GordonGekko
Footballguy
Direct Headline: Democrats Have Forgotten the Working Class. It Will Cost Them in November | Opinion
....I remember vividly when, just before I turned 18 years old, my father filled out my selective service paperwork and voter registration and, against my protests, registered me as a Democrat. To my father, it did not matter that I considered myself a Republican, because, as he put it, "our family are Democrats." My family saw this as an essential plank of our identity. "We are Mexican. We are Catholic. We are Democrats." My family believed that the Democratic Party looked out for working families and stood for their values.
To whatever extent that may have been true in the past, it is apparent that in 2022, it is no longer the case. Working-class families are finally taking notice....At this time, American families are struggling economically, and no one is being hit harder than the working class. Under a Democrat-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, we have watched inflation and gas prices skyrocket. Rather than address this issue, Democratic politicians have asked the working class to sacrifice more while liberal elite celebrities dismiss the concerns and even poke fun at those feeling the impact. Just this week, multiple media pundits on the ideological Left went so far as to admonish voters for being more concerned with inflation and gas prices than with topics they believe should be the priority, such as the January 6 hearings....
...Regardless of what a person believes about January 6 and the subsequent hearings, it is unrealistic, out of touch, and frankly insulting to expect working-class voters to prioritize anything over the well being of their families as they try to make ends meet. It is hard to imagine anything more out of touch with the values held by families like my own than Stephen Colbert telling his audience "I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla," while working-class families are trying to figure out how to afford groceries and fill their gas tanks....
...But inflation and gas prices are not the only working-class problems Democrats have shown themselves to be unaware of or unconcerned about....Instead of meaningful immigration reform, President Joe Biden has effectively opened the borders, wreaking havoc in states along the southern border, such as my own state, Arizona. The nonprofit organization that I co-founded—Cece's Hope Center, which works with victims of sex trafficking—has been overwhelmed by the increased demand created by disastrous border policies. And fentanyl, a drug that comes to America from China by way of illegal smuggling through Mexico, has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45....
...As our children continue to fall behind academically and struggle emotionally (another crisis felt most deeply among the working class) following the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats have focused on implementing social experimentation and politicized curricula that are at odds with the values of many working-class Americans. Educating our children and preparing them for college and the workforce should be the top priority....
The values and priorities of the Democratic Party today are not reflective of the working-class families, such as my own, that supported it for years. It should come as no surprise to anyone this November when we see a "Red Wave" in the midterm elections; this will be the cost that the Democratic Party pays for forgetting about the working class, the backbone of America....
Rene Lopez 6/29/22 at 6:00 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-have-forgotten-working-class-it-will-cost-them-november-opinion-1719880
Direct Headline: What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class
There’s an important social and economic divide that drives working-class whites that progressive elites mostly miss — to their political peril......In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits..... While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic...I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion....
Like Vance, settled white workers tend to see themselves living a version of the American dream grounded primarily — if not entirely — in their own agency. They believe they can survive, even thrive, if they just work hard enough. And some of them are doing just that. Because they lean into the grit of the individual, they tend to downplay structural obstacles to their quest to make a living, e.g., poor schools and even crummy job markets, just as they downplay structural benefits. They also discount “white privilege” because giving skin color credit for what they have achieved devalues the significance of their work. This mindset is also the reason that when Obama said in 2012, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” the remark landed so badly among the settled working class. They’re not accustomed to sharing credit for what they have — perhaps especially when they don’t have much..... — “suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person....”
....Exit polls from 2016 also reflect this division, with the lowest-income voters supporting Clinton—and therefore safety-net programs associated with Democrats—by the greatest margin, 53 percent to 41 percent over Trump. It was folks earning $50,000 to $99,000, those who depending on region and family size might be considered settled working class, who preferred Trump by the greatest margin of all income brackets — 50 percent to 46 percent....As important as this divide is to understanding working-class whites — and in spite of national publicity by big-name scholars and journalists — coastal and urban progressives often seem oblivious to it. This may be because few have any meaningful interaction with either faction of the white working class. Outsiders struggle to grasp the significance of this class war that rages within our nation’s broader class war....
.....Whenever I talk about this settled working class mindset to folks in my coastal progressive world, I get two responses. The first is an assumption that these folks are simply racists whose sole motivation is to deny benefits to people of color. The second response is that they are irrational, even delusional, not to see that they are vulnerable — that they might someday need public benefits, too, given the way precarity has not only crept up the socioeconomic ladder, but also outward and into a growing number of communities left behind by the knowledge economy....First, going straight to allegations of racism is incendiary and infuriating to the folks being labeled “racist.” They tend to define that term narrowly, referring to people who say the n-word or explicitly endorse white nationalism.....Bias based on race and bias based on class are not mutually exclusive, and it can be easier to assume that racial animus is at work when in fact, it’s classist or cultural animus directed at those on a lower economic or social rung. As the late cultural critic Joe Bageant expressed it, “what middle America loathes … are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer....”
