On the day after the 2020 election polls closed, ILSR co-director Stacy Mitchell joined activist Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, and Scot Nakagawa, a senior partner of ChangeLab, on The Laura Flanders Show. They discussed the legacy of this year’s election, takeaways from the preliminary results, and the work that all three activists are continuing to do regardless of the outcome.
Stacy begins by noting the unprecedented turnout of the election, as well as the results of a few key ballot referendums, such as the regulation of payday lenders in Nebraska, taxation of the wealthy in Arizona to pay for education, and passage of a $15/hour minimum wage requirement in Florida. She explains that,
What’s so interesting about this election is that there seems to be some fairly clear support for policies that would help working people really across the board, including in some fairly red places, and yet [there’s] not an alignment between that impulse and the political parties.
Stacy goes on to talk about the ways in which the death of neoliberalism and the ideological gap that creates will potentially shape future Biden administration policy around antitrust and monopoly. She specifically highlights the recent House Antitrust subcommittee’s report on Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, saying,
The work of that committee and what it showed about the role of government and structuring the economy is incredibly powerful, and the question now is, if there is an incoming Biden administration, are you going to act on those policy recommendations? Because my feeling about the Democratic party is that they focus too much on campaigns and not enough on winning votes by actually delivering policy.
Stacy also highlights ILSR’s State and Local Policy Guide as a proposed alternative structure to our economy and government in a world struggling with the aftermath of decades of neoliberal policy. She argues that
One of the real problems… is the tyranny of the expert class of the economists who have driven trade policy, who’ve driven monopoly policy, who’ve driven all of these subsidies and tax advantages for big corporations and wealthy people under a set of economic theories that has nothing to do with the real world. And people who live in the real world have a much better understanding of how these forces work.
Finally, Stacy poses a question to every American:
In terms of the future of democracy, we are at a really crucial inflection point. The question is, can we do the work and the organizing for a kind of renewal?
Watch the full interview below.
Photo via The Laura Flanders Show.
If you like this post, be sure to sign up for the monthly Hometown Advantage newsletter for our latest reporting and research.
