What's The Matter With White Folks Today?

No, not a new Bennelton ad

Just as Boehner announced his roster of all white male committee chairs (plus a gal to take care of the cafeteria and bathrooms), Bernie Sanders was on NPR with Steve Inskeep talking about, among other things, how the Democrats have been losing white working class voters to the anti-working family rightists. He worries, as do most progressives, that the Democratic Beltway insiders have decided to throw their lot in with the Big Business and Wall Street interests and abandon the FDR coalition of working class Americans.

When contemptible party apparachik Debbie Wasserman Schultz's says she's leading an investigation into why the Democrats failed so miserably November 4 so that she can prove it wasn't her fault, clearly saner minds are needed if the Democrats are going to more than just muddle through. Bernie's ideas about why the part failed 2 weeks ago probably don't have much in common with the view from Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel and the Beltway Dems. "To see where the Democratic Party is, I think, it's important to understand where America is," he began. "And where America is, is that today we are seeing the collapse, the continued collapse, of the American middle class. You have working-class families who have given up the dream of sending their kids to college. My family never had any money. My father came ... from Poland without a nickel in his pocket. He was able to send two of his kids to college. That dream is now not a reality for a whole lot of folks in this country.

And then people look out and they say, 'Gee, the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well.' And where are the Democrats? Do people see the Democratic Party standing up to Wall Street? Any of these guys going to jail? Not really. The average person is working longer hours, lower wages, and they do not see any political party standing up and fighting for their rights. What they see is a Republican Party becoming extremely right wing, controlled by folks like the Koch brothers. But they do not see a party representing the working class of this country." White working class voters, desperate, confused and rightfully pissed off, are falling into the arms of their class enemies. Bernie:

I am focusing on the fact that whether you're white or black or Hispanic or Asian, if you are in the working class, you are struggling to keep your heads above water. You're worried about your kids. What should the Democratic Party be talking about, Steve? What they should be talking about is a massive federal jobs program. There was once a time when our nation's infrastructure-- roads, bridges, water systems, rail-- were the envy of the world. Today that's no longer the case.

I would say if you go out on the street and you talk to people and say, "Which is the party of the American working class?" People would look to you like you were a little bit crazy, they wouldn't know what you were talking about, and they certainly wouldn't identify the Democrats.

People have been talking about Dana Milbank's opinion piece in Tuesday's Washington Post in which he tries to delineate the limits to populism. It's not encouraging.

Warren’s populism is appealing-- not fiery or vengeful but compassionate and grounded in fairness. She also has the virtue of being correct: People don’t feel improvement in the economy because the gains haven’t been shared evenly, income inequality has widened and wages haven’t increased along with stock prices and corporate profits.

Yet there’s a limit to how far Warren, and the Democrats, can go with their little-guy theme, for one simple reason: They can’t afford it.

More than ever in America, elections are purchased, not won. And that money comes from corporate and wealthy interests. Run against corporations and you lose that money-- and the election.

...This leaves Warren well-qualified to ask what she calls a “fundamental question”: “Who does the government work for?”

The answer is easy: The people who bought it.

Responding to all this in Slate, Jamelle Bouie goes off in a way different direction from Milbank's defeatism. He correctly identifies the problem for the Beltway careerist Democrats as not really embracing populism to bring the party any credibility with the working class Americans-- regardless of how the Republicans try to divide them up-- Bernie Sanders is talking about. "The Democratic Party," he reminds us, "styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class-- the white part-- wants nothing to do with it." Democratic politicians didn't get their votes-- didn't get their votes hugely.

The recurring debate of how to win these voters, or at least a portion of them. In a recent feature for the Washington Monthly, for example, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin argue that Democrats can capitalize on the generational divide in the white working class. The key fact is that “white working class” is a big category with a large number of different kinds of voters, including millennials, who fall to the left on most national issues. “Today’s young white working-class voters are notably more liberal on issues concerning the role of government” than their older counterparts note Teixeira and Halpin. And significantly these young whites are “significantly more open to rising diversity than the white working class as a whole.”

