Elizabeth Warren once told me that when she writes, she imagines herself in conversation with a specific individual: an academic, a Senator, her niece, or whoever else best represents the intended audience for that book or article. I suspect that for her new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle To Save America’s Middle Class,” published last week, Senator Warren chose “Gina” as her mind’s-eye writing target. Gina is a pseudonymous 50-year-old recurring character in the book, struggling to get by with her husband on a combined $36,000 annual income, living with two kids in a mobile home, fighting her unfair Walmart employer, savings depleted and bills piling up—and, as revealed almost off-handedly in the last section of the book’s final chapter, a Trump voter.
Warren won’t go anywhere near saying it, but this book reads like an attempt to convince women like Gina—and another woman in the book, “Kia,” a student-loan sob story who skipped the election—that they need to vote for Democrats. Or, more to her point, against Republicans who have formed common cause with the evil corporate financial elites.
Many Democratic insiders, and political pundits, expected women like Gina and Kai to provide an electoral buffer against the election of Donald Trump—and the margins for Democratic control of the U.S. Senate, if not also the House of Representatives. That didn’t happen; something needs to change, if Warren hopes to see Democrats regain power in 2018, 2020, and beyond.
“This Fight…” is a campaign book, but not for Warren herself. Unless I’m very, very wrong about her, Warren has no intention of running for President in 2020 (and what you may have read about this book saying she considered running in 2016 is way overblown); and her re-election as Senator will rest far more on parochial concerns than on the economic partisanship expressed here.
No, this is a campaign book—and campaign book tour—for Democrats, nationally. Warren is one of the very few, in or out of office, who can drive a national case for the party. She is the nationally best-known and most-liked currently Democratic officeholder beside Bernie Sanders (who, it should be noted, still officially sports an “I” for Independent by his name in the Senate), and will remain so until real Presidential campaigns ramp up two years from now.
And, Warren is particularly popular among women. Recent national polls show her favorability well underwater among men, but even more solidly positive among women.
This book, then, is her case for a national Democratic argument—both in its content, and its target. Warren is showing the Democratic Party that they need to fashion a simple, sympathetic case for partisan economic populism, and preach it directly to women.
Warren never says, in the book, that she is speaking to women. But it’s pretty clear that she doesn’t expect the straight, white, working-class men of America to vote for Democrats any time soon. She highlights, and repeatedly invokes, three “ordinary” people in the book: Gina, Kai, and a black man named Michael. Others who merit sympathetic descriptions include single mom Nicole; Aunt Bee; school teacher Mrs. Lee; and Mateo, a gay man. Describing a campaign appearance in New Hampshire, she writes of looking out “at all the little girls and sisters and aunties and grandmas in the audience.”
Promoting the book last week, Warren made the most of a brief New York City stop, appearing on CBS This Morning, The Today Show, and The View—all shows with high female viewership. She also made a point of posting to social media a photo of herself with the new Wall Street “Fearless Girl” statue.
But, Warren isn’t leaning on reproductive rights, equal pay, and other “women’s issues” that drive the left but fail to move the center, and can often alienate women like Gina. Warren gets angry with startling frequency in the book—mad enough, in various places, to want to spit, scream, pound a table, grind her teeth, and bang her head on a table—but always in reaction to the misbehavior of the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
Nor does Warren risk pitting white women against demographically different members of the Democratic coalition. Yes, the book contains strong, if somewhat vague, condemnations against bigotry in all its forms, and a few mentions of the particular damage done to black and Hispanic households by the 2008 economic collapse. But you’ll find no mention of Black Lives Matter in the book, or of policing issues at all. Immigration pops up in passing a handful of times, with no substantive discussion. Voting rights shows up once, fleetingly, in a subordinate clause.
Those and other topics of abiding interest when Democrats talk among themselves are not how Warren hopes to reach Gina and women like her.
No, if I’m right, and Warren wrote this book as a conversation with Gina, the pitch is fairly simple: you know that the country’s wealthy elite are screwing you, but let me show you that the Republicans are, and have been, their partners in that crime.
Republicans, Warren repeats time and again, are on the side of the villainous, mustache-twirling banker at your doorstep. “[A]s more families than ever tumble over a financial cliff and crash on the rocks below… a Republican-led Congress just doesn’t care.” “This is what really burns my behind: the trickle-down Republicans paid no price politically for helping the rich get richer and leaving everyone else behind.” “What has gone so horribly wrong that [Republicans] can offer a big wet kiss to rich people and giant corporations while they spit on students?”
Much of the book is a history lesson driving home the idea that Republicans have taken the robber barons’ side what, in another era, would have properly been termed a class war. The Warren history of America is as follows. Founding Fathers did a fine job, but could not anticipate the problems of economic cycles and a corrupting wealth class. The Great Depression forced the issue, and FDR fixed everything with regulation and public investment. All was well until 1980, when the wealth class and Ronald Reagan set about destroying all that FDR had done; this has destroyed the middle class, and will continue to do so until we return to New Deal-type policies, which we will only do if we vote out the evil Republicans.
It’s a simplistic history, to be sure. (For better histories of the Republican Party’s takeover by corporate America, see “Messengers of the Right” by Nicole Hemmer, “One Nation Under God” by Kevin Kruse, and “Why the Right Went Wrong” by E.J. Dionne, all released last year.) Taken at face value, it leaves a distinct sense that Warren fails to comprehend the many important ways in which today’s economy differs from that of the post-WWII boom. The few policy prescriptions offered don’t do much to dissuade one from that conclusion.
There is also a distinct sense that Warren is offering readers like Gina a lot, for nothing. Warren wants student loan relief, higher wages, protection against corporate abuse, infrastructure investment, and research funding, and the only pay-for we hear is a tax hike on the very wealthy.
But, as I said above: this is a campaign book. That’s not necessarily the place for either sophisticated macro-economic analysis or honest budgetary truths.
Warren also sees no use in subjecting Gina to a dissection of the 2016 election; you’ll find no critiques in “This Fight…” of Hillary Clinton’s message or strategy, no heaping of blame upon FBI Director James Comey, and no lamentations over Russian manipulations.
And, while Warren harshly calls out the bigotry that powered much of Trump’s support, she does so with the assumption that the reader shares her discomfort with that aspect of the campaign.
Instead, she wisely offers Gina an excuse for her vote, and a path over to the Democrats: Trump and Congressional Republicans pulled a “plain old double-switch.” Trump, Warren writes, “called out the anger that people like Gina felt, and he lied about the solutions to their problems.” Then, once elected, he revealed his true colors, appointing Wall Street foxes to guard the hen houses and pursuing the agenda of the corporate elites.
One book is unlikely to convince Gina, Kai, and millions of others like them that they need to side with Democrats against in a class war. But it might convince other Democratic leaders to adopt that argument, and add their voices to it.
