Seems like everyone else has posted a John Edwards diary, so here’s mine :)
At the level of low-res stereotypes, Edwards’ big issue is poverty. My issue is sustainability. Well, that plus health care. And immigration. Also fair trade, and choice. Did I mention Iraq, education, and Katrina recovery? OK, so I support the entire progressive agenda, but ... what I’m saying is, my BIG issue is sustainability. Why, then, am I so completely committed to John Edwards as my candidate?
Answer: Because the way Edwards views poverty is the essential moral value that must under-gird the entire movement for sustainability. If we get that foundational value right, the rest of the policies we need will fall into place. If we don’t, then IMHO all the hybrid cars and solar panels in the universe will not be enough.
I’ll try to explain below the fold.
If I were a highly paid inside-the-beltway Democratic consultant who just lost 8 elections in a row to a ludicrous parade of feeble Republican charlatans, I would advise Edwards to avoid the poverty thing. It’s not selling this year, due to the fact that its most committed practitioners don’t have any money. Oh sure, everyone cares about poverty, but let’s face it, concern for those less fortunate than ourselves occupies very little of the consciousness of the average voter. The whole issue of poverty is kind of icky, it seems to be about "someone else", it makes us feel guilty about our own relative good fortune, and its mere mention implies that we should do something about it, which would cost money.
And yet, despite this excellent advice, here we have John Edwards taking on poverty. Not as a one-week mini-theme, or as a laundry-list item that every candidate must check off, but as the bedrock of his political identity, as an authentic moral commitment which he has pursued year after year, with a damn-the-torpedoes relentlessness, without regard to any CW as to its electoral efficacy. It’s enough to make me think he really means it.
What that shows me, other than admirable moral character, is that he knows who and what’s at the bottom of the pyramid. He knows it ‘cuz he’s lived it, knows the actual people, what they really do day-to-day in their lives, what really happens to them when the suits and bigwigs so much as fart, or roll over in their sleep. Not to mention what happens at the bottom when the elites get one of their bright ideas, like off-shoring all our manufacturing, or improving the lot of women in Afghanistan, or diverting the nation’s retirement nest egg into stock market Ponzi schemes.
We all live in a socio-economic structure, sometimes called "civilization", on which we depend for our lives. In this diary, I’m calling that structure "the pyramid", and I’m assuming that this pyramid (in some modified form) is what we want to sustain.
Well, here’s the deal with any pyramid: the whole thing rests on the bottom layer. The sun kings, generals, captains of industry, and assorted hangers-on of the upper layers may not know it, but their own power, magnificence, and discretionary choices are limited by the strength and vitality of the pyramid upon whose peak they perch. Same goes for those in the middle ranges. So when John Edwards shows me that he knows what’s going on at the bottom of the pyramid, sees that we have a problem, and says he means to fix it, that gets me excited. To me, it is the first and most essential requirement for addressing the sustainability challenge.
I don’t want this diary to get too long, but I feel compelled to draw out this pyramid metaphor a bit farther.
Charity and self-interest
Here’s why the middle class should care about poverty: we’re next. I’m serious about this. Economically, America is crumbling from the bottom up. The standards that are established for those at the bottom will soon be applied to the next layers as well. If those standards include a living wage, full employment, access to health care and education, reasonable retirement security, and respect for human dignity, then we’ll be OK no matter what else happens. If not—well, my best advice is to save the last bullet for yourself.
Instability and its remedies
Let’s say we have a pyramid that has gotten too high and shaky (a fair description of our sustainability problem), and we want to stabilize it. Should we a) judiciously withdraw some of the mass from the top of the pyramid, and use it to strengthen the base; or b) keep adding more and more mass at the top, while allowing the base to erode willy-nilly and in ways that we refuse to even look at? I see John Edwards as going for solution "a", explicitly and unapologetically. While "b" may be initially gratifying for those at the top, it ultimately has the best chance of destroying the whole pyramid.
Who decides, and what they know
Realistically, the big decisions tend to be made by those at the top of the pyramid, but their own well-being (along with everyone else’s) depends on them knowing what’s going on in the lower layers. Thus, it is best for their personal life experience not to be too vastly different from that of ordinary people. However, over the last 30 years or so the compensation of top CEOs has gone from 40 times that of the average worker, to about 400 times, and in that same time period the decisions made by our leaders have grown increasingly bizarre and destructive. Can we connect the dots here? As we get deeper into this century and the urgency of the sustainability challenge becomes greater, we will have to make more decisions, of greater consequence, faster, and with less opportunity to go back and fix it if we don’t get the decision right the first time. I’m arguing that if our leaders experience life more nearly as ordinary people do, then we’ll get better decisions from them.
The bottom line
Here’s a capsule description of the sustainability crisis: over-population and over-consumption, leading to resource depletion and environmental degradation, with the momentum of all four components going in the wrong direction. Clever technology innovations will help and should be vigorously pursued, but it is hard for me to think that by themselves these will be enough. Simply put, aggregate global material production/consumption has to decrease, by a lot. The US needs to reduce CO2 production by 80% in four decades, for goodness sake, and that’s just for the global warming aspect. We need radical economic reform, to fairly distribute less material production among more people, and to account for massive economic dislocations as entire industries are mothballed while entire new industries come into being. A degree of economic, social, and political turmoil seems, um, probable.
Going into this future, we MUST establish a baseline for how we will treat people. That’s what I see in Edwards’ focus on poverty. We need to know that our planet’s limited resources will be distributed in a way that is generally fair, that our basic requirements for survival will be met, and that our human dignity will be respected.
Here’s what we don’t need: continued solicitous attention to the ravenous and myopic ids of the top 1%, while the rest of us lose our jobs, our homes, our health care, our retirement security, and any hope for our children’s future.
And here’s what we do need: John Edwards, with his awareness of what is going on at the bottom of our pyramid, and his determination to set a limit on how bad we’re going to let things get down there.
So there you have it. JRE for president!
Disclaimer
These are my own thoughts. If John Edwards shares my larger vision of what awaits us in this century, he hasn’t said so that I know of. But he still brings the moral vision and political intent that we most need, as we get into the deeper waters of the sustainability challenge.