If you are not frightened by the most recent Times/Siena poll, you aren’t paying attention. Biden has lost ground to Trump, seen his support among young voters decline, and, most disturbing of all, a plurality of Latinos now favor Trump.
Why?
A recent book by John Judis and Ruy Teixiera, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, claims to have the answer. At its simplest, they argue that working class people of color share much of the cultural traditionalism of white workers, and these values are turning them off to a “woke” Democratic Party.
Judis and Teixeira argue that with the decline of organized labor, the Democratic Party has become dominated by a highly educated cultural elite composed of all races. As a result, the party has substituted the identity politics of the academy for the economic populism of unions and working people. On issues such as crime, immigration, race, gender roles, and LGBTQ+ rights, working-class communities of all colors do not share the beliefs of the most “woke” portions of the Democratic Party.
Others have made similar arguments. Thomas Frank in his books, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) and Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016), expressed a similar concern about the Democratic Party. He maintained that the Democratic Party under Clinton and even Obama had become dominated by neoliberal economics, especially its support for “free trade” with horrendous impacts on this country’s working classes.
More recently, Thomas Piketty and his co-researchers have made a similar argument about the decline of the Left internationally. They maintain that parties across the world have become divided between a “Brahmin Left and a Populist Right,” with the main battle internationally no longer being between economic haves vs. have-nots, but between cultural avant-gardes and cultural traditionalists.
What these analyses agree on is that these alignments have left the working classes of every country AND every ethnicity without spokespeople in the halls of power.
Returning to Judis and Teixeira, their solution focuses NOT on the need to strengthen organized labor or economic populism, but rather on a demand that the Democratic Party should retreat to cultural traditionalism around issues like immigration, crime, gender, and LGBTQ+ rights. They believe the Party must oppose calls to “defund the police”, “smash patriarchy”, and “open our borders” –calls that alienate workers of all colors—if it wants to become again the party of the working classes.
The problems with Judas’s and Teixeira’s argument are many, but two are most important. First, is their contradictory refusal to address the importance of the decline in unions; and second, their retreat to cultural traditionalism.
The first of these mistakes is addressed by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol in their book, Rust Belt Union Blues. They discuss the reasons for the decline in union power, its consequences for the Democratic Party, and, most importantly, what can be done about this decline.
Unions have lost much of their power as the number of unionized workers, particularly in the private sector, has collapsed. The share of the non-public sector working class represented by unions has gone from over one-third in the 1950s to less than 8% today with obvious consequences for unions’ impact on workers income, benefits, and the political choices of these workers. Even more importantly, they believe that there has been a change not merely in the number of unions in workplaces, but in the quality of that presence.
Drawing on Newman’s and Skocpol’s along with Robert Putnam’s previous analysis in books like Bowling Alone, they argue that most political decisions are made in and through small groups in face-to-face interactions. Unions’ impact on workers has declined as the result of decline in their presence in face-to-face interactions in union halls and informal social gatherings.
Unions in areas like the upper Midwest were not merely places where workers went to get a job assignment, but also where workers came to play a card game, drink a beer, or join a ball club. Along with union newsletters and get-out-the-vote campaigns, these informal social connections were the places where unions’ impact on workers’ political choices were made.
Thus for Newman and Skocpol, the declining participation of union workers in the Democratic Party was not just because of the disappearance of jobs in industries like steel, auto-manufacturing, and coal, but from the decreasing ability of unions to maintain these informal settings.
Newman and Skocpol reject the emphasis that Judas and Teixeira place on the need to return to cultural traditionalism. They point out that the racial and gender beliefs of working class people have always been traditional, but during periods of union strength, those beliefs were overcome with the more progressive messages based in union and class solidarity.
They also confront the gaping hole in Judas’s and Teixeira’s argument by directly calling for strengthening unions. This, they argue, must be done not merely by giving unions more political support in organizing drives, but by unions using resources to strengthen their social relations with their members.
Resources must be redirected from central union offices run by “experts” to local unions with real day-to-day contacts with workers. Those locals in turn, must strengthen and expand their union halls making them again into places of social connection and recreation. This will, in turn, strengthen both unions’ presence in the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party’s appeal to working class people of all races.
However insightful this approach might be for strengthening unions, it does not confront Judas’s and Teixeira’s points about working class cultural traditionalism. Even if Newman and Skocpol are right that strengthening unions will eventually convince workers to overlook their traditional cultural values and return to the Democratic Party, what do we do in the meantime? Here is where the work of Ian Haney López at UC Berkeley is so important.
Haney López confronts the culture issue head on, but in a way that does not retreat to the traditionalism of Judas and Teixeira. He admits that the cultural traditionalism inside working class communities IS real, but there is a way around it that does not involve capitulating to it. The author of Dog Whistle Politics and Merge Left, Haney López argues that progressives must confront this cultural traditionalism with what he calls a “Race-Class Narrative,” which he juxtaposes to the positions not only of those like Judas and Teixeira but also those he calls the “Race-Left.”
Portions of the Democratic Party and some progressives more generally have pushed a response to working class traditionalsim by attacking those that hold these beliefs. However, this “Race-Left” attack on “white privilege” is counterproductive, as Haney López observes: “(C)ondemnations of white supremacy backfire, losing support from voters across racial lines and thereby making justice for communities of color less likely….” He argues instead for an approach that fuses race and class.
In politics, Haney López says, there are two crucial questions: who is on our side? and who is our enemy? Any effective politics must answer both of those. The “Race-Class Narrative” does so by telling working class people that racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant campaigns are being used to divide us so that wealthy elites can prosper.
This does NOT retreat to cultural traditionalism, as Judas and Teixeira recommend, nor does it merely guilt-trip men, immigrants and white people as the source of problems, but rather unites working class people of all backgrounds and gives them an enemy to oppose. In Haney López’s polling this approach to politics is THE most popular approach for all groups: not just among white workers, but African American and Latino workers as well. A more detailed description of what this approach involves can be found here.
Haney López’s work must be taken seriously if we are to avoid both Judas’s and Teixeira’s retreat to cultural traditionalism, and the weakness of some in the Democratic Party who support an identity politics that turns off workers.
That Times-Siena poll must be taken seriously; Biden and the Democratic Party are losing support among this country’s working classes. The Party needs to listen to Newman and Skocpol and offer resources to strengthen unions and, on the other hand, use Haney López’s Race-Class narrative to unite all workers.
These changes are important at any time, but they are essential today with not just the future of the Democratic Party at stake, but American democracy as well.
(In part II of this piece, I will connect this general discussion with what can and should be done here in San Diego.)
Gregg Robinson is a long-time activist, retired Grossmont College Sociology professor, and a member of the AFT Guild, Local 1931 Retiree Chapter.
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