krebscycle

Most working class Americans will vote for Hillary Clinton but white people, particularly white men, will likely remain the base of the Republicans and the right thanks to racism. The civil rights movement and the (qualified) support of that movement by Lyndon Johnson and liberal Democrats and Northeastern Republicans, generated a massive reaction. In the 1968 Mayoral election in NYC, the liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay faced a strong challenge from “law-and-order” Democrats:

Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama strongly praised the New York primary day results, which he described as “the rising up against limousine liberals,” using Mr. Procaccino’s term for Mr. Lindsay and his friends. “The people of the country are sick and tired of the breakdown of law and order,” said Mr. Wallace, who often pointed to the connection between such breakdowns and an insufficient willingness to be hard on black residents. He noted that the winning New York candidates – Mr. Marchi and Mr. Procaccino – won by making the same speeches that the Governor had made in Alabama, “except that they had New York accents.’‘  NYTimes.

Those same themes: the out-of-touch liberal elites, the limousine liberals, the breakdown of authority, and the often coded resentment of black Americans is still a staple of Republican rhetoric, except that Trump doesn’t bother to code anymore. The same themes show up in left wing and even progressive stories, except that instead of a breakdown of law-and-order we see claims of an embrace of “neoliberal” economics and a supposedly willful abandonment of the working class. But most working class voters support the Democrats, so what the “left” means is what the right means – that the important part of the working class is white. That’s a fundamental problem in the US left – its alienation from and opposition to the interests of the racially mixed US working class. Essentially the “left” has internalized George Wallace’s attacks on liberals and dressed it up in pseudo-Marxist terminology.

How does the left cope with the actual  Democratic program – which is far from market fundamentalism, featuring policies like free community college, infrastructure investment, tax fairness (to reduce programs that shift the weight of taxation to poorer people), limits on predator payday loans and financial cheating of ordinary people, and the like? They pretend it’s not there or superficial or “just words” and essentially explain the appeal of Democrats to the non-Confederate working class in the same terms as the far right does – as pandering to those secondary issues of minorities.  “Identity politics” is just a newer term for George Wallace’s argument that Democrats were sacrificing the well being of white people to blacks.

Even during the height of the actual Democratic “neoliberal” acendency, the acendency of New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council,  and “market friendly” policies – during the Bill Clinton administration, the Democrats were a long way from market fundamentalism. Bill Clinton presided over massive expansion of EITC which is essentially reverse income tax for the working poor, SCHIP – Hillary Clinton’s child healthcare, increased minimum wage, direct lending for college, higher medicare taxes, … The worst policies implemented during Bill Clinton’s terms were those pushed by Republicans that Clinton was too weak to stop.

But this reality is too complex and too off script for our left – so we get a steady diet of “neoliberal blah blah” and out-of-touch liberal elites who fail to appreciate the down to earth world of the white working class.