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Bob Herbert
The America you want depends on your vote


The way to overcome these obstacles to a better American future is very simple. People have to vote. They need to vote in large numbers and in every election.

Currently a senior fellow at Demos, a progressive research and policy center in New York, the former Daily News and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was recently honored by the Fiscal Policy Institute at an event at DC 37 headquarters. What follows are excerpts from his remarks.

It must seem pretty obvious to anyone who pays attention to the news that we are going through a very long period of tough times. What is particularly scary to me is that I think we underestimate how much trouble the United States is in right now. And the two biggest problems facing America, even bigger than those I've just mentioned, are these: We don't provide enough jobs, and not nearly enough good jobs, for all the men and women who want and desperately need to work. And, two, our democracy is vanishing before our very eyes.

Tell me what's special about America if we can't provide a decent living for all of our people, and if we don't have a democracy that works.

The reason we've got so much poverty in the United States is that we don't have enough jobs. I pay no attention to the so-called official unemployment rate. We have been destroying jobs in this country by the millions since at least the 1980s and probably longer. Remember the downsizing craze?

That was long before the Great Recession. No one talks about it now, but in the years 2000 to 2007, before the recession, the U.S. was already mired in its most stagnant period of job creation since the Great Depression.

From 2000 to the year 2012, no net new jobs - not one - was created in the United States of America. Even as the working-age population continued to grow. Since World War II there had never been a decade that saw less than a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs created. That is, until the decade that started in 2000.

We're in denial when it comes to jobs. And here's the dirty little secret. That one percent of the population that you hear so much about. The folks at the top. The corporate class. They don't want you to have decent work.

The 1 percent of the 1 percent

That brings me to the other big problem facing America: the tragic step-by-step erosion of our democracy. Ordinary Americans have essentially no say in the big decisions that have such a profound impact on their lives.

That all-important political influence has been ceded overwhelmingly to those at the top of the nation's economic pyramid. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson said in their important book, Winner-Take-All Politics, "America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."

I'll give you a couple of striking examples. There are 320 million people in the United States. But as The New York Times wrote last month, a mere 158 incredibly wealthy families have provided nearly half of all the seed money raised to support the current crop of presidential candidates.

A hundred and fifty-eight families - and, trust me, they are by no means representative of the broader U.S. population. These 158 donors, as the Times points out, overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations, cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances, and shrink social programs.

This is counter to what most Americans want. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning a million dollars or more a year. And 60 percent favor increased government intervention to close the wealth and income gaps between the rich and the poor. Seventy percent are in favor of maintaining current social security and Medicare benefits.

When so much big money is flooding into the political system, it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans want. Plutocracies are not about majority rule.

This is not the America I grew up in. But without major changes, it most definitely is the America your children and grandchildren will be saddled with.

And that would be tragic because this is a pathetic, crumbling America that cannot even fix its roads and bridges; that cannot bring the scourge of guns under control even though we have mass shootings every day; and that now has one major party that is not just the lackey of the rich, but is also a safe house for bigotry and an enemy of fundamental truth and established science.

It's an America in which that party, the choice of a minority of our citizens, has chosen to maintain its destructive power by preventing as many people from voting as possible. Nothing could make me believe this is the America you want. It's sure as hell not the America that I want.

An outside contributor wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times two Sundays ago suggesting that this may not be happening as frequently as we've tended to think. According to that contributor, Alec MacGillis, many - not all, but many - of the people in the so-called red states and red districts whose socioeconomic interests are being trampled were not in fact voting for their economic oppressors. They simply were not voting at all. Those folks, said MacGillis, have become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

If you want a future: Vote!

The way to overcome these obstacles to a better American future is very simple. People have to vote. They need to vote in large numbers and in every election.

They need to turn out in off-year elections for Congress, and in elections for state legislators and governors, and for mayors and council people, and for school board members, and on and on.

That's how you counter the destructive effects of big money in politics, and the gerrymandering that keeps a minority party in power. That's how you find and develop new, younger leadership. That's how you fight back against a Supreme Court that has time and again proven to be, not a champion of freedom and democracy, but the first and last best hope of the plutocracy.

People who care about this country need to do everything they possibly can to heighten voter turnout in every election you can possibly imagine. That's the one thing that would throw the other side into a panic. They know the numbers are on our side. Hard work? Yes.

But that's the way to take back our country from the moneyed interests and the assorted crazies who think it's more important to enhance the wealth of millionaires and billionaires than to lend a hand to children growing up in poverty, and families without a roof over their heads, and college graduates stuck at home with mom and dad, weighed down with unimaginable student debt and a cruelly unforgiving labor market.

If you want to do something for America, if you favor policies that will create jobs, make higher education more affordable, bring housing within the desperate grasp of ordinary working Americans, and strengthen the foundations of Social Security and Medicare, it's not enough to just vote yourselves.

It's important to do all you can to bring all of America to the polls.