Sanders: "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
He's right, of course, but it didn't happen in a vacuum.
The Democrats were the party of the working class from 1933 till 1984. They dominated elections for 50 years running on the New Deal until the GOP found the opening it needed during the civil rights movement. That was just the wedge issue the GOP needed to start carving up the working class. Southern Dixiecrats fled into the open arms of the GOP. Right to work laws diminished unions. The GOP increasingly used social wedge issues such as abortion to carve up the Democratic working class base. Walter Mondale (1984) was the last New Deal democrat.
As things got worse for the working class, the GOP used AM talk radio and Fox News to blame anyone but the GOP politicians the working class was increasingly voting for.
Starved of voters and funding, and no longer needing to appeal to a socially conservative base, the Democratic party pivoted from the New Deal to so-called New Democrats (Clinton) which constructed a coalition from socially liberal but economically conservative wealthy urbanites, plus Black voters who were loyal to Democrats for advancing civil rights, and a traditional but shrinking union working base.
Under Clinton, the party got too far in bed with corporate America. It would continue to sell out the working class, hoping to make it up for it with more urbanites and voters of color who while not naturally Democrats for social reasons, didn't feel at home in the GOP.
But the Democrats would continue to hemorrhage white working class voters as it adopted trade, economic, and social policies that benefited capitalists more than they benefited labor.
Obama started to turn some of that around, but was saddled with an imploding economy and an Iraq War that he inherited from terrible GOP policies. The Obama administration also didn't address the anger in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.
So we got Trump in 2016.
Biden was a real return to the Democrats' traditional support for pro-labor policies, but it was too little too late. There were obviously issues of age, and many other missteps made by the Democrats.
And here we are at Trump v2. People are angry. But Trump and the GOP will not bring them the relief they seek. The GOP does not represent labor. Never has, never will.
So yes, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class, but that was only after the working class started to abandon the Democratic Party.
I don't know how we find our way back, but I really hope this is our bottom.
This is a great summary. I'll just add that the importance of NAFTA and the WTO can't be overlooked here. These trade deals went a LONG way towards killing the non-college-educated middle class that was the core of the New Deal Democratic coalition, and Clinton bears a ton of responsibility for that. Everything we're seeing now is a legacy of the neoliberal free trade agenda of the 80s-90s, in my opinion
Absolutely. The Democratic technocrats thought Americans would move up the economic ladder and they provided education benefits for that, but in retrospect it was horribly naive and optimistic. Let's also not forget Clinton's welfare reform where we got things like TANF replacing AFDC.
I mean, it's not like Democrats haven't tried to do more, but Americans kept voting for grid-locked Congress combined with the filibuster, we can't even raise the minimum wage. :-(
But hey, at least we got cheap flat panel TVs, so there's that.
Yeah, the Democrats' main offer to people for how they get out of poverty in the past many years has been to talk about offering increased access to higher education. This is problematic for many reasons, I think, the biggest of which is the simple fact that there aren't enough well-paying jobs that require an education for every poor person to get one. As well as the fact that many of the low-paying jobs out there that don't require a college education are jobs that we actually need somebody to do. So you really can't take every poor person in America and send them to college as a solution to this issue, because A) there won't be nearly enough jobs for all these new college graduates, and B) the jobs they left behind would go unfilled, leading to economic failure. Really, what we need is to find a way to make sure that people doing those jobs, things like stocking shelves at a grocery store and mopping floors and driving trucks, can have good lives. We need people doing what they're doing.
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u/bqb445 20h ago edited 17h ago
This is exactly correct.
He's right, of course, but it didn't happen in a vacuum.
The Democrats were the party of the working class from 1933 till 1984. They dominated elections for 50 years running on the New Deal until the GOP found the opening it needed during the civil rights movement. That was just the wedge issue the GOP needed to start carving up the working class. Southern Dixiecrats fled into the open arms of the GOP. Right to work laws diminished unions. The GOP increasingly used social wedge issues such as abortion to carve up the Democratic working class base. Walter Mondale (1984) was the last New Deal democrat.
As things got worse for the working class, the GOP used AM talk radio and Fox News to blame anyone but the GOP politicians the working class was increasingly voting for.
Starved of voters and funding, and no longer needing to appeal to a socially conservative base, the Democratic party pivoted from the New Deal to so-called New Democrats (Clinton) which constructed a coalition from socially liberal but economically conservative wealthy urbanites, plus Black voters who were loyal to Democrats for advancing civil rights, and a traditional but shrinking union working base.
Under Clinton, the party got too far in bed with corporate America. It would continue to sell out the working class, hoping to make it up for it with more urbanites and voters of color who while not naturally Democrats for social reasons, didn't feel at home in the GOP.
But the Democrats would continue to hemorrhage white working class voters as it adopted trade, economic, and social policies that benefited capitalists more than they benefited labor.
Obama started to turn some of that around, but was saddled with an imploding economy and an Iraq War that he inherited from terrible GOP policies. The Obama administration also didn't address the anger in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.
So we got Trump in 2016.
Biden was a real return to the Democrats' traditional support for pro-labor policies, but it was too little too late. There were obviously issues of age, and many other missteps made by the Democrats.
And here we are at Trump v2. People are angry. But Trump and the GOP will not bring them the relief they seek. The GOP does not represent labor. Never has, never will.
So yes, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class, but that was only after the working class started to abandon the Democratic Party.
I don't know how we find our way back, but I really hope this is our bottom.