The New Blue: A Democrat's Roadmap to the Working Man

By Jonathan Kincaid

We need a Democratic Party that casts a wide tent not because it is urban, but because it represents the average everyday American. We need a government that works for the good of the nation and not just the half of it that votes for them. This book reimagines the working man for the modern era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.B. Kincaid
• Release date: Dec 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781637603444

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Jonathan Kincaid

The New Blue: A Democrat’s Roadmap to the Working Man

Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Kincaid

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

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The contents of this book represent the opinions of the author, and may not reflect the opinions of the publisher, persons, works, companies, or organizations contained within. These opinions are predicated on experience, direct observation, and academic study. This book is not meant to be used in an academic setting and does not present any research findings, though it does contain references to such works within. Cite this work as an editorial only.

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Contents

Introduction

The Income Tax Axe: Destroyer of Wages

Killing Captain Crunch: The Path to Statehood and the End of Colonial Rule

Loving the Weeds of the Garden: Decriminalizing Marijuana

Especially in My Backyard: Local Deregulation and Wealth Reconstruction

Busty Burbs Federal Edition: Ending the Suburban Experiment, Rebuilding Local Wealth

Doing for Country, While it’s Doing for You: Expanding Service Opportunities

Curtail the Federal Department of Education: And the Horse it Rode in on!

Gored By Elephants: Improving Institutions of Democracy

Carving Mount Respect-more: Improving U.S. Indigenous Relations

Better Red Than Dead: Reasonable Socialized Healthcare

Thorium - Green Energy Glows Greener

Idle Cash is the Devil’s Workshop: Privatize Social Security

Be All That You Can Afford: Sensible Military Funding

Tough on Rights: Criminal Justice Reform

Purple Mountain Travesties and Fruitless Plains: Agrarian Reform

Bigger isn’t Better: Corporate Reform

Immigration Reform

Win First, Take the High Ground Later: Reclaiming Labels and Cleaning House

Acknowledgements and Accreditations

Introduction

What I am writing about and who I’m writing it for.

Who am I to speak on this?

What has happened to the average American? It seems that the working man has become a mythical figure in the political discourse of today. I find myself at a crossroads wondering why the moderate majority has gone silent. All of the decision making seems to be getting pushed further and further to the fringe. Our nation is unraveling at the seams in our hour of need. Great change is on the horizon, but much uncertainty remains. The flaws of our systems have never been quite so visible, and it is readily apparent that now is the time for new beginnings. It is time to reimagine the working man and his needs.

These are truly desperate times for our country. Three-hundred thousand dead Americans and counting as the Corona-Virus Pandemic continues to wreak havoc on our health and economic well-being. In times of crisis, we come to depend upon strong leadership. Looking around it seems to be noticeably absent from our government.

The President is refusing to acknowledge the results of a free and fair election. His cabinet staff held a screaming match inside the Oval Office on this very day, where it was suggested that the President resort to martial law to remain in power. Meanwhile, in Congress, an equally disturbing saga continues to unfold. After months of failed stimulus negotiations, they now enter the weekend with a government shutdown as the deadline to appropriate more funds has lapsed. It sounds like the plot of a post-apocalyptic political thriller, but unfortunately, the nightmare is real and we are living in it.

At the time of this writing, we live in a nation that believes it is deeply divided. There is a widely held sentiment that multiple versions of the truth exist and that we live in two different Americas. I’ve been hearing this narrative for years and I have seen it impact every aspect of our communities. Political philosophers would call this phenomenon constituent-sorting, the idea that people of like-political beliefs move to be within proximity of one another, and that their beliefs become strengthened and self-reinforcing. While there is certainly evidence to support this, it is also equally probable that people who live in the same community experience similar problems and hold similar world views because of the circumstances around them.

Within the two Americas, there is a two-party political system that has become ever more polarizing. This is a product of our unfortunate first-past-the-post system of voting. When a candidate only needs 50.1% of the vote to win, interest groups inevitably consolidate until there are only two parties. This has devolved into the completely irrational big-tent parties of the present. Once one party has proclaimed a position on an issue, the opposing party will take the exact opposite position, regardless of the sensibility in making that decision. Figuratively speaking, it seems that we truly have been left with two Americas.

