Maverick politician Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) is a controversial name among his peers in Congress. In a talk Thursday, he proudly wore that controversy as a badge of honor.
Invited to campus by the Center for Political Leadership, Innovation and Service, Moulton is a Harvard graduate and a decorated former Marine who now represents Massachusetts’ 6th congressional district. Symbolically, he also represents something else—the pragmatic, anti-establishment center that seeks to widen the Democratic base and overhaul the Democratic leadership.
“We need to start winning again,” Moulton said. “We need to recognize that [President Donald] Trump’s really bad, and Republicans are running this country into the ground, but they still voted for him and not us. We need to make some changes ourselves.”
Unlike some mainstream Democrats, Moulton is not focused on resisting Republican policies and the Trump administration. Nor is he focused on enacting progressive laws. Instead, in today’s political reality where Republicans control Washington and most state legislatures, he said his single priority is to win back the House of Representatives.
Although a string of electoral victories in Alabama and Virginia have enlivened the Democratic Party—with some predicting a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterm elections—Moulton cautioned Democrats not to be too hopeful.
“We’re at a structural disadvantage,” Moulton said. “We've got to win Republican districts, and that’ll be hard with our current leadership team.”
Moulton’s criticism of the Democratic establishment is nothing new. His political career started with unseating a nine-term Democratic incumbent, and he was one of 63 House Democrats who voted in 2016 to oust Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as minority leader. Speaking to Duke students and faculty, Moulton renewed his criticisms of the party elder.
“Leader Pelosi is a very nice lady and, in her own words, a master legislator,” Moulton said. “But she is a very good Republican scapegoat. Her strategy is to just complain about Republicans and Trump, and that’s not a winning strategy.”
Instead, he said Democrats should strike bipartisan compromises and gain broader appeal. One of the best ways to do that, he said, was on guns.
“There are absolutely bipartisan ways to make America safer,” he said, citing a recent Quinnipiac University poll that showed 97 percent of Americans want universal background checks for gun buyers. He also called for a screening system similar to that of Japan, which has one of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the world.
Although such gun reform may have strong support, some of the congressman’s other proposed policies were less popular. For example, he broke protocol by calling for changes to Social Security—long considered the “third rail” of American politics—and his criticism of the recently overhauled tax code drew rebuke from Republicans in the audience.
“Half the people I know work for either [General Motors] or Ford, and a plant coming back to Michigan is really good news for the people that I care about,” said audience member Mary Rzepka, a second year master's student in public policy and a former Detroit accountant. “The corporate tax break has the ability to help more Americans than any individual tax break could, so help me understand why you don’t think that’s gonna be beneficial.”
Moulton explained that the benefits of the tax bill are not reaching most Americans. Most corporations are giving small, one-time bonuses instead of raising wages, and gains in the stock market tend to reward only the “uber-wealthy” investors. When Rzepka said everyone with a 401(k) retirement savings plan was a shareholder and accused Moulton of “false rhetoric,” the congressman shot back.
“I hate to break it to you, but this [audience] is the one percent, and the people who are really hurting in this country don’t have 401(k)s,” Moulton said. “If you spend some time in middle America and see the millions of Americans who are really struggling, you’ll see that the stock market’s not gonna help them.”
He also said the tax bill revealed the lack of diversity in the current Congress.
“It’s very easy for a 70 year old to vote for this tax bill, because he—it’s almost guaranteed to be a “he”—will get a great little tax cut in the next seven years,” Moulton said. “Then that cut’s going to expire—and he might expire too—and our generation’s going to have to foot the bill.”
Moulton, speaking to a room of mostly undergraduate and graduate students, called for more younger people to run for political office. The legislatures must reflect their constituents, he said, and the lawmakers should be ones who have the most stake in long-term issues like tax policy, welfare reform and climate change.
He admitted that working in Washington was difficult. But to him, he said, serving in government was a civic duty and a public service akin to his four tours as a Marine in Iraq. He pointed to the Stoneman Douglas High School students, who are lobbying for gun reform in Florida and nationwide, as an example.
“Voting is the bare minimum,” Moulton said. “Go volunteer for a campaign. Think about running yourself. That’s what I did.”
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