The Pareto Principle-80 percent of the outcomes are achieved by the first 20 percent of effort. Closing the last 20 percent of the outcomes requires 80 percent of the work.

Under the post-war, post depression consensus, the policies of the New Deal handled 80 percent of lefty outcomes, especially for white folk. What did the New Deal give us? Big, foundational wins include:

• Anti-trust laws to keep any one business from becoming so powerful it could eliminate competition.
• A legal framework for supporting and protecting unions.
• The foundation for regulating businesses for worker safety and dignity.
• Public investment in communities, transportation, and education.
• Wealth tax. Real taxes, not toilet tissue taxes.

With constraints on income inequality and some ground rules for the economy, the left could turn its attention to achieve the last 20 percent: the fight over who could participate fully and without fear in basic civic life. Who can vote without fear. Who you can marry. Who gets included in equal protection under the law. Basically the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s and the women’s movement of the 70’s. If we hadn’t lost Martin Luther King Jr. to assassination, the 70’s might also have had an economic movement as well.

It is always worth noting that MLK was eliminated just as his attention was turning towards economic justice. That doesn’t seem accidental.

When the assault on the New Deal consensus began to gain real traction with the election of Regan, the left didn’t regroup. We still believed in the basic economic structures and agreements established through the New Deal, it’s just that the types of people that bubble up in leadership in the largest organization of the left didn’t notice how those economic policies were eroding because the erosion worked in their favor.

Jeff Bezos famously paid himself $80k a year, but had all the stock in Amazon as an asset he could borrow against. When you have money coming in as a loan, that money isn’t taxed, so he can spend like one of the top five richest people in the world and get taxed like a well-paid secretary.

And here we are, squabbling and pointing fingers at each other over the last 20 percent of the outcomes we would like to see, which no one agrees on perfectly, and ignoring the 80 percent of the outcomes we want, which EVERYONE agrees on.

What are those outcomes that have damn near universal approval from anyone in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution?

• Get money out of politics
  • Corporations are not people – end citizens united
  • End lobbying
  • Ban elected officials from individual stock trading. ALL elected officials from President to dog catcher
  • No more PACs
  • Full and complete transparency in money coming in and money going out of a campaign, with defined penalties
• Tax everyone according to the same rules.
  • Simplify the tax code by eliminating loopholes and ending the practice of using taxes to incentivize behavior.
  • Especially no more tax loopholes to essentially subsidize industries with record profits.
• Reassert the rights to free speech and free assembly granted by the Constitution by protecting the right to organize.

Simply put, the 80 percent solution is to make sure everyone is playing the same game. If we addressed these three basic points, the pressure on the last 20 percent of what we seek to achieve would ease up considerably. Reclaiming that 80 percent would also give us the breathing room to keep dragging society towards, if not acceptance, than at least a strong not my circus, not my elephants vibe.

There are other, universally impactful things that would be good, but might start to splinter folks off. Banning gerrymandering. A re-investment in the public good through infrastructure, libraries, community spaces, etc. Reinstating the fairness doctrine or otherwise demanding clarity about what is factual news and what is a group of folks shooting the shit and talking out their hindquarters.

I think these add-ons are important, but if we want overwhelming pressure in a French Revolution without the guillotine kind of way, then we have to start with the things that the voters of Ohio are just as enthusiastic about as the voters of Vermont.

So the TLDR? Bernie has been right all along, and the fact that the Democratic Party didn’t recognize what was happening and didn’t adjust accordingly is political malpractice. If we handle the 80 percent, there is a path forward. If we continue putting our efforts into the last 20 percent, we might as well send ourselves to the gulag.