Wealthy White Elitists Are the Democratic Party
Labor and Blue-Collar Concerns Shoved Aside for White Suburbia
Michael Harriot, famed former writer and editor of The Root, declared in 2020 that leftists are out-of-touch when they bash the “Democratic establishment.”
Harriot, who now writes for The Guardian and appears ad nauseam on CNN and MSNBC, is a diehard Democrat, an old school Democrat, and painfully out-of-touch with the times.
Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist senator from Vermont, continues to be a thorn in the side to the new Democrat and the DNC, but remains a hero of sorts for working class folks, and is a player in the resurgent labor movement in the U.S.
The centrist or neoliberal Democrat President Joe Biden is remarkably old and wildly unpopular, with a Congress that is going to get more conservative. Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is itching to make Biden a “moderate” president. Where is that domestic agenda, Joe? Well, Mitch has it and he’s not letting it go, will be Biden’s refrain soon enough.
The only thing Biden has in his corner is the Democratic Party base, which according to recent polling has cut off the blue-collar voter in exchange for a wealthy, white, and highly educated one.
As Branko Marcetic writes for Jacobin:
The Democratic Party has pursued and doubled down on an electoral strategy based on poaching affluent, former Republican-supporting voters while taking non-white support for granted, the assumption being that with the GOP mired in xenophobia and at times overt bigotry, these voters would have nowhere else to go.
‘For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,’ Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) infamously said in 2016.
The turn to white suburban wealth concerns is disconcerting though not stunning for anyone half-way paying attention. President Bill Clinton and his neoliberal cohort in crime Hillary Clinton have long championed policy that smacked around workers, cut their bargaining power, and shredded their wages, and the social safety net in the process. It was Bill Clinton who killed cash payments to the working poor and laughed about it. Hillary has spent a large chunk of her career championing prison-building, cops, and the expansion of the U.S. military.
Then there was President Barack Obama, who used stagecraft and left-wing sounding language to win the White House in 2008.
But Obama, with assistance from Rahm Emanuel, the Podesta brothers, and money-gobbling consultants like SKDK, governed like George W. Bush in the extreme.
Obama was a warmonger-president and deported more immigrants than G.W. Bush too. The so-called “Affordable Care Act,” is a means-tested nightmare and gift to the insurance industry. Obama was not transformational, he was Bill Clinton 2.0.
Nevertheless the new polling confirming a right-ward and glaringly white shift of the Democratic Party can be disheartening to those who once considered themselves on the correct, decent, and good side of history.
Jacobin’s piece says:
It’s a major shift. That the party of Franklin Roosevelt has managed to remain unpreoccupied with an economy where everything is becoming astronomically more expensive, workers’ wages are stagnant, and child poverty has spiked 41 percent suggests that the realignment in process has only solidified, making it ever more inhospitable to a left-wing policy program.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin still has “D” beside his name, but I can’t imagine Harriot sees Manchin as anything but a right-winger. Sen. Manchin, D-Wv., helped derail Biden’s agenda and billionaire Republicans are conducting fundraisers for his reelection to another six-year term in the Senate.
Someone send Harriot an invite to join the Democratic Socialists of America, he will be at home again.
