Appealing to a Class-Based Coalition

Framing is Key

The key to taking a class-based approach is to frame policy recommendations in terms of broadly held values and to link those values to specific policies that are designed to make our economy work for all working-class people.  But first, we need to change our attitude toward the working class. We must liberate the term “working class” from its association with white people. We should stop using the phrase “white working class” and make it clear that the working class includes people of all races and that all of them are oppressed. Some may be more oppressed than others because of the effects of racism, but all are oppressed by an economy that is rigged against them.

Stress Values

Once we see that working-class people of all races are oppressed, we can formulate values that express their right to a better life. Here are a few examples:

• It is wrong that the wealth of a few should be based on the oppression, poverty and insecurity of millions of hard-working Americans.
• It is wrong that hard-working people of all races should suffer while the rich pay no attention.
• It is wrong that children of hard-working parents should grow up in families that - at best - struggle to provide them with things that the children of rich families take for granted: a good breakfast in the morning, a warm winter coat, health care.
• It is wrong that we as a society are wasting so much of our human potential.

Frame Policies in Terms of Values

We should frame our policy prescriptions in terms of these moral values. For example:

•  The minimum wage should be raised so that hard-working Americans can receive a fair share of our national income, and so that working people can earn enough to support themselves and their children.
• We need national health insurance so that hard-working people will not be so poor and insecure that they have to choose between taking a sick child to the doctor and buying gas to get to work.
• We should offer inexpensive daycare for small children so that their parents can afford to go to work. We should do this because we do not want to waste our human potential.
• We should provide more affordable housing so that hard-working parents do not need to pay more than half of their incomes for inadequate housing. We should do this so that the children of working parents can provide their children with things like good breakfasts that richer children take for granted.
• We should offer free tuition at community colleges so that young people really can pull themselves up into the middle class, and we do not waste so much of our human potential
• We need a wealth tax so that we can reduce the concentration of wealth in our society and improve the lives of all working-class people. The wealth of the few should not depend on the misery of the many.

Framing the issues in this way will make it clear that working-class people can rise together. We do not need to make white working-class people poorer in order to improve the lot of people of color. Instead, by reducing the extreme concentration of wealth in the upper class, we can make improve the lives of all working-class people.

Repetition is Crucial

We must say these things and others like them over and over and over until they take their places among the generally accepted assumptions. We must make it clear that working-class people can rise together. If we do that, we will not persuade everyone, but we will be able to build a class-based coalition that is strong enough to make our society more just.

What About Reducing the Racial Wealth and Income Gap?

If we adopt the approach suggested here, we will reduce the racial wealth and income gaps. Any policy that benefits the working class as a whole will benefit people of color disproportionately because they are over-represented in the working class. You can read about more about this topic in a post in this blog entitled "Reducing Racial Inequity in the United States by Making Everyone's Life Better."

.

How the Left and the Right Collaborate to Split the Working Class

Conservatives and Progressives Collaborate to Split the Working Class 

In American politics, conservatives and progressive collaborate unintentionally to split the working class and to prevent the emergence of a progressive majority. The collaboration has come about because we have forgotten how to talk about class conflict in our politics. During the nineteen fifties, we stopped talking about class differences and instead focused on racial differences in discussions of injustice and inequality in our country. The elimination of class conflict from our discussion of injustice and inequality prevents us from seeing the fundamental basis of injustice in our society and divides the electorate in a way that prevents the emergence of a progressive majority.

The Fundamental Basis of Injustice

The fundamental basis of injustice and inequality in our country is that wealth and income are very unequally distributed. A small upper class and a somewhat larger patrimonial middle class own an outlandish share of the country’s wealth and receive an outlandish share of its income. The bottom half of the population owns practically nothing and receives a very small share of the national income. The result is that a large share of our population lives precariously while the upper class and the patrimonial middle class live well.

The division between the two upper classes and the working class is not primarily racial, although it has a racial aspect. It is true that people of color have on average much less wealth and income than white people, but it is also true that most white people belong to the working class. They are regular, working people who share the precariousness of working-class life in America.

Why Don't We Make Life Less Precarious?

We could provide services to make working-class life less precarious. We could provide a national health care system that would eliminate the financial risk associated with being sick; we could provide a real, national pension system that would allow people to age with dignity; we could finance our system of post-secondary education in a way that would eliminate the need for students to go into debt; we could provide affordable childcare so that parents could afford to go to work; and there are lots of other possibilities.