...In July 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer suggested Democrats could ignore this constituency. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” he said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”....Schumer’s strategy proved a notorious disaster for Democrats, and it’s not a gamble the party can afford to repeat in 2022 or 2024. If anything, white workers look more critical than ever to a winning Democratic coalition, as more Latinos drift into the Republican column....It thus behooves Ryan and other Democrats to consider carefully how to communicate with a voting bloc they once took for granted....President Biden talks more about jobs and the working class than President Obama did, but generic job talk may no longer be getting through to workers given the shifting image (and reality) of Democrats as the party of elites and intellectuals. The sad truth is that coastal progressive condescension toward workers has become second nature to many Democrats...
When Trump said he “love[d] the poorly educated,” the credentialed class cringed. They assumed no one would want to be labeled as such and, indeed, that no one would want to be poorly educated (read to mean having little formal education). But folks without college degrees — even folks without high school diplomas — heard Trump’s comment as affirmation. He was happy to be associated with them, and Trump’s warm embrace was a salve on a deep, festering wound. Trump’s comment was also a rare one that did double duty in speaking to both settled and hard-living factions of the white working class.....But Trump also found a way to speak specifically to the settled working class, those with strong identities as workers. The “again” part of “Make America Great Again” brings to mind a time when their jobs provided greater economic security—as Papaw Vance’s steel mill job had—and also a time when blue-collar workers felt broadly respected. For workers displaced or fearing displacement, Trump named various external culprits (aka structural challenges)—unfair foreign imports, immigrants, regulation. He also offered solutions, e.g., tariffs, a border wall, less red tape, though he didn’t deliver on all of his promises. Trump didn’t save coal jobs, but the American steel industry did benefit from his tariffs....
Democratic solutions to worker travails will mostly differ from those proposed by Republicans, of course, but Democrats can fruitfully borrow a page from how Trump communicated with workers. First and foremost, tell workers that they and their labor are seen and appreciated. A key theme of 2016 election coverage was that many working-class white and rural voters felt overlooked. Tracie St. Martin, a union member and heavy construction worker who supported Trump, summed up the disgruntlement, “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.....”
The ongoing labor shortage is all the more reason Democrats should keep telling blue-collar workers of all races that they are valued—and all the more reason to mean it. Our nation badly needs carpenters, electricians, plumbers and the full array of blue-collar workers who are going to help us overcome our national housing shortage and actually reconstruct our infrastructure. Politicians like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) speak more often than most about job training for workers like these... others should follow her lead.....For them, the most important thing is simply to get to work. A close second is living in a country that values their work—along with a paycheck that reflects both that value and their dignity as workers....
By Lisa R. Pruitt 06/24/2022 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/24/democrats-white-working-class-00041807
Direct Headline: How the Democrats became the party of the rich
Ever since Joe Biden’s election, the media has displayed an almost obsessive interest in the Democratic Party’s dwindling popularity among the working class, and its booming support among affluent professionals. The trend has been so dramatic that some Republicans have sought to rebrand the GOP as the party of the “multiracial working class”....But will this strategy work? To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.
In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year....In some states this transformation was particularly astonishing. In Virginia, for instance, counties where the MHI is under $60,000/year accounted for 32% of the vote in 2010, while counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year accounted for 34.4%. Ten years later, the state’s poorest counties contributed just 25.3% of the presidential primary vote, while the richest counties contributed 41.4%. During the same period in South Carolina, the electorate shifted away from poor and working-class counties and toward middle-class counties by 20%. In North Carolina, the shift was 11%; in Florida, it was 9%....
....These changes have occurred not only because the party is growing in prosperous areas, but because it’s also collapsing in struggling ones — a trend that has been most dramatic in the South. Middle-class counties in Tennessee, for instance, grew as a share of the Democratic electorate from 30% to 37.3%, and their raw vote shot up by more than 50,000. But at the same time, poorer counties went from representing 65.9% of the electorate to 56.3%, and their raw vote plunged by over 120,000....What accounts for such profound changes to the Democratic coalition?
...It was during the mid-Sixties that the Democratic Party’s traditional base in the white working class started defecting to Republicans, kicking off the slow-motion collapse of the New Deal coalition. Over the next decade, senior Democrats began contemplating how to attract new constituencies that could replace these voters. In December 1976, Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism....
