Jobs guarantee fails – Intense lobbyist and Republican opposition renders any implementation a pipe dream.

The debate between “guaranteed” jobs or income played out in the 1972 primary between Humphrey and McGovern. Each candidate battled for the soul of the Democratic Party, with two competing versions for resolving unemployment and poverty. In Humphrey’s corner were the NAACP and AFL-CIO. Remnants of the anti-war movement and  backed McGovern.

There were no winners. After Humphrey’s primary attacks, McGovern , a third as large as Nixon’s guaranteed income plan (a precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit), which  led the fight against. Then came the larger economic crisis of the 1970s: rising unemployment, high inflation, and stagnating wages. Democrats made an unusual move, endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the 1976 platform, the first real attempt to establish a job guarantee since the late New Deal. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill called it the “centerpiece.” Voters responded by electing a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a 74-seat majority in the House, and Jimmy Carter, who officially committed to support the bill.

But the same veterans of the Great Society killed it. Carter blamed high energy prices for “stagflation,” as well as unions—the largest army in the Democratic base. Despite support from civil rights and religious groups, Carter refused to provide an enforcement mechanism for the legislation, which passed, but in a gutted, toothless form, just like the earlier Employment Act.

Ronald Reagan dismantled the job program Nixon had been forced to create just before his reelection. In response, Democratic Party elites followed the advice of the so-called , and steadily moved right on “bread and butter” issues. When the Cold War ended, Bill Clinton, who cut his teeth on the 1972 McGovern campaign, reanimated the idea of converting the military—the longest-running, if unacknowledged, jobs program in the U.S.—to more economically and socially productive industries (as McGovern had suggested a generation earlier, taking off from the now-lonely work of ). But the idea never took. Even self-admitted socialists like Oakland’s Ron Dellums refused to close military bases in his district, emblematic of Democratic politicians across the board who failed to recognize defense as an endless source of patronage and pork.

By the time Barack Obama became president, Democrats never entertained full employment in any serious, programmatic manner—highlighting how far they had strayed from their New Deal origins in terms of economic policy.

Support for a government-imposed ceiling on unemployment, for socially useful, economically productive, and individually satisfying work, has remained extraordinarily high into the Reagan era and present. But popular support alone cannot enact legislation. Clear barriers, intellectual and institutional, stand in the way. Wall Street is considerably stronger, and unions are on their knees. Under Trump, an exciting groundswell of activism has appeared. But it is questionable whether the resistance is powerful enough to defeat the donor class, which is violently opposed to a job guarantee. And many of the special interest groups that have replaced the unions and civil rights groups of earlier decades remain ,” unable to marshal constituents to the cause.

Grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter or the National Women’s March, meanwhile, lack the deep pockets of these liberal lobbies. Democratic policy goals have lurched left, but there is no major effort underway to reform the electoral or legislative system, as the left in earlier periods believed necessary to any major policy goal.

Even when the left had both the numbers and financing to rival the GOP, job guarantees were rejected for weak temporary programs because New Deal and Great Society liberals assumed, like their opponents, and most Democratic leaders today, that capitalism would eventually (one day! soon!) provide for all. The jobs vs. income debate is somewhat a false either/or, but it is not surprising that  and  still favor the UBI overwhelmingly against a public option in the labor market, despite persistently lopsided support for one and not the other. A job guarantee threatens corporate power, while an income guarantee subsidizes it.