The
Democratic Party and the White Working Class
The naming of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the
Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee by Kamala Harris has thus far, served to
continue the euphoria progressives are feeling since Joe Biden dropped out of
the presidential race. What we have now are two V-P candidates from the Midwest
who come from White working-class backgrounds. The demographic and ideological
differences between Trump and Harris notwithstanding, both Walz and his
Republican counterpart J.D. Vance are viewed as enhancing their respective
tickets’ chances with White working-class voters in Midwestern swing states.
The Democratic Party based has been dominated by identity
politics social movements since the civil rights era of the 1960s. The
Republican Party’s establishment was controlled by the Wall Street and country
club crowds until 2016. But in that year Trump’s candidacy mobilized White
nationalist and fundamentalist Chrisitan identities on right to vote in the
primaries. Those most passionate about both of those identities tend to be
working-class and poor people. It’s thus, in that way that “White working-class
voters” became a big tent identity on the right.
Howard Winant crafts a trenchant analysis of the way that
the White working class feels a loss of power and positionality within society.
He posits three factors in this respect. First, is the loss of connection to
ethnicity offering a deeper connection to
“culture” as European ethnic identities were assimilated into “White
Americanness” across the 20th century. Second, there is the loss of
resonance for a class-based culture built around labor organizing in a
manufacturing economy. Deindustrialization and the dispersal of workers into
lower-wage service industry jobs undercut that class/cultural solidarity.
Finally,
the victories of the civil rights movement have made it a disadvantage to be
White. First, because affirmative action policies in education, contracting and
hiring led to “reverse discrimination” against Whites in American institutional
life. And secondly, there is the widespread belief that there is no White
culture today. Meanwhile, cultures of color (Blacks, Latinos) are considered
“hip,’ and to have “feeling.”
Consequently,
White people in general, but especially working-class Whites with less
education and high-tech skills can feel that American society has left them
behind. This breeds a group identity built around resentment toward other
groups (POC, feminist, LBBTQI, etc.) who seem to get all the attention around
their needs, while no one in the political establishment attends to the needs
of White people.
At
the turn of the century the late Ken Hoover and I began to puzzle about what
was going on with the White people who joined the anti-government militia
movements that eventuated in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing killing
169 people in 1995. I was very much a group identity social movement guy.
Hoover was a student of social psychology. We were able to bridge those two
literatures to get at what was driving certain White men to commit such
extremist acts. I would argue that those people in the 1990s were driven by a
set of experiences and attitudes much akin to the outlook of those who stormed
the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Let’s
unpack these ideas further. Mostly we talk about identity as a group-level
consciousness, but identity is fundamentally about the individual, about who
“I” am. Who we are as individuals though “involves relations between individual
characteristics and social processes of legitimation, recognition, and
validation.”
Three quarters of a century of social psychological research demonstrates that
identity is made up of three sets of relations: competencies, communities and
commitments.
The inability to fulfill any of these relations can cause alienation,
resentment and a search for scapegoats upon whom to blame one’s problems.
I’ll
now elaborate on those three Cs.
Competencies:
Possessing skills and a job that contribute to the functioning of the economy.
Commitments: Having
the ability to live up to enduring personal obligations to families, friends,
and associates.
Communities:
Being a member in good standing of a community that is recognized as
intrinsically valuable.
Commitments
refers to smaller social groupings beginning with families and friends but
extending to service organizations (Rotary, Elks, Kiwanis, League of Women
Voters, scouting, etc.), sporting activities (playing, coaching), and yes,
political organizations (social movements, special interest groups, political
parties). In contrast community incorporates larger collectivities such as the
culture of a region, city or town; or a religious denomination. Passionate
allegiance to social identity movements which extend beyond a local setting often
become communities as well.
People of all kinds of social identities are experiencing
the pressures of an economy shifting from manufacturing and natural resource
extraction to high-tech and automation. It’s well documented that the Black
people have suffered more from deindustrialization than any other demographic. But Winant’s argument
casts light on the way that loss of social status via the civil rights movement
and the popularity of Black/Brown popular culture have had a debilitating
psychological effect on the White working class. In summation, many Whites (not
just the working-class) are bummed out by the loss of white skin privilege.
