So what is to be done when the Democratic Party of 2016 can win neither Congress nor the majority of state governments? According to the pundit class, were supposed to just wait. A decade or two. Instead of adopting Sanderss class politics to win over the entire working class, many liberal pundits would prefer we simply wait twenty years when the white working class will no longer be a majority of workers. Demography, they seem to believe, is political destiny. Somehow, I kind of doubt that an eighty-six year-old senator Chuck Schumer will announce in the year 2036 that his party intends to finally extinguish the billionaire class.
I can understand how appealing it is to believe that its simply miserable, angry whites and their racism thats holding back the Democratic Party from becoming either a social-democratic powerhouse or one that can at least expand on the achievements of its mid-century golden age all over again. It certainly seems easier to just wait patiently than to fight some of the most powerful people in the country for control over a party that is, structurally, far more theirs than ours likely, irrevocably so.
But demographics wont turn the party of Silicon Valley into the party of Chicagos South Side or West Virginias coal country. All that waiting will do is prolong the undeniable suffering felt both by Trump and Clintons working-class supporters and the large number of low-income Americans who dont vote at all. Because that suffering isnt exclusive to downscale Trumpists the deplorables its everyone who works or desperately hopes to work for a measly wage in order to survive. In other words, not the pundits who have next to nothing in common with them.
Its not just vulgar class-first issues where the Democrats are failing the partys nationwide marginalization means, in much of the country, its been decades since its been this difficult to start or join a labor union or have access to abortion services. Despite having largely shed the racist white working class from the Democrats electoral coalition, the black-white wage gaps are now larger today than they were in 1979. And therein lies the central irony of the Democrats tighter rhetorical embrace of social liberalism alongside a staunch rejection of populist class politics: they actually made far more progress on the former when they were a party capable of the latter.
The belief that bringing in the nonvoting white working class requires surrendering on commitments to gender equality and antiracism is simply that a belief. Sanders simultaneously attracted the support of white working-class voters in states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan even as he repeatedly championed Black Lives Matter and the fight against racial discrimination. There was no Sister Souljah moment with Bernie. The idea that bringing in certain segments of the working class automatically negates the coalitions commitment to social liberalism is a myth.
Among non-Evangelical Protestants, black voters still disproportionately oppose same-sex marriage even as they disproportionately vote Democratic. In 2008, African-American Protestants strongly supported Prop 8 in California. By our punditocracys working-class contaminant theory, the Democratic Party would be forced to choose here between commitment to same-sex marriage and their black Protestant voters. Yet neither has been purged from the coalition. And, steadily, progress has been made far more Democrats, black Protestants, and Americans support same-sex marriage now than they did fifteen years ago.
So while were told about just how insane white workers are for voting the way they do, I frankly dont find it surprising. Many still vote for todays affluent, professional-class Democratic Party with low expectations. Some, with no labor union or political organization to corral them, fall back onto reactionary prejudices and throw in with people like Trump for the worst reasons.
And most, understandably, just stay home on Election Day. Until we change that fact, social justice in the United States will continue to remain out of reach for everyone who has to work for a living.