We are unable to do any of these things because the political constituency for such reforms is fragmented along racial lines, and that fragmentation is not simply an unintended result of our history and culture. It has been deliberately fomented by conservatives to split the working class and thereby t prevent the passage of the needed reforms. The racial differences and prejudices that characterize our large and diverse country have provided fertile ground for the deliberate creation of “populist” conservative political movements like the movement that supports Mr. Trump, but such political movements do not emerge magically from a culture. Building them takes effort, and that effort requires lots of money.

Conservatives Fund Racist Political Movements

The money is provided by extremely wealthy individuals. They fund populist movements to provide political support for conservative, political candidates who vote to keep taxes low.  In other words, white, working-class people are persuaded that their problems – which are real – are due to factors related to race like “unfair competition” from cheap immigrant labor.  White workers are told that “welfare queens” are living a life of ease while “real Americans” have to work hard just to survive. White workers are told that shadowy “elites” want to replace them with non-whites. Many white people are thus persuaded to vote their racial identity rather than their class identity, and their votes provide electoral support for policies that benefit the very rich.

Is there danger that taxes might increase to support a national healthcare system? The danger can be averted if people can be induced to vote their racial prejudices. Is there a danger that taxes might be increased to support a system of affordable childcare? That danger too may be averted if people can be persuaded to vote their racial identities. Thus, the very wealthy work to split the constituency for progressive reforms.

Progressives Accept the Racist Definition of the Conflict

Progressives could offer an alternative view. They could emphasize class solidarity, but they do not do so. Instead, they merely turn the right’s appeal on its head. They agree that the axis of conflict is racial but say that white people are the oppressors while people of color are the oppressed. This race-based explanation cannot attract the support of white working-class people because it denies the reality of their lived experience. They can see easily that they do not belong to the ruling class. They are in fact oppressed by our system, but the racial analysis offered by the left denies the reality of their oppression by saying that in our society, only people of color are oppressed. In contrast, the right's analysis speaks directly to white working-class people. It explains the reasons for their suffering in terms that are easily understood. 

White people who are driving for Uber, working as pickers in a warehouse or operating cash registers at Walmart know that they are struggling to live. They know that they live in a system that is rigged against them. Perhaps they are marginally better off than black people in the same occupations, but that difference is not apparent to them. The left’s appeal to racism as the cause of the suffering of working Americans denies the reality of the suffering of white working-class people, and we should not be surprised that such an appeal does not attract their votes. 

Thus, the left collaborates unwittingly with the right to split the working-class vote. If the axis of oppression is exclusively racial, white people are on one side and people of color are on the other. White workers and white capitalists are on the same team, and people of color are on the opposing team. This situation supports the interests of the very rich by preventing the formation of a coalition with enough strength to pass legislation to advance social justice in the United States. The effect of the focus on race is ironically that we are unable to advance the cause of social justice even for people of color.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Next week's post will take up this question. Stay tuned.

Harris is the Only Choice

From My Heart

This post was originally published last February. It was updated on August 10 to reflect the fact that Pres. Biden had dropped out of the presidential race, and Kamala Harris had become the Democratic candidate.

In this post, I write from my heart as a Jew for my fellow Jews. I truly believe that in the coming election, we must all vote to elect Kamala Harris. For us, she is the only choice.

The Only Choice for a Progressive

If you are a Jew on the left wing of the Democratic party who is angered by Pres. Biden’s support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, consider what will happen if you sit out this election or vote for a third party. If you do that, you will help to elect Donald Trump as president. His supporters include the neo-Nazis and White Christian Nationalists who deny that you are really American.

Moreover, Trump's campaign is openly antisemitic. On December 19, the NY Times quoted a Trump campaign spokesman as saying,

Unsurprisingly, the all-Democrat appointed Colorado Supreme Court has ruled against President Trump, supporting a Soros-funded, left-wing group’s scheme to interfere in an election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden by removing President Trump’s name from the ballot ....

"Soros-funded" means "funded by a rich Jew." The phrase implies falsely that the Democratic Party is controlled by rich Jews, and we must do what we can to prevent a candidate who spreads such lies from becoming president. Trump's Republican Party is dependent on a racist base that includes many, virulent antisemites. Do you really want to elect a government that will empower them?

Moreover, you know that there are many things we need to do in our country. We need to deal with the effects of climate change; we need to lighten the burden of student debt; we need to build a decent, national health care system; we need to provide a path to citizenship for our undocumented immigrants; we need to make sure that women can control their own bodies; and there are many other things we need to do. You know that if we elect Ms. Harris, we will make progress on at least some of those tasks, but if we elect Mr. Trump, we will make no progress, and on some issues, we will move backward. How much do you want to damage our country? How far do you want to set back the cause of social justice here? Would you be willing to sacrifice Social Security or Medicare? Would you sacrifice a woman's right to control her own body to protest our government's support of Israel's war in Gaza?