... When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, politicians such as Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Clinton pollster Mark Penn argued that Gore’s mistake was in adopting populist economic rhetoric that alienated the white professional class....The DLC and Penn blamed Gore’s loss on his adoption of a populist appeal in the last months of the campaign.” ...Like many of their contemporaries, they agreed that college-educated professionals should be the party’s new base. But they also (emphasized) that Democrats must supplement their support from the professional class with support from various other constituencies. “The key for Democrats,” they wrote, “will be… in discovering a strategy that retains support among the white working class, but also builds support among college-educated professionals and others in America’s burgeoning ideopolises....”
....In 2008, Barack Obama captured the presidency with exactly the coalition that Judis and Teixeira described: young people, racial minorities, college-educated whites in the Sun Belt, and non-college whites in the Rust Belt. In 2012, he successfully reassembled that coalition, becoming the first Democratic president to win consecutive popular vote majorities since Lyndon Johnson. He governed along the same lines that they recommended, roughly halfway between Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. By November 7, 2016, almost everyone in politics believed that an enduring Democratic majority had finally emerged. The next day, it was gone....
....When I interviewed Teixeira in February, he told me that the reason for the collapse of the emerging Democratic majority was twofold. First, liberal professionals grew contemptuous of anyone who didn’t share their cultural politics, alienating the white working-class segment of the Obama coalition. Second, their dismissal of these voters’ economic pain as an excuse for racism allowed Donald Trump to push his advantage with non-college whites to blockbuster margins. To make matters worse, liberal professionals have only grown more insular and censorious over the past six years. Partly as a result, even non-college non-whites — Asian and Hispanic voters in particular — have started to drift to the Right....
....But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the political revolution. West of the Rocky Mountains, Sanders beat Biden across all income categories in multiple states. In fact, he often notched up his best performances in poor and working-class counties, including in California. Sanders’s popularity among Hispanic voters was also critical to his success in this area of the country. Chuck Rocha, the architect of the campaign’s Hispanic outreach program, credits its success to the decision to eschew social justice rhetoric and appeals to identity in favour of bread-and-butter economic themes that resonate with immigrant families....For years, the Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the working class — is it any wonder they’ve finally started to notice?
BY Matthew Thomas May 12, 2022
https://unherd.com/2022/05/how-the-democrats-became-the-party-of-the-rich/
VIDEO: Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How. Nov 9, 2021 The New York Times
It’s easy to blame the other side.... But what happens when Republicans aren’t standing in the way? In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And as we explore in the video above, they often aren’t living up to their values. In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states. It is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and economic inequality is increasing most quickly. Instead of asking, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Democrats need to spend more time pondering, “What’s the matter with California?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw
VIDEO: Joe: 2016 Election Results A 'Complete Earthquake' | Morning Joe | MSNBC Nov 9, 2016
Top Talkers: Donald Trump has been elected United States president, and the Morning Joe panel considers the polling data and the shock Trump's win is to both parties in Washington.
Almost every major forecasting aggregator, including FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, The New York Times, and HuffPost Pollster, heavily favored a Clinton victory in the lead-up to Tuesday's race...Trump's victory Tuesday came amid a wave of support among working-class and blue-collar white voters in numerous battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire....
"A complete earthquake...This was an earthquake I haven't seen since Ronald Reagan in 1980 — it just came out of nowhere...Something happened last night that will forever shake up the coalitions that make up the Republican and Democratic Party....People would not admit they were voting for Donald Trump because they watched TV every day, and everybody every day said Trump was a racist, he was a bigot, he was a xenophobe...And if a pollster calls you up and says, 'Who are you voting for?' ...you don't say Donald Trump...." - Joe Scarborough
"They were determined to vote for Donald Trump, and they were ignored. They were ignored by pollsters. They were ignored by the media. And they showed up yesterday in astounding numbers, a wave of people across the country." - Mike Barnicle, MSNBC
"The thing about this [Donald] Trump phenomenon is that there's a lot of good stuff in it; the anti-elitism, the concern for working class jobs." - Van Jones, CNN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgYphOJ7qiw
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-wins-election-results-2016-11
*******
"This is the lowest moment in my life." - Unnamed Clinton campaign official, Election Night 2016
"I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience." - Quentin Tarantino
“Purpose of progress is to lift all humanity, not to pamper the elites' moronity.” - Abhijit Naskar
My godson was more than difficult at times in his childhood. He fought a lot. I recognized it was a complex struggle for him. I wasn't part of his actual biological family. I was more of a distant "Uncle John Wick" who brought lots of gifts. Then suddenly I was raising him full time and I was his last tether on a life that didn't include a series of foster homes. Mostly, he felt abandoned. In part, I suspect, as illogical at it seems, he probably blamed himself in ways he couldn't understand for being alone. I could not bring his parents back to life. The truth is, if I could lift that pain off his shoulders, at any point of his life, I would have given anything. My fortune, my homes, my life. That's what no one teaches you about parenthood. Your life is not your own anymore. You have to weigh out what must be done, even if it has to be brutal, to keep your children safe from the horrors of this world.
