The Democrats are losing the white working class. There are a lot of superficial reasons for that. Surface, culture war disagreements that get offered up as the real reason. But they’re not the real reason. It’s not racism, or sexism, or family values. It’s class. The Democratic Party has abandoned the working class, while at the same time choosing to focus on race, gender and sexual identity civil rights battles, leaving specifically the white working class behind completely.
This is why the white working class is abandoning the Democratic Party, and simultaneously expressing disgust and anger towards the causes that replaced their interests. But instead of addressing their economic pain and reinstating class concerns as a central tenet of Democratic goals, Party elites are instead scolding them for their lack of enthusiasm for these civil rights battles. The tone ranges from condescending to contemptuous. While it is true that racism, sexism, and narrow mindedness are not admirable qualities, contempt is not going to change minds or stop the hemorrhaging of votes. Acknowledgement of their suffering, and hard work towards addressing their struggles might, however.
For a long time now, starting at least as early as the 1990s, the Democratic Party became dominated by “centrists” more interested in winning elections than in defending and fighting for the working class. Due to the daunting popularity of Reagan and his free market ideologies, they abandoned defense of workers and the poor as a central pillar of what the Democratic Party is about, and started embracing conservative themes of welfare reform, weakening unions, free market ideology, and corporate-friendly trade deals. The Clintons of course were central to this shift.
The Party did, however, continue to fight civil rights battles. This didn’t conflict with embracing conservative, corporate-friendly economic principles. It gave the Party a cause, something to fight for, a moral purpose. And a worthy one, to be sure. In the past two plus decades, the Party has embraced and fought for gay rights, gay marriage, gender equity, reproductive rights, and racial justice to name a few. It has also become the party of environmental consciousness, both protecting the environment and addressing the looming danger of climate change.
All that is good, but we left behind white working class people. Of course, the Party also left behind female, black, minority and LGBQT working class people, but at least it continued to fight for them on some fronts, if not class. It gave them some reason to continue identifying with the Party. Not so for white working class men, and even many white working class women who don’t benefit as much from policies that break a glass ceiling they never get close to.
As their economic pain grows, so too does their resentment of these causes unrelated to their own experience that the Democratic Party fights for while ignoring them. If they aren’t a minority, a middle or upper class female, LGBQT, or an endangered species, it’s as if they don’t exist to the Party. The actions and causes of the Democratic Party have become increasingly distant, unrelated, and irrelevant to these people. And they start to resent both the Party and the groups and causes the Party has chosen to focus on to their exclusion.
I believe this exclusion is what has fueled the recent outburst of racism, sexism, anti-gay and transgender sentiment, climate change denial, and anger towards the environmental movement among the traditionally Democratic leaning white working class. Also the more general backlash against “political correctness.” But rather than realizing this and working to address the pain of this group, the Democratic Party has chosen to scold them. No, what they’re saying is not okay, not morally defensible, and not factually correct. But before you get huffy, listen closely. Under all that anger and resentment and culture war, you will hear real suffering, real fear.
What if, rather than leaving them behind for the past thirty plus years, we had worked to defend and strengthen and uplift the working class? What if we had fought like hell for union rights and trade deals that benefited workers over corporations and refused to attack the poor, no matter how popular in the polls? What if we had done all of this while also fighting our civil rights and environmental battles? Would the white working class have such resentment towards these groups and causes? Would they be so easily convinced that these groups and causes are the source of their suffering? I don’t think they would.
Bernie Sanders has done an excellent job of speaking to this group. He comes to them with compassion and empathy. He feels their pain. And at the same time he speaks with conviction about civil rights and the environment. And many white working class voters have abandoned their racism and sexism and climate denial to embrace a Jewish socialist candidate with a liberal resume a mile long. He brings all of these groups together in a remarkable coalition, which is what the Democratic Party as a whole should be doing.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is probably going to nominate Clinton instead, one of the best known faces of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class. Clinton has emphasized race and gender over class throughout her campaign, except when forced to acknowledge class by Sanders. Clinton was so lacking in sympathy for the working class that she chose to phrase her support for environmental causes by stating that she’s going to “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business,” in coal country, where a lot of coal miners have lost their jobs, and many are about to.
More troubling, we have chosen contempt over compassion. There is contempt from establishment Democrats towards the more working class Sanders supporters. There is contempt from Democrats in general towards the working class voters who are turning to Trump. Accusations of racism and sexism abound, while empathy for working class suffering seems to be in short supply.
While we gloat about the Republican nomination of Trump, that Party seems to be coalescing around him and boosting him in the polls. And whatever you want to say about Trump, he speaks to the white working class. He speaks to their pain, and he stokes these resentments created by the Democratic focus on civil rights to the exclusion of class. I don’t believe he has any intention of actually helping them, but he certainly knows how to use feigned compassion to gain their allegiance, and inflammatory rhetoric to channel their anger. I don’t think we can or should count on their votes, union or otherwise, if we nominate Clinton and she doesn’t change her tune fast, along with the DNC and the rest of the Party establishment.
And contrary to establishment opinion, we need their votes. There is a lot of press lately about how diverse the electorate is becoming. Sometimes it gets lost in that discussion that 70% of people who vote are white. No, you no longer need to win a majority of white voters to win, but you do need to win a heck of a lot of them, and you could lose by losing too many of them.
It’s easy for Democrats to feel superior by dismissing this group as nothing but a bunch of dying off racists, but what they’re actually doing is dismissing the control group for identifying how we’re doing in the class struggle. This is the group that suffers from class, and only class. How are we doing on that front? Not so good, apparently.
By simply paying serious attention to class and making working class struggles a central element of Democratic values once again, the Democrats could regain the votes of many working class whites and overcome much of the racism and narrow mindedness that is overtaking this group as a substitute for the anger that rightfully should be aimed squarely at the corporate and ruling classes. It can’t be a side note, but must be a central theme, expressed with the righteous anger it deserves. And it doesn’t have to be Bernie Sanders as the presidential nominee expressing it, but it must be expressed. It’s the smart thing to do, and the right thing to do.
