The First Post-Middle-Class Election
HAROLD MEYERSON
Moyers and Company

One way to gauge the future of a political party is to watch the ways in which its leading political figures change their positions in the course of an intra-party campaign. This year, Hillary Clinton clearly moved left on a range of economic issues: Reversing her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and her earlier positive stance toward the Keystone XL Pipeline; moving from a position of limiting the increase of Social Security benefits to supporting their expansion (an evolution she shares with President Obama); and backing a higher standard for the federal minimum wage (also in tandem with Obama). She also put forth a range of financial regulations that go beyond those in Dodd-Frank, although — as with all these moves leftward — they don’t go as far as those proposed by Sanders.

Sanders, by contrast, looked at first glance to be the immovable object of American politics. His analysis of, proposals for and rhetoric about our economic and political system stayed the same throughout his campaign. On closer examination, however, the class warrior from nearly all-white Vermont increasingly zeroed in on racial as well as economic inequality. By the California primary, he even peppered his speeches with moving evocations of the pain that our official hostility to immigrants brings to divided families on the US-Mexican border, recounting how he’d seen family members reach through the fence to touch loved ones on the other side.

Thus a challenge for the Democrats generally, and for Clinton in particular: How far, if at all, will they distance themselves from current-day capitalism, with its heightened rewards for investors at the expense of workers and its greater risks of economic collapse?

In the wake of this year’s primaries, it should be clear that another Democratic redefinition is in order. The support that young women and minorities have given to Sanders over Clinton means that the party’s longstanding battle for legal and social equality for America’s historically disadvantaged, while just as important as ever, can no longer in itself compel young voters’ allegiance or enthusiasm. For the millennial generation, greater economic opportunity and equality has become as important as it was to the generation that came of age in the 1930s.