{"id":17914,"date":"2024-11-20T11:15:39","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T11:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/?p=17914"},"modified":"2024-11-20T11:15:39","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T11:15:39","slug":"with-trump-heading-for-the-white-house-the-democrats-must-learn-these-lessons-and-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/?p=17914","title":{"rendered":"With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons \u2013 and fast"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

D<\/span>id the Democrats really lose because they were too \u201cwoke\u201d, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems<\/a> was in fact Kamala Harris\u2019s \u201cWall Street-approved economic pitch\u201d, which her brother-in-law \u2013 chief legal officer at Uber \u2013 reportedly helped craft, and which \u201cfell flat\u201d.<\/p>\n

The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here\u2019s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats<\/a> \u201crepresent the working class\u201d has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they \u201cstand up for marginalised groups\u201d has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.<\/p>\n

This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class \u2013 in all its diversity \u2013 as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for \u201cmarginalised groups\u201d rather than \u201cthe average Joe\u201d. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: \u201cKamala is for they\/them; President Trump is for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson<\/a> in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society<\/a>, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.<\/p>\n

In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon\u2019s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. \u201cThe typical worker \u2013 from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,\u201d wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, \u201chas become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.\u201d But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: \u201cThere is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of \u201cirritable mental gestures\u201d, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans \u2013 rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump \u2013 piggyback on this emotive backlash.<\/p>\n

But Kamala Harris<\/a> made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to \u201cflood the zone\u201d, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.<\/p>\n

The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 \u2013 while Democrats<\/a> haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home \u2013 this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.<\/p>\n

Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority \u2013 irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity \u2013 will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised \u201cother\u201d. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, \u201cIf you\u2019re explaining, you\u2019re losing\u201d. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.<\/p>\n

As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Source: <\/em> politics.einnews.com\u2026<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did the Democrats really lose because they were too \u201cwoke\u201d, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpt.m2mbeta.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}