Should Democrats appeal to the center by moving hard left? (with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2019

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For too long, pundits and politicians have talked about the political center as a perfect balance between conservatives and liberals. But this quest for some sort of mythical middle ground between left and right has only succeeded in elevating the interests of the top one percent over everyone else. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal joins Nick to propose a new way of thinking about centrism: a framework of wildly popular policies that directly and significantly improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans who have been left out of economic growth. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is the U.S. Representative from Washington’s 7th congressional district, which includes most of Seattle. She is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Congress. Twitter: @PramilaJayapal Further reading: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/14/democrats-must-reclaim-the-center-by-moving-hard-left-219354 https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Republicans are seen as taking care of the economy better because they are better at
0:06.7	telling the story that they're on your side.
0:09.2	Increasingly there's this giant band between that poverty threshold and the top 10% and those people
0:17.7	can't survive.
0:20.0	We don't talk about economic policy in terms of what is best for the broad swath of
0:25.0	America.
0:26.0	Medicare for all is centrism.
0:28.6	Raising the overtime threshold to include the bottom 80% of workers is centrism.
0:33.6	Moving the minimum wage up to the median wage is centrism.
0:38.1	These are centrist ideas because they will unambiguously
0:42.1	improve the lives of the median family which should be our goal.
0:47.0	From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with
0:58.3	Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101. I'm Jessen Farrell, Senior Vice President at Civic Ventures and former State
1:17.1	legislator from Northeast Seattle. I'm Nick Henauer founder of Civic Ventures.
1:30.0	Nick, do you remember that day that we had a staff meeting in your office and you had this yardstick sitting on your couch.
1:33.6	What was that all about?
1:35.6	The yardstick was this super useful prop
1:40.1	that we've used a bunch of times
1:41.7	and have even brought to meetings with politicians to demonstrate
1:46.1	the difference between ideological centrism and true centrism. And the reason the yardstick is so useful
1:55.0	is that it's a really easy visual metaphor for people
1:59.0	to figure out what it means to talk about the center.
	...

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