From The New Republic:
Why Democrats Need the White Working Class
Ruy Teixeira October 24, 2012 | 12:00 am
What’s the Matter with White People?: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was
by Joan Walsh
Wiley, 278 pp., $25.95
WHAT’S THE MATTER with White People is really about what’s the matter with the white working class—more specifically, with the way they vote. Joan Walsh’s concern is with how the white working class has strayed from the New Deal coalition and from the Democrats. She explains and examines this thesis using her own experience: the political evolution of her New York working-class Irish Catholic family, most of whom followed the classic path from New-Deal-lunch-pail Democrats to Nixon-and-Reagan devotees.
Walsh is a more-or-less unreconstructed New Deal liberal who believes economic universalism is the glue that can and should hold the Democratic coalition together. ...
This brings us to the third and most distinctive part of Walsh’s argument: the role that Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, have played in alienating the white working class. In her view, the retreat of the white working class became an excuse for liberal Democrats to vilify this group, magnifying their shortcomings into a cartoon portrait of hopelessly racist and mean-spirited enemies of progress. This accelerated the white working class’s bitter departure from the Democrats. It also ensured that identity politics displaced class politics within the Democratic Party. As Walsh puts it: “I watched one area of common ground emerge on the left: more and more observers seemed to believe that so-called people of color … shared more interests with one another than with any white Americans.”
... Electoral weakness among the white working class can be finessed in some elections (2008, perhaps 2012), but it deprives the Democrats of the stable majority support they need around the country and within Congress to implement activist programs the country desperately needs. And if a Democratic administration runs into trouble, the potential for blowback from an unfriendly white working class is always present (as was seen in 2010).
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24 comments:
The publishing industry seems to be always asking this.
And if a Democratic administration runs into trouble, the potential for blowback from an unfriendly white working class is always present
I doubt.
magnifying their shortcomings into a cartoon portrait...
Take away the cartoon portraits, and what else do the dem partisans have to coalesce around?
Basically, at least where I live (Washington state), sodomy and marijuana. That's about it, and as you might imagine the appeal there is self-limiting.
"stable majority support they [Democrats] need around the country and within Congress to implement activist programs the country desperately needs"
LOL. Haven't they been implementing activist programs for the past half century? Look how well it all worked out. But the desperate needs never end, of course.
It's remarkable how this has not happened in the UK, yet. Labour is utterly dependent on the continued tribal loyalty of a white working class that the post-Blair leadership despises.
I guess our system is not given to producing a Nixon or Reagan. In the '80s Thatcher had the support of the non-unionised white working class in southern England, but that's a fairly limited demographic. No populist Tory has attempted to win over the broader white working class or even lower-middle-class.
I guess our system is not given to producing a Nixon or Reagan. In the '80s Thatcher had the support of the non-unionised white working class in southern England, but that's a fairly limited demographic. No populist Tory has attempted to win over the broader white working class or even lower-middle-class.
Reagan came off as a very telegenic everyman who understood the concerns of his fellow citizens. Has there ever been a Tory who's come off as any kind of everyman?
"Simon in London said...
It's remarkable how this has not happened in the UK, yet. Labour is utterly dependent on the continued tribal loyalty of a white working class that the post-Blair leadership despises.
I guess our system is not given to producing a Nixon or Reagan. In the '80s Thatcher had the support of the non-unionised white working class in southern England, but that's a fairly limited demographic. No populist Tory has attempted to win over the broader white working class or even lower-middle-class."
I think this isn't really true in the South East of England. Labour is the party of the diversity in Southern England. The anglo saxon folks there are not universally Tory but their not Labour either. It is true that Labour own whites in the North, Wales and Scotland though. Why that is shouldn't be a mystery. The economy of Britain is basically London is the Wall street of the world, tax that, and spend it in the rest of the UK. The rest of the UK associates its economic decline with Thatcherism and the Tories and depends on welfare which they associate with Labour. The main wave of immigration of Britain has also been to the tory heartland of Southern England, White Labour Britain is still largely lilly-white. The Tories are also insufferable snobs.
Any scheme by the left to try to cobble together a coalition of poor minorities and working class whites can't really work because there's a shrinking pot of government money to divide up. We're running trillion dollar a year deficits right now and it's going to get worse. As the amount of government money to be passed out shrinks, it will be inevitable that the various groups wanting it will fall to fighting over it. A free market society leads to people voluntarily engaging in mutually beneficial relationships that lead to societal harmony. Anything other than that leads to societal discord and increasing racial and class animosity.
more and more observers seemed to believe that so-called people of color … shared more interests with one another than with any white Americans
It never seemed to bother these "observers" that they themselves were white.
I'm trying to imagine somebody writing a book titled "What's The Matter With Brown People?"
I'm trying to imagine a book with such a title getting published!
I'm trying to imagine that book getting reviewed in National Review.
But all I'm doing is giving myself a headache.
There will be some interesting story lines in the national Democratic Party after Obama. There will be tremendous pressure to keep nominating Presidential candidates who aren't white males, but the Harold Fords, Villagarosas and Deval Patricks of the world won't motivate the support of the white SWPL base very much...
You guys really need to learn more about things before your spout off. Both Ted Heath and Thatcher were at best middle class. Churchill's dad was a toff but he was certainly not posh acting. Majors middle class along worn pretty much all the guys from Thatcher to Cameron. Never mind that Britians current most popular politican is Cameron crony Boris Johnson. Heck the leader of the BNP even went to Oxford.
Whites didn't "stray" from the Democratic party. The Democratic party abandoned whites.