One party adopts the interests of rural citizens, and the other represents the interests of urban citizens. In order to win, they must find enough common ground with the suburban voters in between. I do not have to tell you which party is which because you already know. The very idea that you can associate their identity with this outcome presents a serious problem for a nation built around unity. We are after all the United States of America, it is in our very name. The parties that should be working together, are driving us deeper into division.

The problem begins with the incredulous number of labels that have become equated with our political parties; liberal and conservative, socialist and capitalist, communist and authoritarian, etc. Depending on the moment the label could be derogatory, or a badge of honor depending on its use. Unfortunately, any American could tell you exactly which labels to box the parties into, or at least suggest which direction they lean. These categorizations are typically flawed because these labels are used casually with reckless indifference to their academic ideology. The parties bear no resemblance to their respective labels. A careful analysis demonstrates with clarity that the parties have no consistent logical philosophy on governance and politics.

You cannot in good faith say that a Republican administration that racks up trillions of dollars in deficit spending is conservative. You also cannot say that a Democratic administration that mandated private health insurance is liberal. Spare me the labels and let us return to a time where the conversation on political issues hinged on the basis of reality. Let us talk about what things actually are instead of what they are purported to be. Then we can begin to find some common ground.

Aside from the terms Democrat and Republican, I grant you the use of one solitary concept of ideology, and that is the concept of the two freedoms. The first being the freedom to, and the second being the freedom from. As a matter of supporting individual liberty, I tend to favor the party which most endorses the freedom to position. I often find that freedom from tends to have no physical impact on the restrictor, but rather upon their sensibilities. I am of the belief that laws and governance should respect the rule of logic and reasoning. A civilized government should protect the rights of an unpopular minority to exercise their freedom as much to the extent that it does not infringe upon that of another. As such, I have historically supported the Democratic Party because I find that it is most frequently aligned with these values.

The purpose of this book is to offer up a roadmap for Democrats to rediscover the needs and desires of the working man. It is my goal to chart a pathway towards restoring the American middle-class and bridging the divide between urban and rural interests. America functions best through unity and it is time that we restored our commitment to the social contract. It is my hope that by the end of this book we will come to understand one another better and find opportunities for growth and compromise. This year the Democrats ran on a winning platform of build back better. If they are sincere in this effort, it is my hope that we can mend our divisions and emerge from this crisis with a prosperous future ahead of us. I intend to keep this more as a discussion on the merits rather than a pure exercise in academic veracity. I will provide a few inspirational accreditations at the end and you are welcome to investigate my claims and proposals for yourself. In fact, I encourage it.

Who am I to speak on this?

As this is a political text you knew that this would be provocative. Only a few pages in and I know that many of you are already prepared to pounce. Before you dismiss me as an overeducated liberal elitist, or conservative neoliberal apologist, or whatever term you may use to describe an asshole, let me at least explain my background first. We are not as different as you might believe and whether you are living in urban blue America, or rural red America, I see you, I know you, and I understand your point of view. My goal is to bring us together as a person split between two worlds.

I grew up in a small rural Texas town. It was sizable enough to boast having two rodeos, well perhaps a rodeo and a half as one was just for horse racing. There were only a few thousand people out there, and most of them grew corn as they had done for over a hundred years since the first grist mill was built there.

My neighborhood was among the first new suburbs to pop-up in the town, though it was still within the state of reason. The main street was only a few blocks away. It consisted of a row of about ten storefronts put up in the mid to late 1800s. You could walk down to the grocery store. You could walk to the town library. You could walk to the fire station and the police station. You could walk to the school. You could walk down to the local feed store. Everything was very local. Everyone knew everybody. Kids rode their bikes all over town. People knew their neighbors. Once a year in the fall they would close off the main street for a festival featuring hayrides, pumpkin carving, and local country artists. People drove trucks because they used them for work, and people dressed like cowboys because they actually owned cows. It was the picturesque charming rural community.

It was only a short drive to the highway and you could reach Dallas or Fort Worth in about thirty minutes. At that time there was still some noticeable separation between the two. It was through this conduit that my dad was able to support the family on a factory worker’s wages. He had a great job building stealth bombers out at LTV. It came with good benefits. It afforded all of our bills and my mother was able to stay home with me as a child. One of the last of his kind, my dad worked in the same factory for decades.

Most of the families in my neighborhood were similarly situated. My neighbor down the street built cars out at General Motors. My neighbor across the street worked for a trash bag manufacturer. No one was by any stretch of the imagination rich, but they were all getting by relatively well. There was a great sense of pride in what they had built and what they had accomplished. The national consensus was that of hope for a greater tomorrow.

