Green Arrow
09-30-2017, 10:56 PM
Via Jacobin (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/democratic-party-2016-election-working-class):
Even before Donald Trump’s shocking victory last November, the press had already written the story of his rise. Despite studies showing that, like all Republican candidates, well-off whites formed the core of Trump’s support, pundits zeroed in on his white working-class backers, which most commentators defined solely in terms of education (whites without a college degree).
This dividing line ignored other crucial variables — such as income, self-identification, and occupation — but it fit with the popular belief that, from the office cubicle to the voting both, the postindustrial “New Economy” separated the intelligent from the ignorant in a virtuous meritocracy.
By the time Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump, non-college whites had become conflated with both the working class and racism itself. The Trump campaign, as one pundit argued, “laid bare the racial animus within the white working class and the Republican Party.”
While frequently wrongheaded, the outsized attention paid to the white working class wasn’t surprising.
For decades, Democratic defeats have been explained through the behavior of the working-class voters that formed the core of the party’s support in its post–Great Depression heyday. And for as long as the working class has been central to the Democratic Party, the working class has been presumed to be white.
But this singular focus on the white working class — rather than the working class as a whole, in all its hues — has (perhaps unintentionally) aided and abetted neoliberalism’s ascension in the Democratic Party. The fate of workers has been lost in the shuffle, undermining both the material wellbeing and the morale of what should be the party’s voting base.
...
Nearly a year after the electoral catastrophe, Democratic elites still show few signs they’ve learned the right post-election lessons. Hillary Clinton’s new book blasts Bernie Sanders for offering “free ponies” instead of hardheaded policy.
And last month, Will Marshall, one of the cofounders of the Democratic Leadership Council — the preeminent group of neoliberal Democrats in the 1980s and ’90s — joined with other centrist Democrats to form New Democracy, a group that once again aims to stanch the electoral bleeding among working-class whites and further court well-off whites by steering the party right —away from the “distraction,” as Marshall put it, of progressive policies like single-payer health care.
By focusing on the role of white voters in Clinton’s defeat, rather than the failure of the Democrats’ neoliberal strategy, liberal pundits and party leaders are drawing the wrong conclusions from Trump’s victory. Instead of debating how to win white workers or doubling down on the misguided strategy of courting upscale whites, Democrats must train their attention on the needs of the working class as a whole.
It's definitely clear that Democrats are still trying to learn their lesson from 2016's defeat. Clinton, their terrible standard-bearer, has learned nothing, but the party itself is at least trying to take steps to once again become the progressive party they once were. They still have a long way to go, however, and while they've made some good changes in the right direction, they are still making their entire identity out of resistance to Trump rather than a clear agenda. They need to remind the working class - all of it - that they have always been the historic party of the working class and can be again.
So far, though, I don't think that's likely to happen. Not until they lose some more.
Even before Donald Trump’s shocking victory last November, the press had already written the story of his rise. Despite studies showing that, like all Republican candidates, well-off whites formed the core of Trump’s support, pundits zeroed in on his white working-class backers, which most commentators defined solely in terms of education (whites without a college degree).
This dividing line ignored other crucial variables — such as income, self-identification, and occupation — but it fit with the popular belief that, from the office cubicle to the voting both, the postindustrial “New Economy” separated the intelligent from the ignorant in a virtuous meritocracy.
By the time Hillary Clinton conceded to Trump, non-college whites had become conflated with both the working class and racism itself. The Trump campaign, as one pundit argued, “laid bare the racial animus within the white working class and the Republican Party.”
While frequently wrongheaded, the outsized attention paid to the white working class wasn’t surprising.
For decades, Democratic defeats have been explained through the behavior of the working-class voters that formed the core of the party’s support in its post–Great Depression heyday. And for as long as the working class has been central to the Democratic Party, the working class has been presumed to be white.
But this singular focus on the white working class — rather than the working class as a whole, in all its hues — has (perhaps unintentionally) aided and abetted neoliberalism’s ascension in the Democratic Party. The fate of workers has been lost in the shuffle, undermining both the material wellbeing and the morale of what should be the party’s voting base.
...
Nearly a year after the electoral catastrophe, Democratic elites still show few signs they’ve learned the right post-election lessons. Hillary Clinton’s new book blasts Bernie Sanders for offering “free ponies” instead of hardheaded policy.
And last month, Will Marshall, one of the cofounders of the Democratic Leadership Council — the preeminent group of neoliberal Democrats in the 1980s and ’90s — joined with other centrist Democrats to form New Democracy, a group that once again aims to stanch the electoral bleeding among working-class whites and further court well-off whites by steering the party right —away from the “distraction,” as Marshall put it, of progressive policies like single-payer health care.
By focusing on the role of white voters in Clinton’s defeat, rather than the failure of the Democrats’ neoliberal strategy, liberal pundits and party leaders are drawing the wrong conclusions from Trump’s victory. Instead of debating how to win white workers or doubling down on the misguided strategy of courting upscale whites, Democrats must train their attention on the needs of the working class as a whole.
It's definitely clear that Democrats are still trying to learn their lesson from 2016's defeat. Clinton, their terrible standard-bearer, has learned nothing, but the party itself is at least trying to take steps to once again become the progressive party they once were. They still have a long way to go, however, and while they've made some good changes in the right direction, they are still making their entire identity out of resistance to Trump rather than a clear agenda. They need to remind the working class - all of it - that they have always been the historic party of the working class and can be again.
So far, though, I don't think that's likely to happen. Not until they lose some more.