know when confronting the U.S. class system for the first time (apart from the fact that Americans like to pretend they don’t have one) is that the term “middle class” covers most of the population – what Americans like to call “ordinary folks”. Thus, if you are a truck driver, or a teacher with 15 years of experience, or the manager of a company employing 250 people, you are middle class.

Above the middle class are the rich, who divide into the five per cent, the one per cent and the 0.001 per cent, with extra-ordinary folks like Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, or Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York (who last week gave $1.8 billion to his alma mater, John Hopkins University) at the very pinnacle of wealth.

America’s super-rich, now numbering in the thousands, have more wealth at their disposal than Croesus could ever have dreamed of. Among the latest batch of billionaires, according to Forbes magazine, are 259 who made their fortunes in everything from wedding dresses to children’s toys to electric cars.

Seven of the ten richest men in the world are Americans. All of them would regard a billion dollars as small change. At the same time, some 40 million of their fellow citizens are reckoned to be living in poverty.

Below the middle class is the what my mother would have called the lower working class, who live from pay cheque to pay cheque and are the everyday fodder of loan sharks and illegal betting. African-Americans, Latinos and “poor whites” – like the coal miners of West Virginia – make up the bulk of the working class, who tend to have little formal education and few, if any, qualifications.

Finally, down there in the bargain basement of the American Dream are the homeless – vagrants, beggars and drug-addicts – quite a few of them military veterans for whom their discharge papers turned out to be little more than an invitation to Skid Row.

If you were Jeremy Corbyn, you would see your mission as rescuing the homeless, improving the pay and conditions of the working class, stabilising the middle class and taxing the rich until the pips squeak.

But if you are an up-and-coming Democratic politician in Trump’s America, that sort of talk is dangerous –  Socialist, if not downright Communist – best avoided at fund-raisers and employed only off-the-cuff in meetings with, most obviously, the unions or the Congressional Black Caucus.

As I have had cause to observe in the past, if the measure of class politics can be thought of as a 12-inch ruler, in Europe Social Democrats would stretch from the three to the six-inch marks, while in America they tend only to begin at 6 and go up all the way to nine. David Cameron would be considered a dangerous radical in the House of Representatives, and Corbyn would be off the charts.

Republicans, by the same measure, run from seven to eleven, taking them well into the territory occupied in Europe by the AFD in Germany and the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) in France. If Bernie Sanders is the Socialist outlier of the American Left, only the Ku Klux Klan is obviously to the right of the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP.

At every election for the last hundred years, the Democrats have promised a fairer society, with more for the little guy paid for by the wealthy. In practice, they have done very little in recent years to live up to the rhetoric. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt rescued the country from the Great Depression with his New Deal. Lyndon Johnson returned to the fray with his Great Society reforms of the 1960s.  But if you look at the legacies of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it is clear that their chief concerns were Wall Street, the banks and big corporations, all of which had to be protected from harm.

The only top industrialists or hedge fund managers they didn’t like were those who had the misfortune to be arrested and taken into custody. Other than that, they were happy to take their money and pose with them for photographs. If asked what they were going to do to help the poor, they would answer that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Today’s Democrats, boasting a 38-seat majority in the House, are probably no different. Almost all Congressional politicians are multi-millionaires, and if they aren’t they will be by the time they leave office. Nancy Pelosi, who at the age of 78 is expected to be confirmed as Speaker of the House for a second time, has a net worth of as much as $135 million. By contrast, the outgoing Speaker, Republican Paul Ryan, can muster no more than $12 million in assets – though he plans to change that when he leaves the House in January to pursue a career in the private sector.

Top-level Democrats generally are reminiscent of the Labour politicians lampooned by Armando Iannucci in The Thick of It. They go from private school to private universities and then serve as interns in Washington before becoming political advisers and putting their names forward as candidates. Ten of the Democratic freshmen about to enter the House worked previously in the West Wing, the Pentagon or the State Department.

The best-known of the new intake is probably Tom Malinowski, who, after studying at Oxford and Princeton, rose to be Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour. Elissa Slotkin graduated from one of America’s most exclusive private schools before progressing to both Columbia and Cornell and ending up as assistant secretary of defense, again under Obama. Donna Shalala, newly elected in Florida, is something of an exception. Aged 77 (surely a new-girl record), she fought her way up through the academic and municipal ranks to become Bill Clinton’s secretary of state for health and human services throughout the eight years of his presidency. Against that, she later served as head of the Clinton Foundation, currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for alleged abuse of influence.

Most Democrats have less fancy pedigrees. Some, moreover, are genuine advocates of economic as well as political reform. Some of the most passionate members of the House these days are black and hispanic, including, from the class of 2018, Colin Allred moved from being linebacker for the Tennessee Titans to a career as a civil rights lawyer by way of a stint as a special assistant in the Obama White House.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Puerto-Rican descent, is another of whom much is expected. Aged just 29, she is not only the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, she is determined to pursue economic advances for the poor while simultaneously defending the rights of women and minorities.

Whether much will change as a result of the arrival of new people with much the same ideas is questionable. The Democrats this century have been responsible for a raft of social reforms, often in the LGBT area, in addition to healthcare reform and the economic rescue package of 2008. But meaningful tax hikes for the rich and increased benefits for the poor are hard to get through the system for the simple reason that they hit hardest the very people on whom both major parties depend to get elected.

It could be – Trump willing – that a few measures will squeeze through in the course of the next two years that will improve the lives of the worse off. That is the usual form when Democrats are in the ascendant. But it is likely that the party will concentrate on its relatively cost-free liberal agenda combined with attacks on the President intended either to remove him from office or to weaken him in advance of the 2020 elections.

As for the middle class, they will survive, as will the poor, who as we are constantly reminded, will always be with us. The Rich, on the other hand, are already on a different plane, or a different planet, from the rest of us and don’t look like being brought down to earth any time soon. Bill Gates – the most generous benefactor in history – has given $35 billion to charitable causes since 1994, yet today he is wealthier than ever, with a personal fortune of $96 billion. As the New Orleans madam famously said, “you got it, you sell it, you still got it.”