How We Stopped Thinking About Class in Politics

This is the second post in my series on the problems and future of the Democratic Party. In the first post, I said that Democrats had become the party of the patrimonial middle class. In this post, I want to talk about how we got here and about how we became reluctant to think about political issues in terms of classes.  We got here partly because of events that we could not control and partly because of our response to those events. 

Events That We Could Not Control

First, the decline of the labor movement weakened working-class support for the Democratic Party, and as a result, workers’ issues became less central to the party’s platform. Second, the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s made it very difficult for any politician to talk about classes or class conflict without being accused of being a communist. So, we got out of the habit of talking about classes.

Third, two movements emerged in the 1960s to dominate political discussion among American progressives. The Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement provided ways for us to think about oppression and inequality without talking about class, which was very useful in the political context of the time. Many of us adopted the view that the oppressors were white men, and the oppressed were women and people of color.  Consequently, women and non-whites were drawn to the Democratic Party, while white, working-class men became Republicans. This process of sorting was accelerated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Our Party’s Response

The Democratic Party responded to these events by embracing its connection with women and racial minorities. We accepted the idea that white men were so well served by our economy and by “white privilege” that a party dedicated to redistributing wealth could ignore them and build an electoral majority based on women and minorities. The idea that our economy serves all white men well had never been entirely true as anyone knows who has read The Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle, but it served as a useful basis for progressive, political action.

A Changed World and a Missed Opportunity

Then, the world’s economy changed radically. China and other countries took over much of the work of making things, and many of the people who had been doing that work in the United States lost their jobs.  Entire communities were devastated, and there emerged a large part of the white working class that was full of anger. Their anger created an opportunity for charlatans like Mr. Trump to turn the anger on women, minorities and foreigners.

We failed to see that the suffering created by globalization also created an opportunity to foster working-class solidarity across racial lines. White working-class communities were not the only ones that suffered. Black workers were also laid off in places like Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. Black communities in those cities were devastated just as much as White communities in the steel towns of Ohio or the mines of West Virginia. We might have seen this as an opportunity to build working-class solidarity across racial lines, but we did not do so, and we missed a chance to build the strength of our party. We left it up to the Republicans to claim the support of the white working class by appealing to the racism and xenophobia that are parts of American culture.

We missed the opportunity because we had forgotten how to think in terms of class oppression. We could see only the oppression of races and genders. We did not understand that a black, working-class woman is oppressed not only because she is black and a woman but also because she is working class, and she shares her plight as a working-class person with all other members of her class. A middle-class black woman is in a different situation.

For example, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County in Georgia, is a black woman, and as such she has surely encountered obstacles in her career. Her movement up the career ladder has undoubtedly been slowed by men’s resistance to promoting women. As an attorney, she has had to overcome the common tendency to take women and blacks less seriously than white men. Like all professional women, she has had to put up with the sexual harassment that pervades women’s professional lives. Very likely, she earns less than a man in a similar position

On the other hand, she does not have to worry about being evicted from her house because she cannot pay the rent. She does not have to see her children get sick because she cannot afford routine, preventive care for them. She does not live in a “food desert.” Millions of black women suffer in these ways, but she does not because she belongs to the patrimonial middle class.

Our focus on racial and gender-based oppression has prevented many of us from seeing the difference between Ms. Willis and the millions of black people (men and women) who are working class. Moreover, because we don’t see that difference, we don’t see that there is an opportunity to build coalitions across racial lines.

The next post in this series will take a more detailed look at the class that now forms the basis of the Democratic Party.