What is the Party of the Patrimonial Middle Class Passionate About?

This is the fourth post in my series on the problems and future of the Democratic Party.[1] The last post in this series said that the Democratic Party is based in the patrimonial middle class. How does the make-up of the party affect its political character?

Our Party’s Concerns Are Those of Its Base

The Democratic Party inevitably reflects the concerns of the people who make up its base. We members of the patrimonial middle class mostly do not think in terms of class, and so, we do not see class oppression. We do see racial and gender-based inequity, and we see them mainly in the light of our own experiences, and the experiences of people we know. We are most passionate about the problems that we know about from these sources. We are also passionate about issues that arise from disgusting public events like the murder of George Floyd.

We Are Passionate About Abortion Rights but Not About a National Health Care System

We can see the effects of our experience by comparing our weak support for a national health care system with our extremely strong support for abortion rights. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision galvanized the Democratic electorate. Millions of Democrats who had been politically inactive became activists. Democrats won political offices in what had been Republican districts, and recently in Ohio, a referendum that would have made it more difficult to change Ohio’s restrictive abortion law was defeated. In contrast, when Bernie Sanders proposed “Medicare for All,” the reception among Democrats was lukewarm at best. Similarly, when Pres. Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, he was able to pass it through Congress, but there was no broad outpouring of support for it in spite of the fact that illness is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in our country, and the cost of health care keeps millions of women, blacks and whites in poverty.

Why is the support for abortion rights so fervent, while the support for a national health care system is lukewarm at best? Could it be because we know that we, our daughters or our sisters may well need abortions? Could it be because we see that restrictions on abortion affect us directly?  A national health care system would have no such direct effect. Most of us already have health insurance. We do not need a national program.

We Are Passionate About Women’s Rights but Not About the Plight of Working-Class Women

Democrats have also supported the women’s movement mainly from a middle-class point of view. We talk about the “glass ceiling,” and articles are published about the number of women who are CEOs of major companies. We encourage our daughters to study STEM fields in college. We abhor sexual harassment because our base includes millions of business and professional women who have experienced directly the things that are described in a recent article about pervasive sexual harassment in a national real estate association. We are passionate about these issues.

On the other hand, we are not nearly as passionate about affordable housing, although the cost of housing keeps millions of women in poverty. In fact, many of our members are strong supporters of the zoning laws that are among the largest obstacles to affordable housing. We are not passionate about affordable childcare, either, although the cost of childcare, like the cost of housing, keeps millions of women in poverty. In short, we are passionate about the obstacles that women face because they are women, but we are not nearly as passionate about the ones they face because they are working class. We do not focus on redistribution of income.

We Are Passionate About Racial Equity but Not About the Plight of Working-Class Black People

Our approach to issues of racial equity is similar. We care deeply about the number of black people who are admitted to elite universities and about the number of black people who are heads of major companies. We are horrified by the repeated killing of black people by the police. We work for “inclusion,” and we raise our consciousness on racial issues by reading books like White Fragility or How to be an Antiracist.

On the other hand, we do not work hard for major increases in tax funding for public universities, although black people on average carry much more educational debt than white people. We do not support – or even know much about – Darrity and Hamilton’s proposal for “baby bonds” to reduce the wealth differential between rich and poor people, although black people would be major beneficiaries of such a program. Black people would also be major beneficiaries of affordable housing, but as mentioned above, we do not support that strongly either. In short, we are passionate about the problems that black people face because they are black but not about the problems that they face because they are working class. We do not focus on redistribution of income.

Our Party Has Good Ideas, But We Do Not Promote Them

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. In my local party's office, I do not hear redistributive policies being discussed. I do not read about such issues on Facebook. I do not see opinion pieces discussing them in the New York Times or the Washington Post. In short, there is no national effort to explain how such proposals would benefit working people of all races; there is no national effort to show how such proposals are rooted in basic, American values; and there is no national effort to build the kind of coalition that would make the passage of such proposals possible.

We Have Allowed the Republicans to Claim to Represent the Working Class

Our failure to unite around redistributive policies that could benefit everyone has left the white working class without a home in the Democratic Party, and the Republicans have not hesitated to use racism, xenophobia and hatred of cultural elites to build a fake populist movement to attract votes to their candidates. The movement is fake because it offers no real solutions, but it does channel working class anger in a way that helps to elect Republican candidates. 

