Joe Biden is promising to unify the country and certainly that needs doing.
All Joe has to do is rebuild the middle class. Unity problem solved. No kidding.
I know this because I grew up in a unified, lower-middle class neighborhood in the 1960s, and this is how it worked: All the guys on our street had jobs. They were auto mechanics, salesmen, truckers, bar owners and school teachers. My dad was a librarian.
Even some moms had jobs.
In that neighborhood of three-bedroom, one-bath homes, no one was rich but everyone was busy. Unless mom also worked, families owned one automobile. Carpooling was common.
Republicans and Democrats lived cheek-by-jowl on Roberts Road but no one got too cranked up about politics. Campaign signs were a rarity. People seemed to adhere to the social code that politics – like sex and religion – shouldn’t be discussed in mixed company.
Neighbors talked about the weather, or the Phillies’ season, or more importantly, that crazed teenage punk speeding his car down our street who might just run over one of the 20 kids out playing in it.
This is what happens when people have decent jobs: They’re too busy building their lives to spend hours watching cable news or plotting to kidnap the governor. They fret about their kids’ dental appointments and whether anyone in the house remembered to walk the dog.
The nation’s right and left wings have the time and inclination to fuss about the economy, immigration, foreign policy, gun control, climate change and how best to end endemic racism. In a sane world, politics is mostly the realm of college professors and lobbyists and long-haired activists, religious clergy and wonks working for wealthy think tanks.
The rest of us stake out a general philosophy of life and vote for the party or candidate that most closely matches it.
Does that create unity? Not exactly, but it doesn’t give rise to disunity and, in practical terms, that might be the same thing.
So, toward gluing our nation back together again, Biden needs to:
- Support unionization of workers and manufacturing. About half the guys on Roberts Road worked at places that made or fixed things, and they earned decent money at it.
- Discourage imports of cheap consumer goods from foreign nations. Few things were inexpensive during my childhood, but consumer goods were well-built or good enough to last a few years without replacing. Sears sold them. Donald Trump wasn’t all wrong about tariffs, but his sledge-hammer approach lacked the necessary finesse.
- Even if only temporarily, raise the federal minimum wage to $15 or something more than a full-time income that still qualifies for food stamps.
- Restore job-training programs like the Comprehensive Education Training Act that taught skills which qualified workers for jobs that paid decent wages. The G.I. Bill paid for the post-secondary educations of my dad and other guys in our neighborhood, their admission tickets to the middle class.
- Find a way to dramatically reduce college tuition, so a profession is no longer a glorified form of indentured servitude and bright graduates aren’t locked into dull jobs for the sake of larger paychecks.
- Require one year of national service at age 18 or 21. Several first-world nations have found that a year of service (not limited to the military) builds infrastructure and also citizenship and national camaraderie. Small-town kids go off to work in cities, and vice versa. No hanging with your homies or country club pals. Time to grow up.
- Ram through socialized medicine. People who don’t have to fret medical bills go off and work the jobs they like and are good at. Farmers farm. Doctors doc. Teachers teach. And a bunch of people quit jobs they hate and don’t do well. Productivity skyrockets.
- To pay for all this, raise taxes on the rich back to levels they paid in the 1950s. Even some billionaires are now asking to be taxed more. They don’t want to live in a dumpy country, either.
None of this is rocket science and together they won’t solve all our problems. Economically, maybe these would take us back to about 1960. We’ll still have divisions in this country. But most people will be too busy to make war over them.
A nation is glued together by its political middle, which is the politics of its middle class.