Making Economics Intersectional

For the handful of conservative readers I may or may not have, this probably isn’t for you. I mean, “intersectional” is in the title. It’s also going to have terms like “unions” and “worker’s rights” and “poor people.” Anyway, read on at your own peril.

Liberals, can we stop pretending that economic messaging is a zero-sum game? It’s driving me up a wall. Howard Dean (the OG white progressive Presidential candidate from Vermont) had it right, which is why I’m sad he’s not still running for DNC Chair. We talk all the time about intersectionality on the left (a leftist intellectual term that’s…sort of hard to quantify). And then as soon as someone brings up economics, we immediately consider it pandering to the “white working class.” Calling it the white working class — or the WWC if you’re super hip/out-of-touch — is its own form of identity politics. It’s putting one group ahead of another, which is the original sin of modern liberalism. We can’t acknowledge that solutions can work for everyone, and we focus so hard on who is included that we don’t look at who is excluded. This is, again, the liberal echo chamber. So in the wake of the election loss, us Smart Liberal Elites immediately debated whether we should pander to the Rust Belt/WWC and how we should do it. We mostly ignored that certain demographics that aren’t undereducated white men voted for Trump at higher levels than polls suggested.

Because Trump — to the degree he needed to — crafted an intersectional economic message. I know it’s hard for us to accept given the degree to which he vilified certain segments of the population, but clearly some people in African-American and Latino communities heard things they liked and voted for Trump.

So how do we fix that? We start by acknowledging that economics are inherently intersectional. This is one of the messages that Bernie Sanders ran on that was somewhat lost in the noise of his populist revolutionary rhetoric. His problem — as a white guy from a white state — was seeing racial problems almost exclusively through the window of class warfare. While that’s oversimplifying (and it showed in his turnout in those communities), it’s an important concept for liberals. Workers’ rights are universal. Unions in the Midwest tend to help white factory workers, while unions like the SEIU tend to help non-white workers. But they all stand for the same (or similar) shared values. The problem is that service employees aren’t losing their jobs to automation (yet) or outsourcing (not exactly, anyway).

But they share the same ideals — higher wages, job safety, fighting against the excesses of corporations. If we had valued the Carrier factory worker as highly as the Vegas kitchen worker, maybe we would have had more success. And again, this is intersectional — it’s not putting one on a pedestal. It’s being an inclusive party that acknowledges the differing challenges of workers and the solutions they require. Chuck Jones should have been a Democratic icon before he called out PEOTUS-Trump for his bullshit extortion deal with Carrier.

Wealth inequality in the United States is at a level we haven’t seen in nearly a century. De-regulation is going to affect everyone. The Flint water crisis happened in a majority African-American community, but a state like Kansas — 86% white/non-hispanic as of the last Census — is not doing so well under Republican leadership right now. Lead lined pipes aren’t an exclusive problem to communities of color. Urban decay isn’t, either. There are white farm states not in the Rust Belt that are failing. Flint remains a humanitarian crisis, but it’s also emblematic of a country that’s falling apart. Our infrastructure is a disaster. Worker rights are being infringed upon everywhere. Women are under assault everywhere.

Another great example of intersectional problems that require intersectional solutions are the last two fights over pipelines. While DAPL protests have gotten more coverage, the Keystone XL pipeline was fought predominantly by Nebraska farmers aligned with environmentalists in the state. They didn’t want their groundwater poisoned and their crops to die and become worthless. This isn’t a white person problem or a Native American problem. It’s a universal problem. Again, unless you’re the oil company. It was great to see veterans mobilize in support of the DAPL protestors, and I take comfort in the idea that the DAPL protestors are now going to Flint. This is the kind of thing we need — shared ideas, shared values, helping each other. This is what liberal politics should look like.

A recognition that the problems are country faces are often universal and our solutions and our coalitions need to be universal too.

We need to further unionize the service sector (SEIU is great but it’s relatively narrow). We need to strengthen the unions that do exist and fight against right-to-work laws where they exist. At the same time, we need to extend the protections fought for and won by certain segments (factory workers) to the vulnerable communities who need them.

We need to protest the pipelines — the ones that ruin farmland for Nebraska farmers and the ones that destroy the sacred grounds of Native Americans.

We need to fix the infrastructure — the crisis in the majority African-American city of Flint and the communities around the country that are going to face the same kind of crisis in the coming months and years.

We need to address climate change, because when the state of Louisiana is under sea level, it’s going to affect everyone.

We need rising wages for everyone. We also need equal pay for equal work.

We need to stop being either/or. We need to start fighting together against the problems that affect everyone.

This is the promise of America. It needs to be the promise of liberalism. We need to start thinking about workers, not narrow regional subsets. We need to be a national party with national solutions, rather than a party of coastal elites reducing people to a set of demographic signifiers to be pandered to.

Let’s make liberalism inclusive and intersectional again.

Before it’s too late.