Moan About It All You Like But Electoral Politics Really Requires Villains As Much As Heroes

This Is Why I Respect And Admire AOC And Rashida

Somewhere along the way (let’s say around 1993), the Democratic Party careerists— those who put their own careers ahead of their constituents’ well-being— started living under the delusion they could serve the interests of both the wealthy donor class and the working class. The delusion was born out of the reality of how much easier it is to raise money from max donors than from people who contribute in $10 and $25 donor increments. And with that, the party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt— or at least the party establishment— sold its soul to the banksters once seen as the class enemy. The Democrats chose the GOP base and the Republicans shrewdly embraced the Democratic base.

Depending on how you define it, between 30% and 35% of Americans can be included in the working class. About 38% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher. (Around 10.5% of Americans have an associate’s degree, most of whom, more or less, would be considered to be part of the working class.) Obviously there’s more to the realignment that just careerist Democrats looking for an easier way to raise campaign cash. In the 1960s, the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights legislation under JFK and LBJ— followed by Nixon’s Southern Strategy— alienated many white working-class voters, particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the South. The passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) led to the realignment of the South, with most white voters gravitating toward the Republican Party. The GOP’s Southern Strategy, which leveraged racial resentment and cultural conservatism, peeled away white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.

It got worse in the 1970s when the decline of manufacturing jobs and unions— particularly in the Rust Belt— hit working-class communities hard. Democrats were often blamed for bipartisan economic policies that seemed to favor globalization and corporate interests over traditional labor. Democrats were expected to protect the workers’ interests; they didn’t.

The stagflation of the Carter years were followed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which effectively appealed to socially conservative working-class voters with a platform emphasizing subtle racism, “family values,” patriotism and opposition to liberal cultural elites. Although Reaganomics, was detrimental to the working class in the long term, it initially resonated with promises of tax cuts and economic revival. Many workers felt abandoned by the Democrats, whom they increasingly viewed as the party of welfare and identity politics. And then came Clinton’s “Third Way” shift toward the center which emphasized fiscal responsibility and free-market policies like NAFTA (1994). While these basically Republican policies were intended to appeal to the donor class, they alienated labor unions and working-class voters who suffered job losses due to globalization. Making matters even more offensive for the white working class, even as Clinton moved right on economics, he stuck with the kind of social progressivism that estranged culturally conservative working-class voters.

And then along came Señor Trumpanzee with a phony “answer” for working class discontent over closed factories and persistent wage stagnation. Many working class voters saw Democrats as increasingly aligned with urban, educated elites and disconnected from rural and industrial communities. Even though Obama had won back significant working class support in 2008, his administration's focus on issues like healthcare reform (while beneficial to many) failed to fully address economic anxieties in industrial communities and by 2016 the working class was ready to ditch Hillary Clinton for  Trump’s pile of bullshit. His victory highlighted the culmination of these trends. His populist rhetoric, anti-globalization stance and appeals to cultural nationalism resonated with disaffected white working-class voters, particularly in the Midwest. This year was the worst yet, with Black and latino male working class voters giving up on the Democrats as well.

Yesterday, Harold Meyerson looked at how Democrats can rebuild trust with the working class voters— something that’s not going to happen overnight and will require addressing economic inequities in a way that is going to alienate Democratic Party fat cats and the politicians who are up those fat cats’ asses. Democratic politicians like Rahm Emanuel and the corporately-aligned New Dems are part of the problem; not part of the solution. Meyerson started with a great question that could easily apply to Emanuel— who is planning to run for the Illinois Senate seat when Dick Durban retires in 2026: “Whose hatred do you welcome?” The question, of course, derives from FDR’s 1936 campaign speech when, referring to monopolists, speculators, bankers, and oligarchs he said “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.” Imagine a New Dem saying anything like this:

Three days later, FDR went on to win ever state but two, 60.8% of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes out of 531. His coattails helped elect 334 House members, leaving the GOP with just 88 (10 other members were allied with the Democrats). The Democrats also won 5 more Senate seats that day, bringing their total to 75 (with 4 senators allied with the Democrats) and just 17 Republicans.

Going back a little deeper into American history, if George Washington and Thomas Paine were two of the heroes of the beginnings of our Republic some of the earliest villains would have been:

• Massachusetts’ polarizing Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a symbol of British tyranny and a target of public outrage to American patriots for his enforcement of British policies, including the Stamp Act and the Tea Act. In 1765, his mansion was ransacked by angry colonists. 

• Better known today from the period was military traitor Benedict Arnold, a universally reviled figure in American history, his name still synonymous with treachery. 

• Alexander Hamilton was a more complicated figure but— despite the Broadway show— his advocacy for a national bank and close ties to wealthy elites made him a villain in the eyes of Jeffersonian populists, also in the eyes of my high school history teacher, Mr. Feldman.

