The Democratic race is basically over. Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders in New York's Democratic presidential primary, shrinking Sanders' already-slim chance of taking the nomination to the almost imperceptible. So as she barrels towards Philadelphia, I'd like to offer Clinton a constructive criticism that could perhaps bridge the divide between her and Bernie Sanders' supporters: Don't be so averse to talking about economics.
And I don't mean economics in policy terms. I mean economics in moral terms. There is a certain strain of gnostic mysticism in American thought, a belief that things like values and moral character are entirely removed from our economic circumstances. This is a problem that plagues Clinton as much as anyone.
"[Clinton] does not talk about economics as the principal foundation to politics, the way that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others in the populist left do," BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer wrote in a deeply sympathetic January profile. In fact, Cramer suggests Clinton is actually motivated by an almost achingly decent desire to remake Americans' human-to-human interactions for the better. What's particularly interesting is how this places Clinton on the political spectrum: "The debate that has gone on — between those who say mostly on the left, 'Everything is economic,' and those mostly on the right who say, 'Everything is cultural' — are really missing it," Clinton told Cramer. "I mean, it is both. There is a level of economic security and opportunity that is essential to human dignity. But that doesn't translate into meaning and purpose for one's life."
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This is a philosophy long held by Clinton. Back in the early 1990s, she called for "a new politics of meaning" and "a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring." Turning that into practical policy proved difficult, however. As Michael Kelly documented in another profile in 1993, Clinton's guru on this topic — a rabbi and writer with the liberal Tikkun Magazine named Michael Lerner — suggested a host of ideas: having government agencies write regular ethical impact reports, issue PSA campaigns to expound on the idea of the common good, and train a new corp of worker representatives and therapists to push the new caring ethos.
Kelly's profile was a kind of mirror image of Cramer's and treated Clinton's "do-gooder-ism" with a breezy contempt. But it hit on the silliness of trying to translate this stuff into practical policy. Stuck between the left's "everything is economic" and the right's "everything is cultural," Clinton just ends up bastardizing both.
The problem is that conservatives are probably correct to believe that government has no role in providing meaning and purpose to life; those ideals are just too mysterious for technocratic policymaking. (Would that conservatives remembered this when it comes to "marriage promotion.") But if Clinton really wanted to create a moral society, she would be better off just embracing the left.
The Warren-Sanders contingent believes that while the government can't directly provide meaning or purpose, it can provide the structural circumstances to encourage them: employment for everyone, economic security and social insurance, and freedom from want. If people don't constantly fear losing their jobs, homes, or livelihoods, they'll be able to demand better compensation and conditions from their employers, driving wealth and incomes in a more egalitarian direction. Clinton evidently believes in the importance of economic security, too, but only because it ensures basic "human dignity," which is fundamentally different from morality.
In that 1993 interview with Kelly, Clinton described a moral logic that starts with the individual and radiates outward. Treat other people kindly. Don't tell racist jokes. Thank the woman who cleans the restroom in your office — and then learn to wonder how much she gets paid to work that overnight shift and whether she gets decent child care. It's deeply admirable in its way, but it puts the cart before the horse.
A more equal economy would reverse Clinton's equation: Instead of starting with a personal morality that must act against economic forces, it would reshape economic forces so they encourage morality.
Conservatives, of course, seek to shrink government: They believe its job is to get out of the way, and that creating jobs or providing everyone a baseline of material security only undercuts meaning, purpose, and virtue. Their vision of meaning and purpose is far crueler than Clinton's.
But she herself is left in a kind of unmoored no-man's-land between these two poles, seeking to expand government maybe a little bit, while emphasizing "love and kindness" as she puts it. Clinton might find that Warren and Sanders' singular focus on economics, far from being incomplete, is the one great contribution government and politics can make to fostering the moral society she envisions.
