Some 2020 planks will be plausible in our political climate. Others will not.

Bernie Sanders, the latest 2020 hopeful to discuss a job guarantee. Citation: Business Insider

Liberals during the Trump era have sensed that the 2020 election may be a bellwether for the future of the Democratic Party. They have noted the party’s leftward turn in recent years and its liberal platform in 2016. Liberals also know that a backlash against Trump, along with demographic changes, may lead to political success in the 2020s and beyond. As a result, they have started to think big, considering programs like job guarantees and universal basic incomes (UBIs) that were impracticable as recently as the Obama presidency.

Basic income has received support in recent years from a number of progressives as a solution to income inequality and the insecurity of the 21st-century economy. A recent article in Slate presented the facts of UBI — a guaranteed monthly cash payment to every citizen in a country. Studies had indicated that even small dollar amounts can improve financial well-being, self-worth, and health outcomes. Even a paltry $64 per month could change families, the authors wrote. At that level, “people received a regular income they could plan around for the first time, which affected their lives in significant ways.”

The problem with UBI is one of politics. UBI is a cash benefit, the least popular type of government program in existence. Unlike the United Kingdom and other European countries and cities, the United States does not already have a tradition of cash benefits. UBI would, more than other types of social program, conflict with America’s flawed but powerful traditional rhetoric about laziness, merit, and the dignity of work. This tradition was a major reason why the New Dealers decided to provide jobs instead of cash to help those afflicted by the Depression, and why earlier plans to give cash benefits to Civil War soldiers were so controversial.

Even attempts at providing a job guarantee, a similar but less radical proposal, have been controversial and fleeting. In a New Republic piece about the job guarantee, Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes argued that although the policy may be the most effective at making a systemic change to the American economy, it is unlikely to earn a chance to prove itself. Drawing on the failed attempts in the 1940s and the 1970s to pass job guarantees, Aigner and Brenes argued that Democrats still lack the right message and the right support system to enact the program.

Why should Democrats again attempt a job guarantee program when earlier attempts failed? The pattern that Aigner and Brenes documented has been a part of the larger pattern of American reform for the past 140 years. Reformers propose legislation, the legislation collapses under the weight of special interests, and then new leaders and conditions emerge to make the earlier propossals a potential reality. Women’s suffrage, agriculture subsidies, hydroelectric dams, and health care reform were all proposed, rejected, and eventually passed decades after their original introductions.

Aigner and Brenes also mentioned the relative lack of an economic crisis: “Major reform of the kind now under consideration has only passed in times of extreme crisis,” and without a crisis, “it is questionable whether the resistance is powerful enough to defeat the donor class, which is violently opposed to a job guarantee.” However, many academics and economists argue that the United States is still in a period of economic and political crisis. The Great Recession is still holding back wages and keeping large areas of the country in economic destitution. As recent poll numbers on a job guarantee and high taxes for the wealthy show, the electorate is still anxious enough about the economy to push for significant changes. The desire to shatter the status quo did not disappear with the election of Donald Trump.

Kirsten Gillibrand’s job guarantee proposal, along with similar bills by Senators Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, is a significant first step. What is needed next is concrete, dedicated study and planning from the world of academics and liberal think tanks. These groups need to spend the time until the 2020 election studying and debating issues raised by a job guarantee, the effects on the private sector, and the all-important mechanisms of paying for the program. Job guarantee research needs to be prioritized over the smart but less practical universal basic income. One day, when artificial intelligence has forced the vast majority of workers out of their jobs, UBI may need to be reconsidered. But its time is in the distant future, and the time of the job guarantee is 2020.