The Republican Party has manipulated White voters by
defending White privilege, but it has done nothing to alleviate their economic
hardship in the shifting economy. Democrats have been on the defensive. They
accepted the Reaganist formula of tax cuts and government program cuts that
hurt middle and working classes of all races. They also accepted easy
non-solutions like the “war on drugs” that demonized urban Black and Brown
communities. Democrats always preferred fewer programmatic cuts, and many of
them did oppose the war on drugs. But it is easy to see why many working-class
people of all races say that the Democrats haven’t done much for them either.
Republican V-P nominee J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly
Elegy, blames Appalachian Whites’ own behavior and choices for their
plight, not the lack of social services and opportunities where they live. He
is no friend of the working-class. Democrats offer Tim Walz aSes
a working-class hero --- school teacher, football coach, proud union member,
etc.
While Democrats controlled the White House and Congress
from 2021 to 2023, they passed the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts,
which together direct over $3 trillion dollars in spending to a wide range of
public works, climate and health care-pricing initiatives. Lots of jobs are
being created by those laws, which represent the largest social spending
undertaken since Roosevelt’s New Deal. For some reason many White
working-class voters still care less about the material benefits Democrats have
brought, than they do about immigration restriction, abortion prevention and
holding on to their guns. The Republicans don’t offer them jobs, or the
education to acquire skills for the new economy: things that would give them competency,
or better enable them to fulfill their commitments. But Republicans do prey
upon White psychological insecurity in the new cultural milieu by offering them
a racialized (and genderized and religious) community against immigrants,
affirmative action and reproductive freedom). Wat can progressives do to create
an alternative sense of community that defeats this project of the right.
Political
Parties, Elections and Values
American political parties are primarily concerned with
winning elections. They plough millions of dollars into trying to understand
where voters are in the present, and devising campaign strategies to convince
voters that they offer the best policies for them. Electoral strategies are
only tangentially related to voters’ values. or some vision for making America
a better place to live. Confronted with the choice between Trumpian fascism
or multiracial democracy though, the values and vision thing are front burner
electoral issues.
Kamala Harris may well win the election this fall and Tim
Walz may play well in Peoria and across the Midwest. But somebody on the
progressive side of the street must begin to take the psychological dissonance
and trauma of the White-working class seriously, if we are to avert race war in
this country!
So how can we alleviate White working-class concerns over
their loss of power in America? Journalist Joan Walsh wrote a lovely book some
years ago entitled What’s the Matter with White People?
An Irish American from New York City, Walsh chronicles the shift of her White
working-class family from the Democratic to Republican Party since the 1960s,
and the centrality of racial politics in that shift. She calls for a strategy
of equity and inclusion that explicitly reaches out to demoralized White
people: a project to turn the discourse on race on the left to one about a
multiracial working-class. Bidenism has taken steps
in that direction, but serious outreach to White workers involving reconciliation
and healing to bridge the racial divide within the working class needs to be undertaken.
Reverend
Dr. William Barber has built a two-pronged movement in recent times geared
toward addressing this issue. Barber began his quest in 2013 as a founder of “Moral
Mondays,” a weekly rally on the steps of the North Carolina Capitol to protest
voting rights restrictions and budget cuts that hurt the working class. Since then,
he has been a co-founder of “Repairers of the Breach” (2015), an pan religious
organization committed to reconciling the social damage done by centuries of racial,
class, gender identity and religious divisions. Barber has also been the central
figure in the second “Poor People’s Campaign” (2017), a secular movement
focused squarely on multiracial poverty, and more broadly taking on the same agenda
as Repairers of the Breach. One program of Repairers of the Breach pairs White
and Black Protestant congregations in meetings to find reconciliation and
healing in through their common faith.
Both
the work the “Repairers” and the Poor People’s Campaign engage people of all
races and classes in pursuit of a common moral vision for America which includes
working-class Whites. Read Reverend Barber’s latest book, White Poverty,
or any of his earlier works for a rich description of his project. Whatever happens in
November, progressives must seriously undertake this multiracial democratic “cultural
project” to complement efforts in electoral politics. In this way progressive
American nationalism can offer the education enabling all workers to participate
in the new economy. That will give them the competency to participate in
the new economy and fulfill their commitments to family and friends.
That progressivism also paves the way toward a more inclusive American national
community embracing all demographic groups.
Kenneth
R. Hoover and Vernon D. Johnson, “Identity-Driven
Violence: Reclaiming Civil Society," Journal
of Hate Studies, vol. 3, 2004, 87.
