The Dems’ Seppuku, and How to Stop It

Dems and progressives are losing the working class, both whites and people of color. That’s not a fear or suspicion. It’s a fact. Whether your greatest fear is accelerating climate change, exploding economic inequality, institutionalized racism, women’s loss of rights, or fascism in America, the loss of workers’ support should be foremost on your mind. It does absolutely no good to dismiss workers, whatever their views, as misguided, let alone “deplorables.”

If this trend continues, nothing else will matter, and every one of those risks will get worse. Much worse. Why? Not only do workers outnumber bosses, they outnumber the rest of us voters, too. In particular, they vastly outnumber those of us with college degrees who work with our mouths and brains, not our hands. Lose those who work with their hands, and the Dems will become a permanent minority party, even without gerrymandering and the skewed Senate and Electoral College.

I reached voting age in 1966. Then American workers were still strongly Democratic. Their labor unions and houses of worship both reinforced their progressive instincts. Union halls and churches resounded with calls for fair pay, workers’ rights to organize and bargain, and equal economic opportunity. The ratio of CEO to average-worker pay then was about 30. Today it’s over ten times as high, and it’s rising rapidly.

Yesterday’s voting machines made progressive voting easy. Entirely mechanical, not electronic, each one had a “straight ticket” lever. All you had to do was pull the lever labeled “Democratic,” and the machine would mark your paper ballot with an “X” opposite every partisan candidate labeled “Democrat.” You didn’t have to research the names and positions of all the candidates on a complex ballot. All you had to do was pull the right lever, as advised by your union leader, your priest or pastor, or your co-workers.

Fast-forward to today. Registering to vote, let alone voting, has become a lot more complex. But forget about that, for a moment, and put yourself in the shoes of a newly-minted citizen from south of the border.

You came from a tough place in Mexico, or Central or South America. Death-dealing gangs preyed on you and your family, as did the police. Police protection, if available at all, required bribes or family connections. Justice was non-existent. Hope was scarce.

You lost some family members, maybe even young children. So you decided to go north. You walked, rode, hitchhiked and hobbled over a thousand miles, through deserts and snake infested jungles, to get to the US border. You made a successful crossing, probably after several failures, and ultimately managed to get a Green Card. After several years, maybe a decade, of law-abiding hard work, you became an American citizen.

Maybe the US is still not ideal for you. But it’s infinitely better than where you came from. You’re proud to be an American. You can vote. You can call 911 when you need police protection, and they come, often quickly, without being bribed. You can practice your religion, raise a family, and maybe even sponsor some foreign relatives as immigrants. You can speak your mind without fear.

Do you, the reader, see why you, the new citizen, might not be entranced by a party that wants to defund the police? that focuses on bathroom and athletic rights for transgender people? that worries (sometimes appropriately) about nuances of equal protection, when what you, the new citizen, faced to get here were literally matters of life and death?

By now, the mass media have sounded the alarm. White workers, Hispanic workers and workers of color are slipping away from the Democratic Party because of its obsessive focus on “cultural” issues and perfecting personal equality. They see it as neglecting bread-and-butter economics and the pride (and relief!) that most workers feel to be American. They are drifting away because of incessant perfectionism, rather than a focus on what workers see as vital kitchen-table issues.

Pick up almost any newspaper and you can see the results of the polls. But if you want a succinct and damning summary, reach this piece by Ruy Teixiera, a little-known doctorate-level, leftist social scientist who’s been studying US politics for several decades.

Here are a few quick headlines. Hispanics, by 70-23, see the US as the greatest country in the world, as do workers (by 69-23). Strong progressives disagree (66-28). Hispanics are split (47-44) on allowing more legal immigration versus increasing border security and enforcing existing immigration laws. So are workers generally (32-58). In contrast, strong progressives opt for increasing legal immigration only (97-2!). Hispanics (50-41) want full funding of police, as do workers generally (59-31), while strong progressives want to reallocate police funding (88-12). (Black voters, while perhaps more ambivalent, provide scant support for defending the police, as distinguished from rooting out the bad apples.) Finally, Hispanics (55-39), and workers generally (55-40) believe that hard work gets you ahead, while strong progressives think that’s not necessarily so (88-12).

These discrepancies, let alone the rest of the polling, highlight vast gulfs in perception between strong progressives, most of whom are college educated, and workers. It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong. What matters is unity: no progressive movement ever has, or ever can, succeed without strong support from workers. And no progressive movement in the US—with Hispanics our most rapidly rising ethnic group—can hope to succeed in the long run without their support.

So what can we progressives do to start winning over, in much greater numbers, the Hispanics and workers without whom we are little more than an elite debating society? Here are a few key points to consider:

1. Drop the pessimism. Accentuate the positive, always. If our nation is imperfect (and it is!), emphasize our capacity for positive change. Recall that it took a Civil War, the bloodiest in our history, to begin to honor Jefferson’s credo that “all Men are created equal.” Point out our successful struggles for civil rights, voting rights workers’ rights and women’s rights, and try to emulate them. In that regard, perseverance is key.

2. Try to make police better, not fewer and poorer. Provide more money for policing, especially in high-crime areas, while emphasizing fairness, diversity and accountability. Make fair and even-handed policing and earning the community’s respect points of pride and promotion. Even make them quids pro quo. Promote and reward police who earn respect, not fear, from the communities they serve. Change the culture while increasing the budgets, hiring more police, and training them better.

3. Work hand-in-hand with labor. The most exciting thing in progressive politics today is the resurgence of organized labor, with partially successful drives to unionize Amazon, Walmart, Apple and Starbucks. The Democratic Party should honor, recruit, reward and feature the organizers of these unions. It should make a full-court press to repeal so-called “right to work” laws, organize realistic options to offshoring jobs, and make labor organizers an integral part of Party politics. The goal should be to reproduce the “Golden Age” of the American Middle class, in the postwar era, when 36% of private-sector workers were unionized and most reliably voted Democratic.

4. Be smarter on climate. Keep prohibitions on and regulations of fossil fuels in the background. Focus on positive change toward electric cars and renewables. Emphasize the millions of cleaner, better paid jobs, with a better future. Who, after all, wouldn’t prefer working in the open air on a solar array or windmill to working in a dank, deep coal mine with deadly gases and occasional rockslides? The emphasis should be on replacing exhaustible oil and gas, which will certainly run out this century, with alternatives that offer cleaner energy and reliable jobs for the long haul.

Take a page from a little-known political pundit named Van Jones, who made the equation “clean energy= jobs” during Obama’s first campaign. Maybe make him energy policy czar. The neat thing about addressing climate change is that the nation that leads it will also lead our species’ industry and manufacturing for the foreseeable future.

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Selling a progressive program to college-educated elites is not enough. How many of us ever call 911 with our property or lives on the line? We have to sell every part of our progressive program to people who work with their hands for a living and whose lives and fortunes are a lot more precarious.

That shouldn’t be too hard. Better (not less) policing, fairer immigration and whole-hearted energy conversion as a way to retard the acceleration of climate change benefit everyone. We just have to emphasize the positive and the short-term benefits to the average voter.

For forty years, Republican propagandists have perpetrated an historic scam on America’s workers. They have gotten them to vote against their own interests and to sympathize with the bosses who exploit them as inanimate factors of profit. But the United States has always been richer, more united and happier when workers got a fair share of the pie, through their own efforts, their own politics, and their own pressure in labor unions. If the college-educated elite can only perfect and sell that cooperation and unify the Party with labor, we can enjoy another progressive era to match those at the turn of the twentieth century and the beginning of FDR’s presidency.



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