This evening I read the smartest critique of the Democratic Party in as long as I can recall: “The New Working Class” by Gabriel Winant. H/t to Corey Robin for linking to it on his FB page. I’ll quote his summary of the essay:
What [the Democrats] offer, says Gabe, is reasonableness but no reason. And no matter what side of the “white working class” debate they take—go for it, don’t go for it—they all evade basic questions of both class and race. This is that rare thing: an article on a fraught topic that is utterly free of sentimentality, sanctimony, and cant.
And Winant is spot on in identifying our party’s blind spots. Some excerpts from the essay itself (emphasis mine):
When I teach history classes, I often give students assignments that ask them to… “historicize” themselves. At a superficial level, it’s easy to absorb this fundamental insight of historical scholarship: that an individual’s ideology doesn’t come from inside them, but is an effect of time and place…
Elite Democrats seem not to remember where they came from, or what it was like when working-class people actually turned out for them. Today’s Democratic leadership and its strategy are the offspring of a process of social transformation in the late twentieth century. Yet they seem to be blissfully unaware of this historical process, and thus unable to grasp that it has become a trap—much less why it has, or how to escape it…
Eight years in power [under Obama reveals] how uninterested the party now was in delivering for working-class people. Working-class savings were wiped out over the Obama years; the racial wealth gap grew; the costs of health care, child care, elder care, education, and housing spiraled; mass incarceration ground on; wages stagnated; union membership declined further…
The American working class is… less white than the rest of American society, and… has more left-wing political views—by dint of its composition by race and gender, as well as its class experiences. The danger that the Democratic Party and elite liberalism now face is that they cannot conceive of the American working class as it actually is, insisting instead on addressing a specter from decades ago. The right-wing hard-hat, the eternal Reagan Democrat—such anachronistic images provide a way of not engaging with questions of class inequality…
While Democrats have been pleading for the votes of suburban college graduates, a new working class has been in formation all the while… We can reduce [its distinguishing features] down roughly to feminization, racial diversification, and increasing precarity: care work, immigrant work, low-wage work, and the gig economy. There’s also a host of interlinked forces shaping working-class life from outside the workplace: policing and punishment; housing insecurity; indebtedness; the costs of education; and the difficulties of caring for the young, the disabled, the sick, the addicted, and the old…
Neoliberalism destroyed the old working class, transforming the Democratic Party into its accomplice as it did so. It also reorganized working-class experience in profound ways…
One way or another, workers will reinvent or transcend inherited organizational forms, or they will never make themselves heard at all… As the Trump administration prepares to shred the remnants of the safety net that it once promised to protect, we might see political rumbling in the sectors of the new working class bearing the immediate brunt: the people who care for the sick, the old, the young, and the poor. This rumbling may sound odd, or it may sound familiar—likely both at once. We may thus initially fail to recognize it for what it is: the only force that can end decades of retreat and renew the struggle for our democracy. The professional middle class would do well to—for once—be quiet and listen. It may even, with a little nudging, want to join in.