"There will be some interesting story lines in the national Democratic Party after Obama. There will be tremendous pressure to keep nominating Presidential candidates who aren't white males"
I've thought the same thing. Especially if Obama get "cheated" out of a second term, blacks will expect a replacement of their own, but women and other minorities will think it's their turn. We're liable to see a string of affirmative action candidates for a couple of decades, with all the drop in quality that implies.
You guys really need to learn more about things before your spout off. Both Ted Heath and Thatcher were at best middle class. Churchill's dad was a toff but he was certainly not posh acting. Majors middle class along worn pretty much all the guys from Thatcher to Cameron. Never mind that Britians current most popular politican is Cameron crony Boris Johnson. Heck the leader of the BNP even went to Oxford.
My question is whether there's been an Oxbridge grad Tory politician who's not had the air of an Oxbridge grad. Joe Biden, for example, puts on this regular guy image, and George W Bush obviously really lay on with a trowel the Texas redneck thing despite being blue-blooded and a Yale and Harvard grad to boot. It wasn't 100% put on either, since his closest advisers weren't Ivy League grads.
I could be wrong, but as an interested outsider, it seems to me that at least since the late nineteenth century there's been some weird coalition between at least part of the British aristocracy and the working class (and a certain kind of "self-made man"), with the middle class (including quite another type of "self-made man") always a political thing unto itself. If I'm not completely off-base, could anyone who is familiar with British politics clue me in? It's rather interesting as I can't make sense of all the details. Also, it seems this would be before race played much part as a factor. I don't know how that changed things, though it obviously had an effect.
I'd love to read a book about this but don't have a place to start, if anyone here does, I'd be grateful.
Yes both Heath and Thatcher acted like normal if ambitious and driven people. Both went to Oxford. Also when talking about PMs it's best just to say Oxford no post WW2 prime minister attended Cambridge.
The white working class lost influence in the Democratic Party with the decline of labor unions and the financial and ideological takeover of the party by Jews. The Republicans won over some by paying lip service to the social issues but that is wearing thin. Both parties advocate policies deeply harmful to the interests of working class whites, including outsourcing, anti-white affirmative action and mass immigration. As long as the political duopoly exists, working class whites are screwed.
Reagan came off as a very telegenic everyman who understood the concerns of his fellow citizens. Has there ever been a Tory who's come off as any kind of everyman?
I've never been a member of the Conservative Party, and back in the eighties, used to regard them as class enemies (I'm not kidding), but David Davis caught my attention.
Why the Tories went for Cameron instead when Davis was a contender for the leadership is utterly baffling to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Davis_%28British_politician%29
Davis was raised on Aboyne Estate, a council estate in Tooting, South West London...Born to a single mother...became a member of the Territorial Army's 21 SAS Regiment ...won a place at the University of Warwick (BSc Joint Hons Molecular Science/Computer Science 1968–71)... He went straight on from there to London Business School, where he got a Master's Degree in Business (1971–73), and, later, Harvard University (Advanced Management Program 1984–85).
As far as I am concerned that is an awesome profile.
He comes across very well as well and has shown he has balls and principles, and also he is not a professional politician but someone with experience in the real world. All of which makes him a giant amongst pygmies to me.
But instead the Tories go with the oily Cameron.
Mental.
What's the Matter with White People?
Whiskey would say: "White women are having sex with black alpha males instead of white betas like me! And don't get me started on the WASP mafia controlling Harvard and Hollywood!"
"The white working class lost influence in the Democratic Party with the decline of labor unions and the financial and ideological takeover of the party by Jews. The Republicans won over some by paying lip service to the social issues but that is wearing thin. Both parties advocate policies deeply harmful to the interests of working class whites, including outsourcing, anti-white affirmative action and mass immigration. As long as the political duopoly exists, working class whites are screwed."
Well said. However, Romney's performance in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota (each >80% non-Hispanic white) shows the way forward, if the GOP is willing to listen.
If Romney loses on Tuesday the GOP will learn that it can't win if it continues to ignore the interests of working class whites.
A GOP loss on Tuesday under what should have been optimal conditions will cause some soul-searching that party leaders can't ignore. $700 billion defense budgets, wars 1or Israel, mass immigration, tolerance for the lefty, multicult agenda won't win elections anymore, and won't cut it with whites in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Jeb Bush and other mainstream Republicans are already setting up to blame Romney for not Hispandering enough. So while the GOP should learn the lesson Matthew states, it's far from clear that they will. They may very well continue to pursue the Bush/Rove strategy of fighting the Democrats over the votes of preferred minorities, leaving middle class whites with nowhere to go except to splinter among various ineffectual third parties.
Well said, Matthew and Dutch Boy. Trapped between a Democratic Party that hates us for our race, and a Republican Party that wants to sell us for $crap, the White working class needs as Workers Party.
I doubt the GOP will do any soul-searching of the kind you mention, though. The leadership will probably come to the same conclusion that Dems have come to, which is: we need demographic change to get rid of those people. Why else really do Romney's backers apparently believe (or HOPE) that the future of the electorate is in Hispanics?
A unionized white middle class polity with vulture-unfriendly economic policies (a 1950s Pat Buchananish situation) is what both sides abominate like Dracula running from a crucifix. We have to ask why.
Since Ruy Tuxedo won't acknowledge this in his review here's three reasons Dems lost the white working class (wwc):
1) affirmative action -- which negatively impacts on wwc
2) immigration -- which negatively impacts upon wwc
3) prioritising identity politics to the exclusion of everything else -- which not only relates to points 1 and two above, but basically means the Dems have nothing to offer the wwc.
The last Democratic President I can recall who offered the wwc anything was Jimmy Carter (and no, I don't think Clinton gave them anything).
I don't think the Republicans offer the wwc shit -- but they aren't as overtly hostile to them, and that makes a difference.
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