“Roosevelt,” wrote Meyerson, “understood better than almost all Democrats who succeeded him the importance of identifying public enemies at a time when the nation is troubled and divided. This understanding is the sine qua non of any Democratic effort to win back enough working-class voters to reclaim a popular majority in future elections. We live, after all, in an angry nation where government bends over to meet the needs of various elites rather than ordinary people— precisely how Roosevelt characterized big business’s goals in his time. It’s been the genius of the Republicans to create a counter-elite to the economic powers that actually dominate the nation. Their Frankenstein monster consists of deep-state government bureaucrats, academia, the socially liberal sectors of the wealthy and upper middle class, and those corporate leaders who are influenced in some degree by those constituencies.”

By 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president by running against government in a time of inflation, and while he quickly realized there was scant support for cutting Social Security and Medicare, he gleefully targeted most everything else (except the Pentagon). But Reagan proved powerless to stop the sociocultural movement toward greater tolerance.

By 1992, Pat Buchanan ran for president, proclaiming the nation to be in a “cultural war” and urging his fellow Republicans to focus their attacks on feminists, gays, abortionists, and racial minorities. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Republicans had lost their number one enemy, and subsequently their number one attack on Democrats: that they were “soft on Communism.”

Buchanan was the culture war’s prophet, but Newt Gingrich really cemented this line of attack on Democrats. Elected House Speaker following the 1994 Republican midterm sweep, Gingrich convinced his colleagues, and almost all subsequent Republican pols, that Democrats should be dealt with as soft on deviants, if not deviants themselves. If overt signs of abnormality were hard to discern, Gingrich made clear, Republicans should magnify what was available and invent the rest. Rush Limbaugh and the newly founded Fox News were enlisted into this effort.

Republicans ran against gay marriage in 2004 and against transgender people this year. In Michigan, which Trump narrowly carried, there are 170,000 high school students on their schools’ sports teams, exactly two of whom are transgender and playing girls’ sports. No matter.

The Democrats’ number one problem in 2024 had nothing to do with this fearmongering. An uncommonly high percentage of voters believed they were left behind by an economy in which the price of some basics— housing and food most especially— was often beyond reach. For this, Republicans held the Biden administration and its vice president responsible. But Republicans also conducted their culture war on the Democrats with unrelenting ferocity. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s most notable ad against Harris concluded with the words: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

It should not be that hard for Democrats to associate Donald Trump and the Republicans with the elite that actually is responsible for the shrinkage of the middle class and the abandonment of investment in rural and small-town America, regions of the country that have become most heavily Republican. The Biden administration’s resurrection of industrial policy was specifically targeted to such regions, and much of the factory construction boom that it engendered has been located in the very areas where corporations shuttered factories and moved the work to China or Mexico. Thus far, this has had little or no appreciable electoral effect, but factory construction takes some time. Preventing Republicans from taking credit for a Democratic program will be critical.

In Nevada, prompted by the hotel workers union’s survey data on the lack of affordable housing, the Harris campaign ran one ad that mentioned how a lot of homes had been purchased by financial institutions and converted to rentals, thereby pushing up the price for would-be homebuyers. But one mild-mannered ad against a sea of right-wing media wasn’t up to the challenge of changing public opinion.

And yet: In recent decades, with the decline in the share of unionized workers, the steadily growing power of major investors who’ve demanded and received share buybacks and the like, the growth in price-setting corporate concentration, the reclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and more, the share of national income going to wages has declined, just as the share of working-class anger has soared. Public polling shows low approval ratings for corporations and high approval ratings for unions.

You wouldn’t know this from the tone and substance of Harris’s campaign and most of her fellow Democrats’. Despite such notable exceptions as Bernie Sanders, Democrats have yet to call out the elite that’s really responsible for these epochal changes.

In the post-election miasma, discussion of how Democrats can regain enough working-class support to arrest America’s plunge into neofascism dominates our discourse. Happily, virtually no one is suggesting Democrats revert to the Rubinomics that dominated economic policy in the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations. If there are any cases being made by Democrats for corporate free trade and financial deregulation, I haven’t heard them.

As for a pro–working class to-do list, one can begin with the paid sick leave and higher minimum-wage laws that voters in red states enacted by ballot measure this November, and move on to expanding Medicare coverage to dental and home health care, making community college and trade schools tuition-free, and providing massive investments in affordable housing and infrastructure. Democrats should also target our malefactors of great wealth by proposing to prohibit private equity’s gutting of businesses they purchase, to end price-fixing in rental and other markets, to institute windfall profits taxes when the profit share of revenues increases at the expense of wages and investment, to scale corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO and median worker pay (the higher the ratio, the higher the tax rate), and so on.

But none of this, I fear, will really put a dent in the working class’s support for Republicans. Democrats need to go after financial and corporate elites at least as much as Republicans go after cultural elites. Democrats don’t have to say that Carl Icahn and Paul Singer are Satanists, which is a term the right applies to any number of stray liberals; but they do need to call them out in public and make that message heard. Candidates alone cannot change the public discourse. Liberals have not made investments in media the way the right has, and if Democrats are to reawaken the public’s awareness of the real elites, investments in media are what liberal’s monied components— in which I include major unions— need to make.

In a divided nation, Franklin Roosevelt made crystal clear which side he was on, and whose hatred he welcomed. If Democrats are to regain the American working class, they need to state whose hatred they welcome, too.