Kotek’s attack on Preschool For All may as well be Trump’s
Oregon Democrats want to take money from preschoolers and hand it to millionaires 💰
Elite capture of Oregon’s government is fueling austerity and paving the way for fascism. Nothing illustrates this better than the nasty little coup Governor Tina Kotek and her motley crew of state senators and representatives recently attempted against the people of Multnomah County.
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek wrote to Multnomah County Commissioner Jesica Vega Pederson on June 10 and attacked the county’s Preschool for All program. Kotek claimed in her letter that the program’s funding mechanism, a progressive tax on Multnomah County’s highest income earners, was driving said income earners away from the county. Her argument relies on decades of right-wing fearmongering and is almost completely incorrect, but that didn’t stop Kate Lieber, Kathleen Taylor, and Mark Meek from sneaking in a last-second amendment to Senate Bill 106 to kill the staggeringly popular Preschool for All program in Multnomah County.
Two things about this piqued my interest; first, these politicians are all Democrats despite their apparent right-wing goals and motives. Second, they’re trying to circumvent Oregon’s democratic process by using the state government to gainsay Multnomah County voters.
As Rebekah wrote about late last month, these Oregon Democrats fail to do their jobs. This session alone, a Democratic supermajority couldn’t find funding for critical housing programs and couldn’t pass a critical transportation package that would prevent our shoddy infrastructure from getting worse.
Ostensible liberals making an enormous massive rightward tack is concerning enough on its own, doubly so when said movement flies in the face of home rule and democratic self-determination, triply so when an openly authoritarian president is similarly abusing power at the national level.
Imagine you hadn’t read those first two paragraphs. If I told you that a group of state-level politicians tried to defund education and childcare in a major city so they could cut taxes for a small group of very wealthy residents, what party would you assume those politicians belonged to?
At the risk of sounding like a “both parties are the same” guy, I do have to hand it to them here: Oregon Democrats are, knowingly or not, carrying out Republican policy. That’s a bad sign for a party searching for a political identity after the 2024 election!
I’m far from a Democratic Party devotee, but they are, for better or for worse, the only national electoral opposition to the rising American fascist movement. It’s hard to imagine a disciplined center-left party allowing this sort of thing to happen at a time like this. I won’t sugarcoat it: if Democrats are willing to politically self-immolate in the midst of authoritarian takeover so people earning well into the six figures can save 1.5% a year, we’re well and truly fucked.
I’m no strategist, but it seems to me that empowering your base, building government capacity, and improving affordability are the building blocks of a sustainable political vision. For that matter, what is the Democratic Party’s fundamental vision? What values underpin these sorts of decisions?
For one thing, Democrats want to write good policy. Fair enough, I want to be governed by good policy. But their obsession with “good” policy corrupts their definition of what good is and, ultimately, ends up occluding the good results their policies are supposed to achieve. More often than not, they end up accomplishing nothing at all, which only entrenches the status quo and makes existing problems deeper–conveniently further enriching the rich. Over time, this wealth friendly non-result has become an end in itself.
As the neoliberal order fades, Democrats like Kotek are missing the forest for the trees. By kowtowing to a small group of elites in real estate and finance, they’re sealing their political fate.
The fact of the matter is that people are sick of being sold out and lied to. Good policy is meaningless when voters are tired of a feckless and unserious party that jumps to sell them out every time a donor yanks their leash. Especially when the opposition party articulates a vision, disgusting and racist as that vision may be.
When the driving theory behind Republican policymaking is “let’s make people angrier and dumber while siphoning power from voters to elites,” it certainly feels like Democrats aren’t an opposition party so much as a junior coalition member. It’s a self-defeating political theory: why shouldn’t voters cut out the middleman and just vote for Republicans?
My other major concern is how cavalier Democrats seem to be in trying to abuse the state government’s power to meddle in local affairs. This sort of top-down governance is philosophically and politically upstream of the executive overreach we’ve all seen on the news the last few months. Fundamentally, the motivation behind the SB106 amendment and using ICE to terrorize sanctuary cities is the same: the people are too stupid to govern themselves.
Tina Kotek and Mark Meek are fully on the same side as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller in that they all believe elites and politicians need to keep the people in line. It’s a profoundly dangerous and arrogant theory of political power, and establishment Democrats like Kotek are doing nothing more than paving the way for fascists when they operate in this way.
It’s beyond disturbing that America’s nominal opposition party is behaving this way, but it’s hardly surprising. Democrats have, time and again, demonstrated that mass incarceration is their priority despite paying lip service to progressives. From the Obama and Biden administrations’ overfunding of ICE to Democrat politicians gleefully siccing police on the people they’re meant to represent, it’s clear that any real opposition to fascist thought in the American political system needs to come from the bottom.
Ironically, the Multnomah County preschool for all program is just the type of grassroots political involvement we need to combat fascism in the United States, which is what makes Oregon Democrats’ attack on it so galling. If fascism relies on our being mad, stupid, and divided, it’s hard to think of a better antidote than a self-organized ballot initiative to improve education and reduce childcare costs. Politicians like Tina Kotek and Mark Meek who can’t grasp this obvious fact simply have no business leading anyone, least of all in our current political climate.
The attack on preschool for all is an existential threat to the Democratic Party. Tina Kotek and Mark Meek and their ilk need to be strongly disciplined by their party for betraying their constituents because if party Democrats don’t do it, voters will. These sorts of shady backroom handout schemes for the in-group of investors and business elites are precisely what led to Democrats’ credibility crisis and faceplanting in recent elections. Ultimately, though, the situation is simpler than any of that: if Democrats are willing to sell their constituents out like this, they’re just fascists holding rainbow flags. And Americans deserve better.