Another kid at school called him an "orphan". I'm not sure totally how that spiraled out of control, I'm guessing the parents of this kid must have talked to someone else, gossip and all that, and it filtered through to the children. I'm quite a bit older than my godson, and he's mixed race, and he looks nothing like me. ( Still very good looking of course, just different than my version of ridiculously handsome). So that creates those kinds of questions.
I asked him what happened. He said there was some argument over something pointless that kids argue about. And the other kid, in some kind of rage, shouted out, "At least I'm not an orphan". Then I asked him if he punched him then and there. He said "No". I asked what did you say. He said, "Don't call me that again". The other kid challenged him, "What if I do?" in the way kids taunt each other.
My godson screamed, "F--- around and find out!"
This nimrod kid called my godson an orphan again. And so my boy clocked this POS mouth-breather right good. Put him right on his back. Made him bleed. Made him cry.
(I did my best here not to smile. I did not raise him to be a victim. I didn't not raise him to take anyone's stupid BS. )
Of course the teacher and the principal both sat me down and asked me where he learned that. Well, damn, to be honest, he learned it from his "Uncle Gekko" Because sometimes I'd say that into a phone while doing business. Or maybe he overheard me talking to one of my managers at one of my companies on how to handle a difficult situation/person.
"F---- AROUND AND FIND OUT"
Because this was a private school and I have some outside leverage, this all got worked out in the end. Kids are going to be kids. Also the old man and the kid were blessed with stellar looks, and these educators are usually pretty shallow to my experience.
So I've previously talked extensively in the past here in the PSF about Team Blue and their constant alienation and condescension to the every day working class American citizen. Just regular people trying to get by and keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table for their children. But as time went on, the Democratic Party appears to have chosen the route to quadruple down on seeing how many working class related voting blocks they could enrage, punish and lose completely, even up to actual legacy votes.
The problems are the same, and have gotten even worse
1) Democrats see the working class as a type of monolith. They don't appreciate the nuance and context of these different voting blocks.
2) Democrats have pushed "culture wars" and identity politics at all costs over "kitchen table issues" This is also a basic math problem. The working class vastly outnumbers the other blocks that Team Blue panders to the most.
3) Democrats intentionally chose to abandon the working class for their "college educated liberal elites" and their woke radicals. They took a risk versus reward equation and picked yet another wrong path. Or maybe someone at the DNC engaged with Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 too seriously when he said to "always bet on black".
4) Democrats, particularly under the Obama regime, forgot that any voter engagement strategy has to be more than just grievance based coalitions built around intersectionality and identity politics, you actually need to deliver wins for the American people and make their lives materially better.
5) Democrats chose to ignore those like Johnny Harris of the NYT, who pointed out long standing Blue strongholds were often the most punitive, by intentional public policy design, towards the working class and fueled even more widening gaps of inequality.
6) Democrats didn't appear to learn a single thing from the 2016 general election, where masses of voters defied all projections and polling as the working class swelled up to, as a MSNBC pundit put it so aptly, "put a middle finger up to the political establishment".
7) Democrats continued to dismiss the pain and context of the working class, especially the bottom rungs, and wrote it off as karma for perceived "racism" while devaluing actual honest blue collar work that simply differed from the "labor" of the Limousine Liberal over-educated tone deaf elite. This choice was made to rob many people, often those the most in need, of their dignity. Did Team Blue truly believe that this kind of reckless hate would win them hearts and minds?
8 ) Democrats failed to put forth a national candidate that would appeal to the working class and would sound far more reasonable than the typical stock issued Team Blue caricature corporate cut-out establishment shills. Plenty of voters would have supported an Amy Klobuchar, a Katie Porter or a John Fetterman, with real Party support and a good campaign strategy. The problem of course is the corporate big donor overlords that drag the leash on Team Blue and the DNC would never allow someone to come forward that they didn't completely control.
I wrote a thread about the struggles of the white rural Christian working class over a year and a half ago. In that time, Team Blue and the Biden Administration has done everything possible to turn themselves into pariahs to multiple other working class segments of the country.
But most of all, the current power base of the Democratic Party failed to learn the lesson that came from a little boy. Who said there would be consequences if you keep f-----ing around with people for no good damn reason at all.
Now Team Blue gets to find out.
