Opinion: Who lost the white working class?

Why did white, working-class voters decide to leave the Democratic Party? 

|
Jae C. Hong/AP/File
Two homeless people rest with their tents pitched on a sidewalk as a group of anglers arrive to fish at Kewalo Basin Harbor in Honolulu (Monday, Aug. 24, 2015). Political allegiances among both poor and working-class voters have shifted in recent years.

Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? 

The conventional answer is that Republicans skillfully played the race card. 

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. 

Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens” (Ronald Reagan popularized the term), being soft on black crime (George W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads in 1988), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). 

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”  

But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. 

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. 

But they’ve done little to change the widening structural imbalances in the economy that have hurt the working class. 

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.

I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. 

Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. 

The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners to drown. 

Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.

And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. 

What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? 

You get an economic structure favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful – while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.

Why haven’t Democrats done more? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. 

In part, it was because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determined electoral outcomes. 

Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. 

“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. 

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain. 

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos.

This would give them the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliative programs papering over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.   

But to do this they’d have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. 

Will they? If not, a third party might emerge that does it instead.

This article first appeared at Robert Reich.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Opinion: Who lost the white working class?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2016/0119/Opinion-Who-lost-the-white-working-class
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe