A Challenge and an Opportunity for Democrats

 The Challenge

The Republicans recently won all of the statewide electoral offices in Louisiana, and Charleston recently elected its first Republican mayor since the 19th century.  These victories show the consequences for Democrats of having become the party of the patrimonial middle class, and if we Democrats do not pay attention, we will lose in other places. 

To win back our place as the party of working Americans, we must regain our focus on inequities of class as well as those of race or gender. We must become again the party that created Social Security, Medicare and many other programs that redistribute wealth from the very wealthy to ordinary Americans of all races and genders.

The Opportunity

We can begin by becoming an ally in working-class struggles. Pres. Biden understands this as he showed recently in his support of the United Auto Workers' strike against the big three auto companies. Now, the UAW has begun a broader campaign to organize workers in non-union automobile plants, and that gives Democrats an opportunity to speak out publicly in support of the campaign. We should take advantage of that opportunity if we want to rebuild working-class support for Democrats. We should also use this as an opportunity to campaign against so-called "right-to-work" laws at the state level.

We Must Remember that the Status Anxiety of American Workers is Legitimate

American workers suffer legitimately from status anxiety due to their increasingly precarious financial situation.  Wealth and income are being concentrated more and more in the hands of a tiny minority, while ordinary, working people are finding themselves more and more insecure financially. Naturally, this leaves them feeling anxious. 

It has been claimed that workers are anxious not because they are financially insecure but because they feel threatened by the rise of Black people. That may be true for some, but far more suffer from status anxiety legitimately because their social position is endangered by their financial insecurity.  They are anxious because their incomes have stagnated in a time of rising prices of the things that they must buy: food, housing, clothing, transportation, health care.

We Have an Opportunity Now

In our increasingly unequal economy, people of all races are suffering. White people in the steel towns of Ohio or coal towns of West Virginia are suffering, and Black people in rust-belt cities like Detroit or Milwaukee are suffering, too. Working class women are suffering even more than the men. This has given us an opportunity to build a class-based coalition across the lines of race and gender, and now is the time to seize it.  We can begin by supporting the UAW's organizing drive.

We Can Offer Real Support Instead of the Republicans' Fake Support

The Republicans like to claim to be the party of working-class Americans, and our focus on the problems of middle-class women and minorities has made the claim seem credible. The Republican claim is of course completely fraudulent. The Republican Party’s policy positions continue to favor the interests of wealthy people and corporations, but at least the Republicans say that they care about working-class Americans, while we do not even appear to do that. Now, we can change that. We can follow Pres. Biden by offering public support to the UAW.

We Can Promote Redistributive Policies That Really Help Working Americans

We are surviving as a major party for the moment because the leader of the Republican Party is completely disgusting, because the Republican Party is in disarray and because millions of women have become activists to preserve the right of a pregnant woman to choose an abortion, but this situation will not last forever. The right of a woman to choose will gradually be preserved by action in most states, and Mr. Trump will be gone from the stage eventually. If we want to be a strong party in the future, we will have to regain our focus on redistributive policies that really help working-class Americans of all races and genders. We will have to be passionate about things like the wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren; we will have to work for things like affordable child-care or Medicare for All; we will have to support a way of paying for higher education that does not leave young people with crushing debts; and we will have to support our labor unions. 

We will not be starting from scratch. As I said in an earlier post, "Our party does not lack for redistributive ideas. Democratic leaders like Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders have made a number of redistributive proposals, but they have not generated the kind of grass-roots enthusiasm that would be needed to turn them into major planks in the Democratic platform."

We need to pick up our party's redistributive proposals and run with them. We need to return to our roots.