....I remember vividly when, just before I turned 18 years old, my father filled out my selective service paperwork and voter registration and, against my protests, registered me as a Democrat. To my father, it did not matter that I considered myself a Republican, because, as he put it, "our family are Democrats." My family saw this as an essential plank of our identity. "We are Mexican. We are Catholic. We are Democrats." My family believed that the Democratic Party looked out for working families and stood for their values.
To whatever extent that may have been true in the past, it is apparent that in 2022, it is no longer the case. Working-class families are finally taking notice....At this time, American families are struggling economically, and no one is being hit harder than the working class. Under a Democrat-controlled Congress and a Democratic president, we have watched inflation and gas prices skyrocket. Rather than address this issue, Democratic politicians have asked the working class to sacrifice more while liberal elite celebrities dismiss the concerns and even poke fun at those feeling the impact. Just this week, multiple media pundits on the ideological Left went so far as to admonish voters for being more concerned with inflation and gas prices than with topics they believe should be the priority, such as the January 6 hearings....
...Regardless of what a person believes about January 6 and the subsequent hearings, it is unrealistic, out of touch, and frankly insulting to expect working-class voters to prioritize anything over the well being of their families as they try to make ends meet. It is hard to imagine anything more out of touch with the values held by families like my own than Stephen Colbert telling his audience "I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon. Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla," while working-class families are trying to figure out how to afford groceries and fill their gas tanks....
...But inflation and gas prices are not the only working-class problems Democrats have shown themselves to be unaware of or unconcerned about....Instead of meaningful immigration reform, President Joe Biden has effectively opened the borders, wreaking havoc in states along the southern border, such as my own state, Arizona. The nonprofit organization that I co-founded—Cece's Hope Center, which works with victims of sex trafficking—has been overwhelmed by the increased demand created by disastrous border policies. And fentanyl, a drug that comes to America from China by way of illegal smuggling through Mexico, has become the number-one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45....
...As our children continue to fall behind academically and struggle emotionally (another crisis felt most deeply among the working class) following the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats have focused on implementing social experimentation and politicized curricula that are at odds with the values of many working-class Americans. Educating our children and preparing them for college and the workforce should be the top priority....
The values and priorities of the Democratic Party today are not reflective of the working-class families, such as my own, that supported it for years. It should come as no surprise to anyone this November when we see a "Red Wave" in the midterm elections; this will be the cost that the Democratic Party pays for forgetting about the working class, the backbone of America....
Rene Lopez 6/29/22 at 6:00 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-have-forgotten-working-class-it-will-cost-them-november-opinion-1719880
Direct Headline: What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class
There’s an important social and economic divide that drives working-class whites that progressive elites mostly miss — to their political peril......In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits..... While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic...I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion....
Like Vance, settled white workers tend to see themselves living a version of the American dream grounded primarily — if not entirely — in their own agency. They believe they can survive, even thrive, if they just work hard enough. And some of them are doing just that. Because they lean into the grit of the individual, they tend to downplay structural obstacles to their quest to make a living, e.g., poor schools and even crummy job markets, just as they downplay structural benefits. They also discount “white privilege” because giving skin color credit for what they have achieved devalues the significance of their work. This mindset is also the reason that when Obama said in 2012, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” the remark landed so badly among the settled working class. They’re not accustomed to sharing credit for what they have — perhaps especially when they don’t have much..... — “suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person....”
....Exit polls from 2016 also reflect this division, with the lowest-income voters supporting Clinton—and therefore safety-net programs associated with Democrats—by the greatest margin, 53 percent to 41 percent over Trump. It was folks earning $50,000 to $99,000, those who depending on region and family size might be considered settled working class, who preferred Trump by the greatest margin of all income brackets — 50 percent to 46 percent....As important as this divide is to understanding working-class whites — and in spite of national publicity by big-name scholars and journalists — coastal and urban progressives often seem oblivious to it. This may be because few have any meaningful interaction with either faction of the white working class. Outsiders struggle to grasp the significance of this class war that rages within our nation’s broader class war....
.....Whenever I talk about this settled working class mindset to folks in my coastal progressive world, I get two responses. The first is an assumption that these folks are simply racists whose sole motivation is to deny benefits to people of color. The second response is that they are irrational, even delusional, not to see that they are vulnerable — that they might someday need public benefits, too, given the way precarity has not only crept up the socioeconomic ladder, but also outward and into a growing number of communities left behind by the knowledge economy....First, going straight to allegations of racism is incendiary and infuriating to the folks being labeled “racist.” They tend to define that term narrowly, referring to people who say the n-word or explicitly endorse white nationalism.....Bias based on race and bias based on class are not mutually exclusive, and it can be easier to assume that racial animus is at work when in fact, it’s classist or cultural animus directed at those on a lower economic or social rung. As the late cultural critic Joe Bageant expressed it, “what middle America loathes … are poor and poorish people, especially the kind who look and sound like they just might live in a house trailer....”
