Why Nancy Pelosi's Comments About Capitalism Disappointed Progressives

Democrats are clamoring to harness the energy of millennial progressive activists, who mostly favored Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the presidential primary.

But an exchange between a college student and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at a CNN-hosted town hall on Tuesday night illustrates how challenging that can be in practice.

Responding to a question about whether Democrats could adopt more progressive economic positions, Pelosi launched into an academic explanation of American capitalism that critics derided as tone-deaf in the current populist environment.

Trevor Hill, a 20-year-old sophomore public policy major at New York University, first pointed to a Harvard poll from April showing that 51 percent of people aged 18 to 29 do not support capitalism.

“That’s not me asking you to make a radical statement about capitalism but I’m just telling you that my experience is the younger generation is moving left on economic issues,” Hill explained.

“But I wonder if there’s anywhere you feel the Democrats could move farther left to a more populist message, the way the alt-right has sort of captured this populist strain on the right wing ― if you think we could make a more stark contrast to right-wing economics?”

“I thank you for your question. But I have to say, we’re capitalist ― and that’s just the way it is,” Pelosi responded with a chuckle. “However, we do think that capitalism is not necessarily meeting the needs with the income inequality that we have in our country.”

The California Democrat went on to decry the departure of American capitalism from a “stakeholder” system where worker pay grew in tandem with productivity, and the current “shareholder-driven” model that has depressed pay and produced record inequality. It was an analysis that would not have been out of place in a column by liberal economist Paul Krugman.

But Pelosi’s efforts to defend capitalism suggested she interpreted Hill’s query as a request for Democrats to abandon the free market entirely.

And she did not address the question of whether the Democratic Party has room to be more economically progressive, or otherwise present the party’s vision for confronting the inequality she described in such detail.

Pelosi’s remarks, which you can watch above in full, immediately drew jeers from progressive critics on Twitter, some of whom turned Hill’s name into a hashtag.

Source: Why Nancy Pelosi’s Comments About Capitalism Disappointed Progressives