Note: I will be on Angie Coiro’s Live From the Left Coast show tonight at 7 to talk about taxes. Listen live at Green 960 whether you’re listening on the air in SF or via the internet.

Earlier today David Dayen leveled his criticism of the Sacramento Democratic establishment for their apparent failure to produce an initiative to roll back the 2/3rds rule and start fixing California’s broken government.

Here I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the issue of what we need to do to win the battle. This isn’t a disagreement with David, but instead a discussion of something related – the question of how it is we win this battle.

My own views on this have evolved somewhat over the last 6 months. I very much think we need to be “making the argument” for majority rule, and that so far this hasn’t yet been done.

And the way that has to be done is to place the 2/3rds rule into a broader effort to emphasize progressive values. This is a twofold approach that requires us to do two things:

1. Show Californians where progressives want to take them: Universal health care, free higher ed, eliminate traffic, create sustainable jobs, etc. Articulate our end goals and get people excited about them, since it’s hard to excite people about procedural questions.
2. Show Californians how we want to get there. Go populist and hammer the shit out of the corporations and wealthy folks who benefit from the current tax structure, and push for sensible revenue solutions consonant with that populism that can achieve the promised goals.

I think that to emphasize the procedural problems (the 2/3rds rule) before emphasizing the fundamental injustice and inequality of our tax code is to put the cart before the horse. If we are going to reverse the polling and win this, we need to first mobilize Californians behind the notion that our state’s economic problems and our inability to properly fund schools or healthcare or parks or transit is because we are letting those with the money escape their obligations.

The PPIC and Binder polls (the one from the May 19 election) have both shown the public is willing to support certain taxes to preserve important services. So the move should be to push hard for an oil severance tax to fund schools, or closing corporate tax loopholes to expand Healthy Families, or to jack up taxes on the wealthy (particularly taxing unearned income) to bring down higher ed tuition, or something to that effect.

Dems should plan to move these things in the next legislative session and spend several weeks beforehand making this argument. Back Republicans up against a wall, make them defend the unpopular tax breaks for the unpopular bandits that have ruined out economy. And when the Republicans predictably use the 2/3rds rule to block those revenue solutions, then we will be in a much better position to win public support for majority vote on revenue.

We will have the opportunity over the next 12 months to move on this strategy, especially as outrage builds over the existing cuts. That outrage is not about process, but about the basic values of this state being violated and cast aside in order to enable the wealthy to get tax breaks at the expense of everyone else.

There are some folks in Sacramento who seem to get this. Lt. Gov. and future Congressman John Garamendi has been calling for an oil severance tax to fund higher education.

I know that leads some to criticize “ballot box budgeting” and argue that dedicating specific taxes to specific services doesn’t help the problems with the general fund. I have always been much less critical of ballot box budgeting than others, partly because I see it as a necessary holding action until we resolve Prop 13 itself.

But more fundamentally, we need to overturn 30 years of anti-tax rhetoric that has sank very deeply into the minds of many Californians, including those who otherwise call themselves progressive. One of the core tenets of the anti-tax mentality is the notion that government would just waste new revenues. Public hostility to dumping money into the general fund is significant.

So what we have to do is rehabilitate the notion of using taxes to provide services. Californians need to see the connection between low taxes and failing schools, jammed roads, a lack of health care, and a lack of jobs. And they need to see that it is Republicans that are blocking those things from getting done, by the 2/3rds rule.

The only reason anyone in America knows about “reconciliation” in the Senate, or the “mark-up” process, or even the “filibuster” is because those things stand in the way of key progressive goals. Those Senate procedures have screwed us and have needed to be eliminated for a long time, but only when they stood in the path of something people wanted did awareness rise.

In short, we are not going to win this if it is framed as a procedural problem, or even as a way to fix a broken state. We win the majority vote by enfolding it within a broader narrative and a broader campaign that uses progressive populism to beat the stuffing out of the large corporations and their allies in the Republican Party, in the service of clear goals that people actively and strongly desire.