...In July 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer suggested Democrats could ignore this constituency. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” he said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”....Schumer’s strategy proved a notorious disaster for Democrats, and it’s not a gamble the party can afford to repeat in 2022 or 2024. If anything, white workers look more critical than ever to a winning Democratic coalition, as more Latinos drift into the Republican column....It thus behooves Ryan and other Democrats to consider carefully how to communicate with a voting bloc they once took for granted....President Biden talks more about jobs and the working class than President Obama did, but generic job talk may no longer be getting through to workers given the shifting image (and reality) of Democrats as the party of elites and intellectuals. The sad truth is that coastal progressive condescension toward workers has become second nature to many Democrats...
When Trump said he “love[d] the poorly educated,” the credentialed class cringed. They assumed no one would want to be labeled as such and, indeed, that no one would want to be poorly educated (read to mean having little formal education). But folks without college degrees — even folks without high school diplomas — heard Trump’s comment as affirmation. He was happy to be associated with them, and Trump’s warm embrace was a salve on a deep, festering wound. Trump’s comment was also a rare one that did double duty in speaking to both settled and hard-living factions of the white working class.....But Trump also found a way to speak specifically to the settled working class, those with strong identities as workers. The “again” part of “Make America Great Again” brings to mind a time when their jobs provided greater economic security—as Papaw Vance’s steel mill job had—and also a time when blue-collar workers felt broadly respected. For workers displaced or fearing displacement, Trump named various external culprits (aka structural challenges)—unfair foreign imports, immigrants, regulation. He also offered solutions, e.g., tariffs, a border wall, less red tape, though he didn’t deliver on all of his promises. Trump didn’t save coal jobs, but the American steel industry did benefit from his tariffs....
Democratic solutions to worker travails will mostly differ from those proposed by Republicans, of course, but Democrats can fruitfully borrow a page from how Trump communicated with workers. First and foremost, tell workers that they and their labor are seen and appreciated. A key theme of 2016 election coverage was that many working-class white and rural voters felt overlooked. Tracie St. Martin, a union member and heavy construction worker who supported Trump, summed up the disgruntlement, “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.....”
The ongoing labor shortage is all the more reason Democrats should keep telling blue-collar workers of all races that they are valued—and all the more reason to mean it. Our nation badly needs carpenters, electricians, plumbers and the full array of blue-collar workers who are going to help us overcome our national housing shortage and actually reconstruct our infrastructure. Politicians like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) speak more often than most about job training for workers like these... others should follow her lead.....For them, the most important thing is simply to get to work. A close second is living in a country that values their work—along with a paycheck that reflects both that value and their dignity as workers....
By Lisa R. Pruitt 06/24/2022 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/24/democrats-white-working-class-00041807
Direct Headline: How the Democrats became the party of the rich
Ever since Joe Biden’s election, the media has displayed an almost obsessive interest in the Democratic Party’s dwindling popularity among the working class, and its booming support among affluent professionals. The trend has been so dramatic that some Republicans have sought to rebrand the GOP as the party of the “multiracial working class”....But will this strategy work? To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.
In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year....In some states this transformation was particularly astonishing. In Virginia, for instance, counties where the MHI is under $60,000/year accounted for 32% of the vote in 2010, while counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year accounted for 34.4%. Ten years later, the state’s poorest counties contributed just 25.3% of the presidential primary vote, while the richest counties contributed 41.4%. During the same period in South Carolina, the electorate shifted away from poor and working-class counties and toward middle-class counties by 20%. In North Carolina, the shift was 11%; in Florida, it was 9%....
....These changes have occurred not only because the party is growing in prosperous areas, but because it’s also collapsing in struggling ones — a trend that has been most dramatic in the South. Middle-class counties in Tennessee, for instance, grew as a share of the Democratic electorate from 30% to 37.3%, and their raw vote shot up by more than 50,000. But at the same time, poorer counties went from representing 65.9% of the electorate to 56.3%, and their raw vote plunged by over 120,000....What accounts for such profound changes to the Democratic coalition?
...It was during the mid-Sixties that the Democratic Party’s traditional base in the white working class started defecting to Republicans, kicking off the slow-motion collapse of the New Deal coalition. Over the next decade, senior Democrats began contemplating how to attract new constituencies that could replace these voters. In December 1976, Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism....
