Rufus Polson
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

These things can go together. Democrats have in fact over the last few decades “abandoned working Americans by insufficiently supporting redistribution, labor unions, single-payer healthcare, insert socialist policy here. (The farther left you go, the more popular this explanation becomes).” Whether it’s a source of their political weakness can be debated, but whether that’s what they’ve done is clear — they have. And those working Americans would, whether they are aware of it or not, be better off if the Democrats had continued to support these things.

But what they have done in order to fill the vacuum left by this absence is adopted a cultural politics — and it is the cultural politics of the educated, fairly well off class of bosses, professionals and so forth, which most Democratic operatives belong to. Some call it the “co-ordinator” class. It is an egalitarian culture in terms of race, male-female, orientation and so on — that is, everything except money. Which is reasonable because the politics of higher education in capitalism is a double-down politics of meritocracy — merit comes from making money or it comes from brains and good marks or some combination, not from the colour of your skin or whether you have a wee-wee (or whether you work hard or are actually an asset to your community).

So OK, the US working class know that things are going lousy and the Democrats seem to be doing zip about it, but they are talking a whole lot about women’s rights, gay rights, non-white people’s rights. One possible conclusion they can draw if they don’t know why things are going lousy is that this politics of what we might call cultural liberalism is the CAUSE of things going lousy, or at least that the Democratic obsession with all this stuff is the cause of them not giving a damn about white working class prosperity (and let’s face it, the Democratic party as an institution genuinely doesn’t give a damn about working class prosperity, white or black; Obamacare originally came out of Mitt Romney’s camp before Obama appropriated it, and the only reason the Democrats are opposing something worse is that the Republicans are for it — give them a few years and they’ll pass a law just as bad). If the democrats had been making things better for the working class, the cultural attitudes advocated by the democratic party might not have become anathema to so many of them.

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