How Kamala Harris Is Creating a New Majoritarian Center

The
EITC, for example, has long been an essential thread in our social safety net,
lifting millions of families out of poverty by supplementing low-wage pay. So
it sure feels like it leans to the left. And yet … first proposed by Richard
Nixon and signed into law by Gerald Ford, the EITC is essentially a variation
on Milton Friedman’s negative income tax—about as economically right a pedigree
as a policy could have. Furthermore, in practice, this tax credit is as much a
subsidy to low-wage employers as it is to low-wage workers, helping to
perpetuate an exploitive business model that increases profits at the expense
of the working poor.

And
this isn’t the only Harris proposal that challenges standard categories. On
housing, Harris proposes working with public, private, and not-for-profit
developers to build an additional three million affordable housing units over
the course of her first term, while “cut[ting] red tape” (i.e., deregulation) and
imposing new regulations on corporate property owners who drive up prices by
hoarding supply or by colluding on rents. In addition, she proposes to help
first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 toward a down payment. Because this ideologically
nuanced fusion of regulation, deregulation, public investment, and market
incentives would benefit millions, it clearly serves the interests of the
majoritarian center. And while neoliberal critics might dismiss any role for
government in directing the housing industry as too far left, there remains “strong
bipartisan support for federal action”
on housing affordability.

The
same is true of Harris’s pledge to “build” on the progress made through the
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation
Reduction Act, and the American Rescue Plan, as well as to continue the Biden administration’s
practices in favor of organized labor and against unfair trade. This embrace of
industrial policy—of (gasp) state planning—might reasonably be intuited as
ideologically left. Yet many of the policies required to implement it (for
example, hundreds of billions of dollars of grants and loans to giant
corporations) arguably lean to the right. So which is it? Republican Senator
Marco Rubio makes a compelling case that industrial policy, properly done, is
inherently neither
left nor right, and I totally
agree. That said, the policy objectives are all broadly progressive, broadly popular,
and if properly done, broadly beneficial.