PROGRESS IN THE AGE OF COVID-19.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: VOX POPULIST

In the February and March primary elections, a cabal of backroom political geniuses rushed out a coordinated campaign, screeching that impending doom awaits the Democratic Party if it actually runs on democratic ideas like making sure people have health care and enough money to get by. Too bold, they wailed, too socialistic-y sounding, too... scary!

Clueless billionaire Mike Bloomberg actually hurled the "communism" smear at Bernie Sanders's policy ideas. Better to go slow with Joe, they warbled--he's the safe choice, a trusted insider who'll excite voters with his steady-as-she-goes conventionality.

Then, KABLOOEY! In a flash, conventionality started coughing, gasping, and dying. Instantly, the public was clamoring for (and even the GOP-controlled Senate was voting for) the very remedies that Biden & Company were so loudly decrying as extremist.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt taught Herbert Hoover in 1932, in times of widespread troubles, ordinary folks begin to understand that the status quo is Latin for "the mess we're in." And that's when they open up to nonestablishment thinking.

Since Wall Street hucksters crashed our economy more than a decade ago, middle-class and poor families are being intentionally crushed by corporate and governmental decisions imposed by plutocratic elites, creating an untenable, ever-widening level of inequality. That's where the big "extremist" proposals being put forth by progressive forces come.

America's inequality crisis--now made much more pressing and painful by our aloof "leaders" mishandling the coronavirus pandemic--cannot be met by small-ball political tinkering and legalistic tweaks to failed systems. Whatever Biden and his old-guard contingent do, or fail to do, this is no time for progressives to back off; we must, instead, become even more aggressively progressive.

While Sanders, Warren, and the other Democratic presidential contenders who offered bold democratic ideas didn't win, their ideas clearly did. Populist proposals entirely dominated the election debate and, as polls and the recent votes on ballot questions show, they're now mainstream with majority backing, including from some Republicans.

Among these ideas: a wealth tax, green jobs and infrastructure, student-loan forgiveness, equal access to broadband Internet for rural areas and poor neighborhoods, universal basic income, and Medicare for All. Such popular programs stand as a readymade New Deal/Fair Deal action agenda for America's...