Hmmmm.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/mexico-and-the-road-us-democrats?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61579&post_id=164825474&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNzczMzg3LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxNjQ4MjU0NzQsImlhdCI6MTc0ODg1OTA3MiwiZXhwIjoxNzUxNDUxMDcyLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjE1NzkiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.fauQal9uaxnY5nNPi3YNODA8966OfnFK69nA6fCoxV0&r=1nfyj&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=emailMexico and the Road U.S. Democrats Can Never Take
The promise and peril of Claudia Sheinbaum’s working-class agenda.
Since its heterodox left came to power in 2018, Mexico has put the working class’s material interests first. But it hasn’t stopped there. It has doggedly incarnated the priorities and values of working-class people, very much including their prejudices and aversions.
But if you raise working-class incomes while keeping fiscal discipline, somebody has to pay. In Mexico, that “somebody” is the professional managerial class. Over his tenure, AMLO systematically dismantled some 280 “fideicomisos”—government trust-funds that, for the most part, bankrolled the lifestyles and priorities of Mexico’s right-thinking elites. Funds earmarked for everything from scientific research and independent film to sustainable energy, space exploration, women’s studies, biodiversity protection and elite sports were zeroed-out and their balances swept into the treasury to bankroll spending for the working class.
The result has been the kind of redistribution—from the managers’ pockets directly into their own—that working-class people can’t get enough of. Labor’s share of Mexico’s national income rose from 26% of GDP in 2018 to 31% by the end of 2023.
The Mexican left have long since realized that working-class people aren’t interested in abstract questions of identity—racial or sexual. So while Morena did deliver, for instance, on same-sex marriage and some gender equality measures, it’s always known better than to adopt the phraseology of the identitarian left. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine Claudia Sheinbaum getting tripped up by a question about whether to give transgender prisoners access to state-funded gender affirming care. Working-class Mexicans aren’t signed up with the crazier extremes of the woke agenda—and neither is Morena.