The conclusion is straightforward. Democrats don’t have to worry about alienating these voters with their cosmopolitanism. If they can just embrace a populist, forward thinking agenda-- in which they tackle stagnation and explicitly attack the wealthy engineers of extreme income inequality—they can win these younger whites who are comfortable with diversity and want a more level society. As Noam Scheiber writes for the New Republic, commenting on Teixeira and Halpin’s piece, “The politics of this approach work not just because populism is a ‘message’ that a majority of voters want to hear. But because, unlike the status quo, it can actually improve their economic prospects.”

Implicit in all of this is the assumption voters will believe the pitch. That they’ll hear the case for stronger programs, higher minimum wages, and higher taxes on the rich, and believe Democrats are advocating for them, and not some other group.

The problem is I don’t think we can make that assumption.

After all, working-class whites didn’t leave the Democratic Party over insufficiently populist policy and rhetoric. The liberal economic reforms of 1960s-- and Medicare in particular-- paid benefits to white working-class families throughout the 1970s and ’80s, even as the group moved to a decisive break with the Democrats. No, the proximate cause of the break was the Democratic Party’s close identification with black Americans, who-- after the riots of the late ’60s and ’70s-- became identified with urban disorder and welfare.

Specifically, whites were bewildered and infuriated with liberals who defended rioting communities-- correctly noting the decades of deprivation and abuse that led to those violent outbursts—and pushed anti-poverty programs to address the underlying conditions. Black incomes rose while at the same time, many white incomes were beginning to stagnate or even fall. Why was the government spending our tax dollars on them, working-class whites asked, when they destroy their neighborhoods and refuse to work, and we’re losing our jobs and our homes? In Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein captures the basic attitude by relaying this comment from a white construction worker, directed at George McGovern, “They’re payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”

Part of this was just racism. For most of the post-war era, whites were empowered by the federal government to separate themselves and their lives from black Americans. For the white middle class, federal aid built white suburbs and white schools, and for the white working-class, it built segregated housing projects and cities. The civil rights revolution brought blacks and black demands to their doorsteps, and for the white working class-- which couldn’t just leave for the suburbs-- it fueled a backlash.

But part of it was something broader. After all, there wasn’t a backlash to government programs writ large. Then, as now, working-class whites are ardent supporters of Social Security and Medicare. But to them, our retirement programs came with an implicit social contract: If you work and contribute to society, society will care for you into your old age. By contrast, you didn’t have to work to benefit from anti-poverty programs, in fact, you could riot and still receive government benefits. To these whites, the New Deal and its successor programs rewarded self-reliance and independence. The War on Poverty didn’t. And they hated it.

...Working-class whites are physically closer to the poor. And to them, as Kevin Drum notes, the poor are often “folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars.” It doesn’t matter that working-class tax rates are relatively low, and that anti-poverty programs are a small part of the federal budget. What matters is that they pay taxes but don’t get the same kind of benefits.

...Democrats can adopt populist rhetoric, but there’s no guarantee working-class whites will buy it. Indeed, in parts of the country-- like the Deep South-- it’s a lost cause. The Democratic Party is too associated with blacks and too associated with welfare to win over enough whites to make a difference.

Put another way, for a new rhetoric of populism to work-- or at least, attract the winnable whites identified by Teixeira and Halpin-- it needs to come with a commitment to universal policies that working-class whites like and support. (It’s no coincidence that the most liberal working-class whites belong to private and public sector unions.)

But the United States doesn’t have a political party to support that kind of social democracy. Instead, it has the Democratic Party, a collection of disparate interests which-- at its best-- is nervous about economic liberalism and hesitant to push anything outside the mainstream. And worse, it has a presidential frontrunner who-- more than anyone else-- is connected to the kinds of elites and the kinds of policies that would push the party away from the muscular liberalism it needs.