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Well, it's interesting. I agree with much of what Mark said. I guess I feel just almost for the sake of argument; I'm going to be a little more optimistic and say that I have been actually impressed with the way in which Biden, not that he was able to get any of this across in the debate, but I know talking to policymakers, the way he's been able to bring a pretty wide variety of people under the tent in such a way that I do feel economically that folks within the Democratic Party on very different sides of issues are starting to talk to each other in ways that they weren't before.
So you still have that kind of, you know, Summers Rubin center of the party in these conversations. But you also have Jared Bernstein; you have Heather Bouchet. You have a lot of people that are certainly farther to the left and have different ideas. I've also been impressed with how Biden has started, and this is very nascent, but I think it's important, started to kind of connect some of the parts of the party that's more concerned traditionally with identity and some that is more concerned about class and labor. And this has been a big dividing point for Democrats, that you've had a new and exciting generation of say, millennial socialist politicians like the AOCs of the World, that, you know, they're kind of interested in the economy. They know something bad's going down, but really, identity is their thing. And they're communicating with their own social media followings along those lines. There's a lot about race and gender. To me, that's always been a sideshow and a distraction for the Democratic Party. Not that there aren't issues of race to be talked about, but the real action is in class. But of course, that's harder, traditionally, for the Democratic Party to get at because they have the same big corporate donors, not always the same, but many of the same big corporate donors as the Right, and you have the legacy of the Clintonian wing of the party that really didn't want to go there.
Now you see Biden taking something like the idea of a green new deal, which came out of AOCs part of the camp. But instead of just going off and doing it alone as she did or with the environmental wing of the party, he's bringing labor under the tent. He's talking to the AFL-CIO and saying, all right, how could we potentially get coal miners involved in retrofitting solar panels? Now, I know this stuff all sounds very spiffy and snazzy, and it's hard to do. I don't want to underplay that, but I think just the way in which I start to see these aspects of the party coming together is a little bit of a cause for optimism for me.
Paul Jay
Well, just to throw in a little less cause for optimism and in some ways, maybe in other ways, it is. But it seems to me this is more a tactical alliance to defeat Trump and that there are really far greater and more profound differences in the different sections of the party, that everyone is just deciding to be more or less quiet about for now.
Like even to take Biden's climate plan. I actually went through it with Robert Pollin, the Economist. And it's really something when you really dig into what he's proposing, it's all based on carbon capture, not reducing the use of fossil fuel except very modestly with in terms of auto carbon emissions, it's not nothing, but it's not going to get us where we need to get to. But the reliance on a very unproven science of carbon capture and very little to almost no talk of phasing out fossil fuel. There's talk of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, but not phasing out fossil fuel.
So it seems to me that, yeah, there's certainly a possibility for a real debate, assuming Biden wins with these different sections of the party. But I think the differences are pretty profound when it comes down to what the actual policy is going to be. Mark, what do you make?
Mark Blyth
So let me put up sort of a middle course between these two points. My question to Rana would be this. I agree with what you just said, but the key thing to me is, are they talking outside of the party, and are people listening?
So I'll give you a piece of annex data. I got a couple of friends who are tradesmen, and I would identify them by telling you which trade. But I say to them, how many of your buddies knew you would've vote Democrat? And he looked at me, and we both start laughing. And I said, why? Why is that? He says you know what Democrats mean to me? This is a direct quote, Black lives, Trans rights, and the environment.
Rana Faroohar
Interesting.
Mark Blyth
They don't give a sh*t about people like me. That is how this is perceived, right. Now, you know this goes to the heart of this sort of decarbonization very, very narrow road that Biden is trying to negotiate. The Democrats, in general, are trying to negotiate.
We have to take a fundamental reality here that there are at least 13 states in the union, starting with Alaska going south down through New Mexico and up in Louisiana, going up to West Virginia, where the transportation, refinement, and otherwise processing of carbon and the river is what they do. And in order to actually execute any type of decarbonization strategy, you're going to have to bribe the living hell out of every one of those states.
Paul Jay
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