One of the most important consequences of an election is its effect on conventional wisdom about how the losing political party must change in order to win. After Tuesday’s Democratic loss in the Virginia gubernatorial election and near-loss in New Jersey, I’m hearing a narrative about Democrats’ failure with white working-class voters that worries me because it’s fundamentally wrong.
In today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt points out that the working-class, non-college voters who are abandoning the Democratic Party “tend to be more religious, more outwardly patriotic and more culturally conservative than college graduates.” He then quotes fellow Times columnist and pollster Nate Cohn, that “college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.”
Leonhardt adds that these defections have increased over the past decade and suggests that Democratic candidates start listening to working-class voters’ concerns about “crime and political correctness,” their “mixed feelings about immigration and abortion laws,” and their beliefs “in God and in a strong America.”
This narrative worries me in two ways. First, if “cultural” messages trump (excuse me) economic ones, why shouldn’t Democrats go all the way and play the same cultural card that Republicans have used for years to inflame the white working class – racism. Make no mistake: Glenn Youngkin’s campaign in Virginia against “critical race theory” – which isn’t even taught in Virginia’s schools – comes out of the same disgraceful dog-whistle tradition.
But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong with this new “culture over economics” narrative about how Democrats should woo back the working class. It disregards the shameful reality that the Democratic Party after Ronald Reagan turned its back on the working class.
Democrats had control over the White House and both houses of Congress during the first terms of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They scored some important victories, such as the Affordable Care Act and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.
But both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the working class. Clinton and Obama refused to spend their political capital on reforming labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.
Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 11 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a better economic deal.
The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown.
Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – allowing big corporations to grow far larger and major industries to become more concentrated.
Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. He never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.
What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy and you shaft the working class.
Adjusted for inflation, American workers today are earning almost as little as they did thirty years ago, when the American economy was a third its present size.
What’s happened to Biden’s agenda for working people – including lower prescription drug prices, paid family leave, and free community college? All have been scrapped. Much of the rest of his agenda is endangered. Why? Because of the power of big money. Big Pharma blocked prescription drug reform. A handful of Democratic senators backed by big money refused to support paid family leave. And so on.
Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the huge shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that paper over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.
But to do this Democrats would have to end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.
And they would have to reject the convenient story that the American working class cares more about cultural issues than about getting a better deal in an economy that’s been delivering working people a worsening deal for four decades.
The BS you're now hearing about how the Democrats can woo back the working class