We Can Do Better

We do not have to sit passively and allow the Republicans to claim the white working-class vote. If we offered real solutions to working-class suffering, we would be able to draw many working-class people to our party. Some would continue to prefer racism and xenophobia but many others would see which side of their bread was really buttered. We can win if we remember what a party of the left is really supposed to do.

The last article in this serious will suggest some things that we might do going forward to build a coalition with a real chance to enact redistributive policies.

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[1] The earlier posts in the series may be found at Fox Cities Progressive: The Party of the Patrimonial Middle Class, Fox Cities Progressive: How We Stopped Thinking About Class in Politics and FoxCities Progressive: What is the Patrimonial Middle Class?

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.

The Party of the Patrimonial Middle Class

 A Critique of Our Party

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will lay out a critique of the direction that the Democratic Party has taken in recent years and suggest a direction for its future. I write as a member of the party in the hope that my comments may help it to change its direction.

I believe that, although my party claims to be the party of the dispossessed and the marginalized members of our society, it has become the party of what Thomas Picketty calls “the patrimonial middle class.” The party has focused mainly on issues that are of concern to the members of that class, and as a result, the party has failed to build a national, political coalition that could enact policies to benefit working Americans of all races. The Republican Party has been able to exploit our failure by promoting a politics of anti-elitism and racism that has drawn the white working class away from the Democratic Party. Our country has become immobilized politically and unable to deal with many of the challenges that face us. As a party of the political left, we must find a way to break the stalemate and move our country forward.

What Is the Role of a Party of the Left?

We live in a society where an outlandishly large share of the income and of the wealth are held by a tiny minority of our people. Our economic system produces enormous wealth, but it distributes the wealth so unequally that it creates enormous inequity and destabilizes our society.  In such a society, the primary task of a party of the political left ought to be to provide the means to redistribute the wealth more equitably. This is a matter of providing economic justice to all classes. It is not primarily a matter of racial justice, although racial inequity is a part of the problem, and it is not primarily a matter of gender-based justice, although gender inequity is a part of the problem. The core of the problem is to find ways to redistribute income from our society’s richest people to the class that makes up the poorest 50% of our society, which corresponds roughly to what used to be called the working class.

Redistributing Wealth

There are various ways to redistribute wealth, but the most common in all rich countries is through tax-supported programs that provide income in kind. For example, a program of affordable child care would charge the families receiving the care less that its cost, and remainder of the cost would be covered by tax revenues. Similarly, a national health care system would reduce the cost of health insurance by paying a part of the cost with tax revenues. Such programs would provide income in kind in the form of services and pay for the services with taxes.

The recipients of the services would not be a minority of our population. They would include most of us, but especially, they would include the poorer half of our population. The bottom half of our wealth distribution includes people of all colors and genders, and they share common problems, which have common solutions. A single woman who is struggling to raise her children on a waitress’s wages would be helped by a system of affordable child care no matter what race she belonged to. Any person struggling to pay off student debt would be helped by forgiveness of the debt. Any person without health insurance who becomes ill would be helped by a decent national health care system. This kind of wealth transfer would help non-whites and women disproportionately because they are overrepresented in the poorer half of our population, but people of all colors and genders would benefit.

What Have We Become?

The Democratic Party used to focus on policies for redistributing income. We passed Social Security, the GI Bill and Medicare.  However, we have lost that focus. We now focus on issues that are mainly of concern to members of the patrimonial middle class while failing to provide strong support for proposals to increase equity across the classes. One result of our change in focus is that conservative propaganda can plausibly claim that white, working-class people have no place in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party has used such propaganda to draw the white working class away from the Democrats. Consequently, the Democratic Party, which ought to be the party of the working class, has become the party of comfortable members of the patrimonial middle class, and our party is weaker than it ought to be. 

How we got into this situation will be the topic of the next post in this series. The third post will deal in more detail with the makeup of the patrimonial middle class and with its connection to the Democratic Party. The fourth post will discuss the ways in which our political actions reflect the makeup of our party. Finally, the fifth post will suggest some ways that we can move forward.