This type of narrative has been fostered by the right for a long time. It is not helpful to the Democratic Party for it also to be promoted by the left. And besides, it is wrong-headed in the way it is presented. On the right, the George Wallace campaigns paved the way to show Republicans how to break apart the New Deal coalition and appeal to working class whites to leave the Democratic for the Republican Party. This is why we have seen the kind of “aw shucks” presentation of self of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and then in full George Wallace mode, Donald Trump, despite each of them representing the very wealthy. This narrative on the right has aligned with attacks on the “liberal media” and “government is taking your money for ‘those’ people” appeals to the white working class.
On the left, the narrative is more complicated, but equally damaging to the Democratic Party. The short version is that with the rise of the Anti-War Movement in the 1960s and then when the New Right took over the Republican Party in the 1970s, those in professional occupations (and students) moved from the Republican to the Democratic Party.
Since at least the Civil Rights Movement, in order to win, the Democratic Party has needed to hold together a coalition of the white working class, race and ethnic minorities, and white collar professionals.
Historically, there has been a trade-off in votes between the white working class and race and ethnic minorities. When the Democratic Party emphasizes the class issues of the white working class, they risk lower turn out among race and ethnic minorities. When the Democratic Party emphasizes race/ethnic issues, the white working class stays home or votes Republican. Unfortunately, white collar professionals have played a role in playing off one of these groups against the others, and in doing so, as a legacy of the New Left, they have treated the Democratic Party as the enemy rather than the Republican Party.
During the War on Poverty days, professionals and students championed a civil rights agenda by challenging the influence in the Democratic Party of the white working class, union members, and white ethnics, especially those who controlled urban party organizations. Think 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
As the Democratic Party has become associated with a civil rights agenda and the vote of race and ethnic minorities, some of these same white collar professionals have chastised the party for “forgetting” the white working class. Think of books like Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, or Teixeira and Rogers, Why the White Working Class Still Matters, and then Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, and more recently, Listen Liberal.
Note that it is the very group who played an instrumental role in challenging the influence of the white working class, especially union, influence on the Democratic Party, who is now criticizing the Party for having “forgotten” the white working class and who is now arguing that the Party needs to appeal to white working class interests. But the professional class in the Party is not blaming themselves for this situation, but rather they are blaming the demands of race and ethnic minorities and their influence on the Party.
In my book, The American Non-dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, I call this a conflict between class (focus on the economy, jobs, and unions) politics versus race/ethnic (focus on civil rights and social agenda) politics. The most important area of conflict between a class based versus a race/ethnic based politics is over access to jobs. The Democratic Party needs to bridge this gap and resolve the conflict between the politics of class and the politics of race/ethnicity in order to hold together their coalition and to win elections.
Professionals and students who have, since the New Left, treated the Democratic Party as the enemy and turned their fiercest criticisms for those inside the Party instead of toward Republicans have undermined the ability of the Democratic Party to win. (The exceptions of the Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama presidencies are too complicated to discuss here, but each was able to bridge the class versus race divide.) Over the fifty years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, white collar professionals have contributed to internal Party dissension, even though, they have switched sides from time to time, sometimes attacking the the Party for supporting the white working class supposedly against the interests of race and ethnic minorities, but then sometimes attacking the Party for supporting race and ethnic minorities supposedly against the interests of the white working class (as now).
Given the outcome of the 2016 election, the current criticism is of the supposed overblown influence of race and ethnic minority interests on the party (or more broadly “identity politics), and an appeal to “remember” the white working class. But in the past, these same white collar professionals have attacked the Party for supporting the interests of the white working class, instead of a civil rights agenda and programs for race and ethnic minorities.
This is not elitism as such, certainly not in the way that this article suggests, but it is a kind of moralism that is always against the other, who is portrayed as not pure enough in their liberalism. And it has played into the right wing agenda of undermining the Democratic Coalition, long ago, the New Deal coalition, and keeping those who should support the Democratic Party fighting among themselves, rather than coming together as a unified social movement to challenge the increasingly right wing Republican Party.
Among all of the other factors that contributed to Donald Trump winning the electoral college — the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, widespread voter suppression in states with Republican governors, the rogue actions of the FBI, especially James Comey’s news conference in July, the Russian hacking and Wikileaks releases, the news media continually highlighting supposed scandals of Clinton while giving Trump free media, and so on — the most decisive factor in Clinton’s loss of the electoral college was the over 8 million votes (almost 6% of the vote when every vote counted) for Johnson or Stein, with the margins in all of the states that mattered greater than Clinton’s loss to Trump.
And this should be laid at the feet of Sanders attacks on the Democratic Party. He stayed too long in the opposition, feeding the narrative of Clinton as corrupt and providing a framing that was used to ill effect by Trump and the Republican Party. And the Bernie or Bust group that attacked the DNC for its support of Clinton (after she had already clinched the Democratic nomination with more than 4 million votes) undoubtedly encouraged that third party vote that sealed the fate of Clinton’s candidacy. See, for example, Kurt Eichenwald’s analysis in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044.
As a final indignity, take note that Jill Stein was seated at the same table with Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin at the Russian TV event, in which she calls for a more collaborative relationship with Russia. Even now, on her website, she says with regard to that dinner: “While the objective of that dinner was not to engage in serious discussions, Putin did appear to respond in his formal remarks to the call for greater dialogue and collaboration made by myself and three other political figures on the foreign policy panel earlier that day.” See: http://www.jill2016.com/stein_in_russia_calls_for_principled_collaboration
So Putin’s flattery worked for Stein as well. Stein also said that Trump would be far better than Clinton. Yet another example of the left undermining the Democratic Party.