DOWN TO BASICS

The election results are in. I am particularly sorry about the defeat of Joe Sestak, whom I considered the best candidate in the country this year. I hope he'll run for governor in four years or otherwise find another way to serve.

But there are bigger considerations before us. Bob Herbert's New York Times column of today discusses a new book, Winner Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, on a topic that has been much on my mind for some time.

The authors say, as quoted by Herbert, "Over the last generation, more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich. The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind." And labor unions, which gave us a middle class and preserved it for us, have dwindled greatly.

Political choices in this country, the authors argue, have made these things happen. That went on in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

This is why mommy and daddy both have to work today, maybe several jobs each, in order to get by. Until a few decades ago, it wasn't so.

If mommy wants to work, fine. But if she doesn't, yet has to, why are we listening to rightists who say that liberals are costing us our traditional freedoms? It is the liberals who would like to do something about these conditions, though too often they lack the understanding or the spine to tackle them.

There is also the wee matter of free trade and globalization, which the authors think less relevant to the outcomes they write of. Free trade is sending our jobs to countries with low wages and lowering our standard of living. Globalization is marginalizing a billion humans into abject and hopeless poverty, while their resources are stolen from under them to enrich the West -- but, increasingly, to enrich the few in the West.

The Obama administration has worked competently and has accomplished a good bit, though it has communicated its aims poorly. But we have seen in this year's vote that the electorate doesn't understand what is being done to it. Make any move that could inconvenience international corporations or raise the taxes of the rich or give everybody healthcare, and you will be inundated in vomit from voters terrified of "socialism" and gay matrimony and Sharia law in our cities. Reasonable, moderate, piecemeal measures cannot succeed against politicians and corporate interests that have huge money to psych us out and promote hysteria.

We can learn two major things from the "tea party movement": that you have to speak to the people's emotions -- and that when they are sufficiently aroused, nothing can withstand their will. So far we have been played by the monied interests. But what they have used against the rest of us can also be used against them. We might start by asking people whether they like working three jobs to make billions for somebody else? And why shouldn't that be an issue?

There must be a populist-militant-patriotic-egalitarian alternative to what we have, not socialist but pro-small business and wielding some nationalist demagoguery against the superrich and their worldwide activities at our expense. It must oppose oligarchy at home and around the planet, because oligarchy is the death of liberal capitalism and of democracy. The better people among the tea partiers -- the ones who are afraid but not hateful -- will join it.

And it must have a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2012, not just another Woodrow Wilson but someone who is enough of a Huey Long to shake things up.

There is a market today for a politics beyond corporate-owned "practical" and "moderate" liberalism. Our government cannot serve all tendencies. It must serve either everyday people or the oligarchs. The rich get richer and richer because it takes money to make money. The way we are going, we may end up in a world of 800 trillionaires and 10 billion wage slaves.

Putting it in these terms may be too extreme for a campaign slogan, but we must eat the rich or starve.

We cannot leave it to Washington, because Washington is owned by Wall Street and will compromise away anything that is really "change." We cannot leave it to Wall Street because Wall Street is owned by big money that has no loyalty to America's well-being and will connive with keen skill against anything that can reduce its discretion or threaten its largesse.

Avoiding old-style proletarian leftism, we must make a down-home case for restoring a free and democratic middle class country in an ever freer and more democratic world, because we are all interconnected and what happens anywhere has ramifications everywhere.