Democrats and the Working Class
Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to understand the working class that once defined their party. They face an identity crisis at the very moment they are trying to attract blue-collar voters who no longer think the political left sees them — or cares. Why did the working class switch sides?
To find a way forward, Democrats might want to look back to when they first lost the working class and the New Deal coalition fractured. While some Democratic challenges have changed, too many struggles remain all too familiar.
Remember in 1970, after Nixon expanded the Vietnam War and the National Guard killed four Kent State students, the antiwar movement radicalized like never before.
Workmen watched protesters chanting support for the other side fighting their kin and kind in Vietnam. IIn a clash that engulfed Lower Manhattan and came to be known as the hard hat riot, masses of workmen pummeled student protesters.
The icons of Franklin Roosevelt’s coalition had attacked the left’s future. It shocked power brokers. The New Left was at war with the Old.
Vietnam concerned not only how one lived but also how one might die. It chafed many working families to see student protesters lecture Americans with less status about social justice while their boys went to war in students’ place. For weeks, two breeds of Democrats were now in the streets, clashing over social values and who felt valued.
This was a class war boiling beneath the emerging culture wars.
Many Americans wanted not only respect for soldiers and the flag but also for motherhood, elders, the workingman. Once celebrated, blue-collar workers were now dismissed as reactionary, racist and ignorant suckers.
So, some Republicans saw their chance to win that Democratic base.
By the 1972 campaign, labor sought to salvage blue-collar Democrats. But at the Democratic convention, George McGovern became the standard-bearer. The New Left had won the party.
At the convention, delegates were diverse by race and sex — but not by class. The party establishment shifted Democrats’ emphasis from social class to social identity. Republicans from Ronald Reagan to President Trump framed campaigns as common touch versus out of touch.
Nixon won 49 states with nearly all his electoral gains being with blue-collar voters. The Republican presidential nominee won the labor vote for the first time since tracking began.
Enough of history! Democrats’ question today is: will Hispanic voters, in particular, ultimately drift rightward as so-called ethnic whites once did?
Trump got the white working class and Latino men. Most of Mr. Trump’s increased Latino support was within the working class. Democrats belatedly recognized that demographics — and a multiracial electorate — did not assure a progressive destiny.
In 2020, when protests and riots took place in many American cities, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina warned that the mind-set “burn, baby, burn” had “destroyed our movement back in the ’60s.”
But Democrats are not fated to relive mistakes that confuse some activists’ causes for whom they claim to represent or the views of radical youth for the views of the young or to forget that politicians can win big, boisterous crowds and still lose America.
Blue-collar America has changed. It’s less unionized, less white, less reliant on manufacturing. But most Americans still lack a bachelor’s degree and would find it difficult to pay a $1,000 emergency expense.
American intellectuals have long struggled to fathom the average American. One study showed that Democrats’ ability to accurately comprehend the other side “actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn.”
And it seems, too often, that leading Democrats who seek some populist fire misunderstand how Democrats got burned. More than two-thirds of swing voters who chose Mr. Trump strongly agreed that Democrats held wrongheaded positions on immigration, crime and identity politics.
Economic populism, including Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour, is the easy part. A populism that ignores most Americans’ social outlook has never proved able to win a majority outside dire economic times.
Democrats cannot merely buy back the working class.
There are also progressive headwinds. Democrats who identify as socially liberal rose to 69 percent from 39 percent over the past two decades.And since the 1970s, loud voices from popular culture to politics have encouraged an orthodox social liberalism that has weighed down swing-state Democratic candidates.
Which inspires yet another question: Have Democrats lost enough to win? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — led Democrats out of a similar wilderness. For even when Mr. Trump’s presidency ends, the challenges will persist.
Democrats need to stop walking into the same old trap, and supplement defense of democracy with a viable strategy to lure back enough non-college-educated voters to win elections. Both white voters and voters of color without degrees typically care more about the economy than democratic norms.
First, Trump is not focused on the kitchen table issues he ran on. Second, he has cut government programs that provide security for ordinary Americans in order to finance huge tax cuts for big business. Third, he’s making America weak again in the process.