The Only Choice for a Conservative

If you are a conservative who is disgusted and angered by the antisemitism of the extreme left, you need to remind yourself where the real danger lies. The antisemites of the left are noisy; they march with placards; they sometimes harass Jewish students. But they have not gone into synagogues to kill people. Remember the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

The really dangerous antisemites in our country are on the extreme political right. It is the neo-Nazis and White Christian Nationalists who have made us afraid and who have caused every synagogue in the United States to increase its spending on security. We can tolerate noisy, antisemitic leftists, but we cannot tolerate people who walk into our synagogues to kill us, and we do not want to elect a president who will empower those killers. If you ask yourself which candidate is “good for the Jews,” you will find only one answer: Kamala Harris. If you sit this election out or vote for a Republican, you will empower our country’s most dangerous antisemites. Is that what you want?

The Only Choice

So, I say again, a Jew must vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. There is no other choice.

The Humanities and National Identity

 What is the Point of the Study of the Humanities?

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece entitled “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don ‘t Know What Their Value Is.” Many Americans share that ignorance, and we wonder why anyone should study subjects like literature or history. I think that the humanities have a key role in the education of the people of a nation.

The humanities are the means by which we create a national identity through a shared culture and history. A nation must be more than a collection of individuals who happen to reside within the borders of a territory. The people of a nation must have a shared identity that answers the question, "Who are we?" In a large territory, such an identity cannot emerge automatically. In every country, it is and has been a deliberate creation.

A National Identity Must Have Depth  

A shared, national identity should not be a shallow or a momentary thing. We Americans cannot be merely the people who eat hamburgers or the people who love the music of Taylor Swift. A national identity should have historical depth and cultural richness. When I was in school in France, I had to memorize poems written in the sixteenth century. I now understand that the point of that exercise was to impress on us that being French meant having a share in a literary tradition that went back for centuries. Memorizing those poems was part of learning what it meant to be French.

We can use works of American culture in the same way. We are the people who produced the literary works of Richard Wright and Emily Dickenson, the plays of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keefe, the music of Aaron Copeland and Scott Joplin. We are the people who have created a unified and distinctive culture from the contributions of an unimaginable variety of immigrant influences.

A National Identity Can Have Variants

A national identity does not have to erase regional or ethnic identities. We can have both. The American South has a distinctive culture, but southerners also share our American culture. American Blacks have a distinctive culture, too, but they remain Americans as they learn when they visit Africa. Spain has four official languages, but despite their protestations to the contrary, the people of Barcelona remain Spaniards.

A National Identity Can Change

A national identity is not static. It can change over time as people come to understand their society and their history from new perspectives. That is why the literary canon matters so much. When I was in college, the canon didn't include many female or nonwhite writers, and that had to change. We now study works by Black writers, by Hispanic writers and by women. We learn that their contributions have not diluted our culture. They have enriched it. We are a people with a rich culture that has many strands.

History and National Identity

The study of history also plays a role in our sense of who we are. When I was in school, I learned that we were the people whose ancestors arrived at Plymouth Rock, wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought the Civil War and crossed the prairies in covered wagons. We have since realized that the view that I learned is incomplete, and we have started to come to terms with the fact that we are also the people who exterminated the Native Americans, enslaved millions of Africans and imprisoned innocent Japanese in camps in WWII.

That dark view of who we are has been very hard for some people to accept, but it must in the end be incorporated into our sense of who we are. The solution cannot be that we stop studying history. It must be that we learn to tell our story in a new way. Perhaps, we will learn to accept that our history - like the history of every nation - is morally ambiguous. It contains both elements of heroism and elements of villainy.  

Perhaps the elements of villainy are the most important because we can learn from them. In a wonderful book about engineering failures called To Engineer is Human, the author explains that the study of failures is important because we can learn from them. Successes teach us nothing new. Perhaps the study of the villainous parts of our history will help us to build a more just society in the future. We can come to see ourselves as the people who created "Jim Crow" and also as the people who overcame it.

We Cannot Be a Nation Without the Humanities

The study of the humanities is the way that a national culture and a national identity are built. Without a shared culture and identity, patriotism becomes racism or shallow jingoism. We cannot be a nation if we learn only the things that benefit us directly as individuals. The study of accounting, computer science or chemistry does not help to create a shared identity. If we are to be a nation at all, we must learn to see ourselves as the inheritors of a shared culture and history. We can learn that only through the study of the humanities.