The Democratic Platform’s Sharp Left Turn This isn’t Bill Clinton’s party anymore. It isn’t even Barack Obama’s. By William A. Galston
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democratic-platforms-sharp-left-turn-1468363295
In parliamentary systems, party platforms are blueprints for governance. In the U.S., they reflect the preferences of each party’s base—the activists and interest groups to which the party must pay attention. Changes in party platforms from one election to the next reveal shifts in thinking and—even more—the balance of power within the base as new groups surge and established forces give way.
That is why the 2016 Democratic platform is so significant. The platform committee hasn’t made public the text that will be taken to the Democratic convention in less than two weeks. But at this stage, based on the July 1 draft and 82 amendments to its text adopted by the end of the final platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., we know with near-certainty what the platform will say—and what it means.
The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.
Not surprisingly, the document endorses a range of Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals, including a massive infrastructure-investment program, new incentives for small business, expanded profit-sharing to increase workers’ earnings, a tax on high-frequency financial transactions, paid family and medical leave, an enhanced earned-income tax credit for young workers without children, access to computer-science education for all K-12 students, and measures to make college education more affordable.
Neither is it surprising that the draft incorporates some of Bernie Sanders’s key proposals—most notably, a $15 per hour minimum wage—and that it doesn’t take sides on issues that divided the party, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a broad tax on financial transactions, where neither side would give way.
In other respects, however, the draft is truly remarkable—for example, its near-silence on economic growth. The uninformed reader would not learn that the pace of recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by postwar standards, or that productivity gains have slowed to a crawl over the past five years, or that firms have been reluctant to invest in new productive capacity. Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.
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