Poor People and Politics in America
The US needs to spend more time and money improving the lives of poor people, whatever their color or creed, without the constant hyper-emphasis on race that is typical of liberal politics these days.
People of color are hugely over-represented in low-earning segments of the population. This means that any help provided to less-well-off communities on a non-discriminatory basis — for improving housing and education, dealing effectively and humanely with drug abuse, reducing health- and happiness-impairing pollution, whatever — will go in large part to Black people, Hispanics, and indigenous and immigrant communities.
Some will go to poor White people, as well. That is not a bad thing. White people who are disadvantaged by bad housing and schools, drug addiction, pollution, and other penalties levied on those who aren’t good at the meritocracy game also deserve help. And providing that help without condescension might start to alleviate the vocal resentment and anger among conservative White voters. This, in turn, might cool the harsh rhetoric that Democrats claim to deplore, but now frequently emulate.
Some White Americans are genuinely racist or, more charitably, overly protective of their virtual clans. But many are not or, in any case, are not heavily motivated by race. The complexity of their motivations is documented, for example, in UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s 2016 bestseller Strangers in Their Own Land, about workers and caregivers in the oil refinery- and chemical plant-ridden Bayou country of Louisiana. Their “deep story,” as she tells it, is that they see themselves as having waited patiently in an increasingly slow-moving line to get the American dream, only to find “immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority.”
Divide and Be Conquered
Of course, it’s true that through slavery, Jim Crow and beyond, Black people over the decades have suffered, and continue to suffer, much worse discrimination than White people in Louisiana, or the Appalachians (some of whom are my ancestors) or Texas and Florida. Or New York and Los Angeles. This needs to be acknowledged and in some way reconciled.
However, it has also been well documented, in books like The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics by Wayne State University professor Michael Goldfield, that low-earning Blacks and Whites have been effectively played off against each other for generations by the wealthy and politically influential, stifling progressive and socialist politics in the US that could have helped both races.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to the US. Cedric J. Robinson argued in Black Marxism that racism has permeated capitalism from its beginning in Britain and continental Europe, as it applied to the Irish as well as African-origin people and others. He identified this racial element as the root cause of the failure of the “international proletariat” to rise up in solidarity, as Marx and Engels had supposed they would.
This us-against-them dynamic, operating through what Robinson terms “racial capitalism,” splinters the ranks of the have-nots. And it must be overcome if a genuinely progressive politics is to develop in the US. Instead, both political parties too often reinforce the dynamic, from opposite directions.
Do-Nothing Democrats
The strategic assumption of the Democratic Party establishment, at least since the Great Recession of 2008–09, has been that they can gain ongoing political ascendancy by relying more or less exclusively on urban, well-off educated Whites and on Black and Hispanic voters, aligned against less well-off and less educated rural and small-town White voters. Population trends are on their side, they argue.
This strategy has not worked, and it will not work. Over the period in which the Democrats became increasingly rich and educated, they lost control of state houses and state legislatures in straight up-or-down votes. This accentuated their more fundamental problem: The political system of the country was explicitly organized under the constitution to favor small-population states and relatively rural areas.
That was the tradeoff that made formation of such a huge country as the US possible in the beginning. It isn’t going to change unless the country breaks apart, and it ensures the Democratic Party strategy will not work. If anything, Democrats’ big risk is on the downside: That they will lose increasing numbers of Hispanic, other immigrant, and possibly even Black voters who tire of their heavy-handed, singular emphasis on a cosmopolitan social agenda. Even if you support that agenda, as I do, it isn’t enough by itself.
This singular emphasis on race, gender and, within carefully defined bounds, environmental issues was the party’s response to the extreme economic inequity and divisiveness of neoliberalism that developed after the turmoil of the 1960s-70s. As the party became increasingly dependent on Wall Street and Silicon Valley funding and other favors, it lost its appetite for tackling economic inequity in New Deal and Great Society fashion or pushing for workers’ rights.
Race and gender were what the Democratic leadership picked to distinguish their party from the Republicans in ways that are compatible with the interests of their financial supporters, and of the well-educated, well-off urban voters that provide the backbone of their support. Climate and broader environmental concerns sometimes fit into this schematic, but only if they don’t interfere with the growth ethic and corporate consolidation. That won’t save the Earth.
Republican Redress
The Republican Party dynamic worked as the flip side of this coin. Traditionally, the Republicans were the party of industrialists, Big Ag, and regional and small-town bankers and retailers, as opposed to the Democrats’ Big Finance and Big Tech. Their guaranteed layer of mass support beneath this power-wielding surface was constituted of poorer, often rural or semi-rural White people — just as the similar base layer for the Democrats was less well-off Blacks and Hispanics.
Through the 1990s and into this century, though, the Republican portion of the economic elite gradually lost out to the Democrat part. Think of Wall Street using mergers and shareholder activism to wield a bigger and bigger stick over industrial companies, whose operations were moving to other countries in any case, weakening their attachment to voters — and vice versa. Small business lost out. When it was Walmart driving local stores out of business, it didn’t seem so bad, since the Waltons were Midwestern Republicans. But then came the tech-oriented Amazon challenge to Walmart. That hurt if you were Republican. Think of the way Trump’s attacks on Jeff Bezos resonated with his “base.”
Many at the top of the Republican Party saw potential for redress in the Democrats’ rush into what have come to be known as “culture war” issues. The cosmopolitanism that permeated the upper levels of the Democrat Party provided perfect chapter headings for an alternative narrative that appealed to small town, rural and exurban people across America. The Democrats came across as snooty and condescending to low-income White people everywhere from backwoods Maine to California’s Central Valley and all the area in between that coastal liberals have long treated as “fly-over country.”
Bernie Bashing
Bernie Sanders offered the Democrats a chance to turn this around. He put forward ideas and policies that could have pulled many lower-income Whites back into the party, and also energized less-well-off Blacks who were disenchanted by Democratic efforts to help the best and brightest in the Black population but do little or nothing for them and their abused communities.
Instead, the Democratic Party froze Bernie out in favor of Hillary Clinton and, since her defeat, have revved up the attack on the “deplorables,” a phrase that many in the Democratic Party still view as a valid and accurate description of the political opposition, albeit one that obviously shouldn’t have been spoken out-loud in the runup to a tight election.
What Bernie was trying to get the Democrats to do was to focus on economic inequities that had mushroomed under neoliberalism. To fight climate change and resuscitate small farming in ways that would benefit the less well off without regard to race. But Bernie wasn’t popular with Big Finance or Big Tech, to put it mildly. His campaign was financed with small donations instead of speeches to Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
He talks passionately about the inequities Black people and Hispanic migrants have suffered in this country, and he supports gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights of all sorts, but alongside — not instead of — economic equity. He was dangerous to the high-flying funders of the Democratic National Committee and all those in and around it.
Donald Trump played a similarly contrarian role in the Republican Party, but without endangering the economic interests of the big donors that wield the real power in that party. He offended their good taste, perhaps, but he was not about to take their money. On the contrary. So Trump succeeded in grabbing the reins of the Republican Party, while Bernie failed in taking over the Democrats. In response to the pandemic, mainstream Democrats appeared to be turning a bit towards Bernie-style progressivism, but that has faded with the predictable Republican takeover of the House and the approach of campaign financing season.
Of course, the story isn’t that simple. There are huge and important nuances this version leaves out. I accept that. Still, this tale of woe and missed opportunities has enough fundamental validity and practical usefulness to pass for what we call “truth” in this society at this time. Democrats should, in my view, read it and weep.
