Creating opportunity must be Dems’ focus

The party has to offer policies to level the playing field, fix a system that penalizes bottom 80 percent of society

For those of us raised upper-middle class, to read Richard Reeves “Dream Hoarders” is to realize you haven’t accomplished a damn thing. I have a career I love — all made possible by unpaid internships I could take because my parents could pay my expenses over the summer. People respect my BA from Bowdoin College — which I could get into because I went to an expensive private high school, had an SAT tutor, and got extra math help the minute I got a “B.”

I’ve been able to outcompete people born less well-off. I’m not going to pretend I earned it. As “Dream Hoarders” and academic studies show, people born to families in the top 10 percent are likely to stay there. People further down the economic food chain are likely to stay put, too. Class lines are hard, and the trend is getting worse.

Less economically well-off people, then, could be forgiven for thinking the system is, as our president puts it, rigged. They’re right. They don’t have a fair opportunity to compete. No matter how smart they are and no matter how hard they work, someone born richer is going to get that high-paid, prestigious job or outbid them for that house in the neighborhood with great schools.

Opportunity — to work hard and make a better life for yourself and your family, to move up in the world, to do better than your parents did — is what’s missing in America.

That’s why opportunity must be the Democrats’ focus. It must shine through their messaging, sure, but also their actions, platform and proposals. It is a winner electorally. More importantly, it is what our country desperately needs.

A key point: An opportunity agenda is distinct from the inequality message that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont made the centerpoint of his 2016 campaign. To be clear, Sanders is not wrong — America’s wealth and income are grossly overconcentrated at the top, and, again, the trend lines are going in the wrong direction. Yet a focus on inequality will fail for two reasons.

First, it is pessimistic. Successful Democrats — like Presidents Obama, Clinton and Carter — rode optimism and excitement to victory. Barack Obama’s 2008 election was accompanied by so much excitement he had to make affirmative efforts to tamp down expectations before he was sworn in. As we saw in 2016, fear and grievances don’t bring Democratic voters to the polls. Excitement does. Couple that with the fact that Americans do not dislike rich people, but rather want to join them, and you have a message that doesn’t resonate.

Second, the focus on inequality misdiagnoses the problem, so it will ultimately fall on deaf ears. The issue isn’t just the greedy “millionaires and billionaires.” The gains of the modern economy aren’t just going to the top 1 percent, they’re going to the top 20 percent. And the problem isn’t that the top quintile isn’t paying its fair share of taxes — though it could absolutely pay more — but that the advantages its members had growing up enables them to simply outcompete people in the classes below.

The “solution” posited by a focus on inequality doesn’t fix America’s problem.

So what would an opportunity agenda look like? Democrats should look at all of the choke points where the system tilts against the bottom 80 percent and seek to level the playing field. There is no shortage of concrete policy proposals. There’s funding universal pre-K, so that children of the 80 percent don’t start out life a step behind. There’s easing zoning rules, so higherdensity housing can go up in good school districts and less-wealthy people can afford them. There’s increasing subsidies for poorer people to take unpaid internships. I’d like to see an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that people who do a hard day’s work get a good day’s pay.

Policy experts have come up with hundreds of good ideas. The key is for Democrats to frame all of them — and enact all of them — under the banner of opportunity.

Shortly after my niece was born, I saw a show filmed in prison featuring a baby girl born to an incarcerated woman. In today’s America, it doesn’t matter how smart, how talented, how hard working that baby grows up to be. My niece — the child of attentive parents, going to a great school, with a network of well-connected adults ready to help her every step of the way — is going to win any contest with that child. It’s not a fair fight. That such a dynamic is now the rule is simply un-American.

A successful Democratic agenda will push for a time when the most important day in woman’s life isn’t the day she’s conceived, but the day she proves what she can achieve. Democrats must reintroduce opportunity to America.