On the uglier side, our town was known as one of the last places in the United States to integrate their schools. A commemorative light post downtown once marked the location of the community lynching post. The Klu Klux Klan used to hold regular meetings at the local Beefers restaurant. You would think it would be a bastion of hellacious intolerance, and at one point it certainly was. However, much of this was eroded by the time of my youth.

Despite the blight of this legacy, overt racism was not as prevalent you might imagine. The working-class nature of my neighborhood lent itself to great racial diversity. Black, White, Asian, Latino, in our neighborhood it didn’t matter. All the kids could play together. Our fathers all worked together at the same factories. We all attended the same churches and schools. There were a few assholes out there, but they were never celebrated. My next-door neighbors were a lesbian couple. They adopted a child and cashed in on the emu farming business when that trend rolled through the mid-90s. In my senior year of high school, we elected a Black prom king. The biggest conflict in town was primarily over who would be the first to get to lunch on Sundays, the Methodists or the Baptists. Call me biased, but that was a battle frequently won by the Methodists because nobody had to be saved and the pastor was going to cut it off at noon no matter how deep he was into the sermon.

The notion that we were some backwater hellhole of ignorance and racism would have been an egregious stereotype. Yet, I know that this is what most urban readers are thinking about small towns. There was once a time in America when the majority of small towns reflected such a robust and diverse dynamic. The stains of the Confederacy have always lingered over the South, but in those days they were steadily diminishing. The Blue States and Red States of America had far less meaning.

In Texas, we had Democratic governor Ann Richards. Bill Clinton was readily elected president across numerous Southern states. Democrats and Republicans alike would not have readily given up on any state as being unilateral. This notion that states are rigid and unchanging is a relatively new political concept, and I would argue was never true. A Republican president can lose Georgia. A Democratic president can lose Pennsylvania. The past few years have shown us just how dynamic our elections can be and should be.

My soiree into politics happened when I was in the second grade. I served as an election judge in our school’s mock election. Then third-party candidate Ross Perot received the majority of the vote. My parents were both involved in the Perot Campaign. I remember going with my dad to pass out yard signs for gubernatorial candidate Democrat Martin Frost. I recall meeting Geoge Bush Jr. at a local debate. He offered me a donut.

A few years later, I attended the Democratic National Convention when my dad was a delegate. This is where I first met Jesse Jackson and then-Vice President Al Gore who was on his way to receiving the nomination. Politics was in my veins. Nothing felt quite so defeating as watching the results of the 2000 election unfold. It was around this time that my hometown took a dramatic shift for the worst.

Our local school district was rated among the top in the nation by some sort of magazine which featured such articles. The town began to explode with development. There was a great exodus from New York and California. People would sell their modest million-dollar homes in the big cities and then move out to my hometown where they would build row after row of what were fondly referred to as McMansions. They were unsightly suburban castles that now fill the landscape here. The fields of corn and cows grew from a town of 11,000 people to a town of about 80,000 people in a matter of ten years.

The local hometown festival was replaced with a big corporate one. The local businesses could no longer afford to stay open and one by one they shut down. The residential taxes skyrocketed. Rents grew increasingly higher. Home prices doubled and then tripled. The rodeo was torn down to make way for a new school. Those of us who grew up there quickly became acquainted with the reality of the bubble we had been living in. We were no longer welcome in our own town, or at least that is how we began to feel.

My classes at school became noticeably less diverse. The churches became less about community and more about status. Every aspect of life started to become political. Did you attend the best church? Did you drive the nicest car? Did you wear the best clothes? Did you have the biggest house? Did you believe the same things that they believed? This was the price of progress. Where there was once harmony and good nature, there was now contention and competition. 9/11 only made matters worse.

It is no mystery to me why a party that aligns itself with urban interests would struggle to win over rural small-town voters. My upbringing is of course not in itself substantive enough to say that I am qualified to speak on such matters, but it does at least give me an olive branch of common ground between the voters Democrats are trying to win over.

Let us now talk about my adult life. I have a bachelor’s degree in government and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. I have a law degree from Texas A&M. I have a master’s of education in management of technical education from Texas State. I also have a post-graduate certificate in healthcare compliance from Ashworth College in Norcross, Georgia. If education is something that you value or something that you believe lends you credibility, I have a sizable helping of it on my table.