... When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, politicians such as Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Clinton pollster Mark Penn argued that Gore’s mistake was in adopting populist economic rhetoric that alienated the white professional class....The DLC and Penn blamed Gore’s loss on his adoption of a populist appeal in the last months of the campaign.” ...Like many of their contemporaries, they agreed that college-educated professionals should be the party’s new base. But they also (emphasized) that Democrats must supplement their support from the professional class with support from various other constituencies. “The key for Democrats,” they wrote, “will be… in discovering a strategy that retains support among the white working class, but also builds support among college-educated professionals and others in America’s burgeoning ideopolises....”
....In 2008, Barack Obama captured the presidency with exactly the coalition that Judis and Teixeira described: young people, racial minorities, college-educated whites in the Sun Belt, and non-college whites in the Rust Belt. In 2012, he successfully reassembled that coalition, becoming the first Democratic president to win consecutive popular vote majorities since Lyndon Johnson. He governed along the same lines that they recommended, roughly halfway between Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. By November 7, 2016, almost everyone in politics believed that an enduring Democratic majority had finally emerged. The next day, it was gone....
....When I interviewed Teixeira in February, he told me that the reason for the collapse of the emerging Democratic majority was twofold. First, liberal professionals grew contemptuous of anyone who didn’t share their cultural politics, alienating the white working-class segment of the Obama coalition. Second, their dismissal of these voters’ economic pain as an excuse for racism allowed Donald Trump to push his advantage with non-college whites to blockbuster margins. To make matters worse, liberal professionals have only grown more insular and censorious over the past six years. Partly as a result, even non-college non-whites — Asian and Hispanic voters in particular — have started to drift to the Right....
....But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for the political revolution. West of the Rocky Mountains, Sanders beat Biden across all income categories in multiple states. In fact, he often notched up his best performances in poor and working-class counties, including in California. Sanders’s popularity among Hispanic voters was also critical to his success in this area of the country. Chuck Rocha, the architect of the campaign’s Hispanic outreach program, credits its success to the decision to eschew social justice rhetoric and appeals to identity in favour of bread-and-butter economic themes that resonate with immigrant families....For years, the Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the working class — is it any wonder they’ve finally started to notice?
BY Matthew Thomas May 12, 2022
https://unherd.com/2022/05/how-the-democrats-became-the-party-of-the-rich/
VIDEO: Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How. Nov 9, 2021 The New York Times
It’s easy to blame the other side.... But what happens when Republicans aren’t standing in the way? In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And as we explore in the video above, they often aren’t living up to their values. In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states. It is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and economic inequality is increasing most quickly. Instead of asking, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Democrats need to spend more time pondering, “What’s the matter with California?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw
VIDEO: Joe: 2016 Election Results A 'Complete Earthquake' | Morning Joe | MSNBC Nov 9, 2016
Top Talkers: Donald Trump has been elected United States president, and the Morning Joe panel considers the polling data and the shock Trump's win is to both parties in Washington.
Almost every major forecasting aggregator, including FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, The New York Times, and HuffPost Pollster, heavily favored a Clinton victory in the lead-up to Tuesday's race...Trump's victory Tuesday came amid a wave of support among working-class and blue-collar white voters in numerous battleground states, including Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire....
"A complete earthquake...This was an earthquake I haven't seen since Ronald Reagan in 1980 — it just came out of nowhere...Something happened last night that will forever shake up the coalitions that make up the Republican and Democratic Party....People would not admit they were voting for Donald Trump because they watched TV every day, and everybody every day said Trump was a racist, he was a bigot, he was a xenophobe...And if a pollster calls you up and says, 'Who are you voting for?' ...you don't say Donald Trump...." - Joe Scarborough
"They were determined to vote for Donald Trump, and they were ignored. They were ignored by pollsters. They were ignored by the media. And they showed up yesterday in astounding numbers, a wave of people across the country." - Mike Barnicle, MSNBC
"The thing about this [Donald] Trump phenomenon is that there's a lot of good stuff in it; the anti-elitism, the concern for working class jobs." - Van Jones, CNN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgYphOJ7qiw
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-wins-election-results-2016-11
*******
"This is the lowest moment in my life." - Unnamed Clinton campaign official, Election Night 2016
"I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience." - Quentin Tarantino
“Purpose of progress is to lift all humanity, not to pamper the elites' moronity.” - Abhijit Naskar
My godson was more than difficult at times in his childhood. He fought a lot. I recognized it was a complex struggle for him. I wasn't part of his actual biological family. I was more of a distant "Uncle John Wick" who brought lots of gifts. Then suddenly I was raising him full time and I was his last tether on a life that didn't include a series of foster homes. Mostly, he felt abandoned. In part, I suspect, as illogical at it seems, he probably blamed himself in ways he couldn't understand for being alone. I could not bring his parents back to life. The truth is, if I could lift that pain off his shoulders, at any point of his life, I would have given anything. My fortune, my homes, my life. That's what no one teaches you about parenthood. Your life is not your own anymore. You have to weigh out what must be done, even if it has to be brutal, to keep your children safe from the horrors of this world.
Another kid at school called him an "orphan". I'm not sure totally how that spiraled out of control, I'm guessing the parents of this kid must have talked to someone else, gossip and all that, and it filtered through to the children. I'm quite a bit older than my godson, and he's mixed race, and he looks nothing like me. ( Still very good looking of course, just different than my version of ridiculously handsome). So that creates those kinds of questions.
I asked him what happened. He said there was some argument over something pointless that kids argue about. And the other kid, in some kind of rage, shouted out, "At least I'm not an orphan". Then I asked him if he punched him then and there. He said "No". I asked what did you say. He said, "Don't call me that again". The other kid challenged him, "What if I do?" in the way kids taunt each other.
My godson screamed, "F--- around and find out!"
This nimrod kid called my godson an orphan again. And so my boy clocked this POS mouth-breather right good. Put him right on his back. Made him bleed. Made him cry.
(I did my best here not to smile. I did not raise him to be a victim. I didn't not raise him to take anyone's stupid BS. )
Of course the teacher and the principal both sat me down and asked me where he learned that. Well, damn, to be honest, he learned it from his "Uncle Gekko" Because sometimes I'd say that into a phone while doing business. Or maybe he overheard me talking to one of my managers at one of my companies on how to handle a difficult situation/person.
"F---- AROUND AND FIND OUT"
Because this was a private school and I have some outside leverage, this all got worked out in the end. Kids are going to be kids. Also the old man and the kid were blessed with stellar looks, and these educators are usually pretty shallow to my experience.
So I've previously talked extensively in the past here in the PSF about Team Blue and their constant alienation and condescension to the every day working class American citizen. Just regular people trying to get by and keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table for their children. But as time went on, the Democratic Party appears to have chosen the route to quadruple down on seeing how many working class related voting blocks they could enrage, punish and lose completely, even up to actual legacy votes.
The problems are the same, and have gotten even worse
1) Democrats see the working class as a type of monolith. They don't appreciate the nuance and context of these different voting blocks.
2) Democrats have pushed "culture wars" and identity politics at all costs over "kitchen table issues" This is also a basic math problem. The working class vastly outnumbers the other blocks that Team Blue panders to the most.
3) Democrats intentionally chose to abandon the working class for their "college educated liberal elites" and their woke radicals. They took a risk versus reward equation and picked yet another wrong path. Or maybe someone at the DNC engaged with Wesley Snipes in Passenger 57 too seriously when he said to "always bet on black".
4) Democrats, particularly under the Obama regime, forgot that any voter engagement strategy has to be more than just grievance based coalitions built around intersectionality and identity politics, you actually need to deliver wins for the American people and make their lives materially better.
5) Democrats chose to ignore those like Johnny Harris of the NYT, who pointed out long standing Blue strongholds were often the most punitive, by intentional public policy design, towards the working class and fueled even more widening gaps of inequality.
6) Democrats didn't appear to learn a single thing from the 2016 general election, where masses of voters defied all projections and polling as the working class swelled up to, as a MSNBC pundit put it so aptly, "put a middle finger up to the political establishment".
7) Democrats continued to dismiss the pain and context of the working class, especially the bottom rungs, and wrote it off as karma for perceived "racism" while devaluing actual honest blue collar work that simply differed from the "labor" of the Limousine Liberal over-educated tone deaf elite. This choice was made to rob many people, often those the most in need, of their dignity. Did Team Blue truly believe that this kind of reckless hate would win them hearts and minds?
8 ) Democrats failed to put forth a national candidate that would appeal to the working class and would sound far more reasonable than the typical stock issued Team Blue caricature corporate cut-out establishment shills. Plenty of voters would have supported an Amy Klobuchar, a Katie Porter or a John Fetterman, with real Party support and a good campaign strategy. The problem of course is the corporate big donor overlords that drag the leash on Team Blue and the DNC would never allow someone to come forward that they didn't completely control.
I wrote a thread about the struggles of the white rural Christian working class over a year and a half ago. In that time, Team Blue and the Biden Administration has done everything possible to turn themselves into pariahs to multiple other working class segments of the country.
But most of all, the current power base of the Democratic Party failed to learn the lesson that came from a little boy. Who said there would be consequences if you keep f-----ing around with people for no good damn reason at all.
Now Team Blue gets to find out.