I pay a mortgage on a house in suburbia. I own a piece of land in the middle of nowhere. I’ve lived downtown in an apartment in a big city, and I’ve lived in a friend’s spare bedroom. I have seen the good and the bad in every arrangement.

If you are a person who values experience, I can speak to that as well. I have worked as a high school science teacher in the public school system for approximately six years. I was a real estate agent for about five years. I once owned a small oilfield trucking company. I’ve produced a few of my own musical records and published a science fiction novel. I worked as a clerk in a worker’s compensation firm. I once interned with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. I’ve worked as a technical support operator for an internet servicing company. I’ve stocked shelves at Target. I worked in maintenance at Six Flags. I even used to give guided tours of a nature preserve.

I also spent a few years working for the Caterpillar corporation, building diesel engines and power generators on a factory line. I know what it’s like to stand on your feet for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, getting your hands dirty and turning wrenches. I might argue that at one point in time there was no one else in America that could install an oil pan on a C9 engine as quickly, effortlessly, or efficiently as me. I worked my way up the chain there into a support specialist logistics role. I was proud of what we built there.

You can put away the daggers now. It’s easy to dismiss political opinions under the basis that a person doesn’t understand your point of view. They don’t know your upbringing. They don’t know your profession. They don’t have your education or your experience. Hopefully, I’m less difficult to dismiss than most people. If there should be a staple of credibility that I have missed, I do hope that you kindly suggest to me what that is such that I might obtain that.

Believe me, I understand. I get to hear about these things all the time. Everyone thinks that their problems are unique. If only someone would listen to them, they could fix it. They know what solutions are best and politicians with their same background would as well. Nothing could be further from reality.

Let me be the first to tell you that problems are universal. Problems are systemic. Solutions can and should be applied from multiple sources. A politician who has never stepped outside of their world view, or for that matter yours, will never understand how to fix a broken system. I address you then not as a citizen of Blue America or Red America, but as a person who has seen all walks of life, traversed all fifty states, and been to the edges of the Earth.

I feel then that it is my duty to lay out the groundwork for the return of the yellow-dog Democrat. If you want to start winning again in rural America, here is a map.

The Income Tax Axe: Destroyer of Wages

No taxes on overtime wages

Repeal the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax.

Send out prebate checks to compensate for cost differentials and the poverty level

Repeal payroll taxes to incentivize hiring.

There is nothing that the American factory worker hates more than income taxes and they have every right to be upset about it. In fact, I would bet that buried underneath every other political issue, this is the primary motivator for blue-collar voters. Democrats of late have been catering to this message by saying they will compel the rich to pay their fair share of taxes. Republicans seem to use tax cuts as the solution to all problems. Both parties tip the needle ever so slightly in either direction, but really they exist on the same continuum. The difficult part is getting them to see the alternatives. You don’t have to tax income.

If we’re going to tax income, the single most powerful message a Democrat can offer the working man is to say no taxes on overtime wages. No words have ever sounded so sweet to the American wage earner. I ought to run for congress in Ohio on this slogan alone, I imagine I could turn out the vote. If you are working hard for America, America should be working hard for you. This promise means that you should keep the entirety of the productivity of your excess labor. As the working majority knows, the forty-hour workweek is a cosmic mythical joke. Most of their real-time earnings come from their overtime and holiday pay. For most Americans, this extra income is their saving grace. When they see the amount of taxes being leached out of their overtime checks, it can be incredibly disheartening. It is these moments of disappointment that ignite the Libertarian fantasies of a tax-free world.

The majority of elected officials have no idea that Americans are working fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty-hour work weeks. I can tell you that in the oilfield and in manufacturing these schedules are the norm, not the exception. As disheartening as it is to see, it’s equally frustrating to labor under. Yet there are many among us who desire this level of work because they equate hard work with success and advancement. Taxing their overtime wages says that we do not value their sacrifice. Many aspects of society would be improved if we changed that policy.

That is of course if you don’t just take the full step of eliminating income taxation completely. I had the opportunity to sit in on a taxation policy lecture from then-congressman John Linder, a Republican from Georgia. While I had initially expected to find disdain in every word he said, by the end of the presentation I left persuaded. He had proposed legislation known as The Fair Tax Act. It was given due consideration and even studied by the Obama administration, but it got buried and discarded somewhere along the way. I say it is