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Conservatives win many votes saying that liberals are elitist. I am here to tell you that the liberal movement is indeed very elitist. Its organization’s staffs are composed mainly of Ivy leaguers whose life experiences are dramatically different than the 70 percent of Americans that never graduate from college. Very few of them have any actual experience living with or knowing working-class people. As a graduate of Bucknell, I still feel out of a place and most glaringly underdressed when I get in a room with the Ivy Leaguers running our movement.
As garbageman turned United Electrical Workers (UE) in Political Action Director Chris Townsend put it to me:
"When I am in meetings in Washington, DC, with organizations that presume to speak for workers or on behalf of workers – I ironically find myself the only worker in the room. As a worker with a GED – and 30-plus years of labor union experience – opinions like mine are rarely sought and universally dismissed as being too extremist when most workers feel the way I do about things. This is why it is so common for liberal and left-wing staff and activists to
completely misunderstand workers."
The experiences of liberal elites are so outside of the mainstream that, very often, they just don’t understand the working class. They fail to communicate to workers because most of them have never talked to a worker in real life, except for to ask for fries at McDonald’s. Instead, when they fail to understand the misdirected anger of the working class at its economic anxiety, they tend to engage in intellectual snobbery and narrow-mindedness that only serve to alienate the white working class further.
Such snobbery was expressed to me in an email recently sent to me from a Democratic media strategist who said the message of the day was, "Conservatives face a choice about the future of their movement: Will they come to the table to get things done or ‘stick with the angry people’?"
Well, let me think about that for a second. If I am a poor white guy, do I want to go with the polite people (Democrats) who are going to beg for change with their sophisticated intellectual arguments that I don’t understand? Or do I want to be with the party (Republicans) that embraces my anger and wants to get out in the streets to yell about how awful this economy is?
Americans are screaming now about the economic hell we are in. Republicans are screaming about how awful the economy is and winning many of them over. Albeit, they’re winning them with the wrong solutions, but they are trying to win Joe the Plumber, not Joe Stiglitz, so the details don’t really matter.
On the economy, the Democratic message is, "Sit tight, don’t get out in the street and protest, everything will be alright."
White working-class guys would choose the angry people who are willing to stand up and say how frustrated they feel. The progressives who are telling me to be cool and not get upset with things are just merely talking down to me. They have the privilege of telling me not to get upset, when I have every right to be upset.
Sarah Palin indeed represents all the rage of the working class that liberals of this country are trying to quiet down. Many liberal elites engaged in revisionist history say that McCain’s defeat was caused by Palin. However, anybody who actually worked on the Obama campaign like I did knew that McCain’s defeat was caused by the financial crisis and McCain’s baffling response and coddling of Wall Street.
As an organizer for the Obama campaign on the ground in Western Pennsylvania during the election, I remember how white, working-class, swing voters couldn’t stop talking about Sarah Palin for weeks on end. For the three weeks between Palin’s selection as VP candidate and the financial crash, we were scared shitless the Republicans were going to win as Palin led to McCain surging in the polls.
Many white, working-class people loved her because here was a politician who finally was working class and ready for a fight. They loved her even more as Ivy League liberals denounced her as basically "white trash." It felt to white, working-class people like liberal elites were calling them "white trash" too.
Liberals still treat Palin and the right-wing populist Tea Party Movement that she leads as "white trash." They spend more time attacking them as "stupid racists" than actually trying to win them over and address their concerns. Its as if liberals are saying we know better than you stupid working-class people.
To understand how easily Sarah Palin could be the next president, we need only look to another vice presidential candidate widely denounced by the liberal elite when he was announced in 1952 – Richard Milhouse Nixon. Nixon became president by mobilizing resentment of the working class against elites. By framing elites as talking down to the poor and working class, Sarah Palin, with the right slick ad men, could mobilize that same type of sentiment against the elitist "eggheads" of the Democratic Party.
From Rick Perlstein’s classic, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America":
"To cosmopolitan liberals, hating Richard Nixon, congratulating yourself for seeing through Richard Nixon and the elaborate political poker bluff with which he hooked the sentimental rubes, was becoming part and parcel of a political identity.
"And to a new suburban mass middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals who claimed to know so much better than you (and Richard Nixon) what was best for your country. This side saw everything most genuine in Nixon, everything that was most brave, – who saw the Checkers speech for what it also actually was, not just a hustle but also an act of existential heroism: a brave refusal to let haughty ‘betters’ have their way with him."
It’s like deja vu all over again.
Republicans are rallying the troops against the educated elites of society. As a result of their political jujitsu, Republicans are making it look like they are engaged in a class war on behalf of the working class against the liberal elite.
Liberals instead are playing into the class war trap by talking down to the uneducated masses of America via TV talk shows and blogs. They can’t understand why they aren’t winning over the working class because they are too busy attacking them.
Such intellectual foolishness was dramatized in the way I heard liberal DC political operatives talk about the widely read focus group study by "The Very Separate Worlds of Conservatives" by Stan Greenberg, James Carville and others. They took the memo as evidence that working class people lived in a world so far outside of their own (socioeconomically speaking, they do) that they couldn’t possibly be reasoned with using their methods). They reckoned that surely these people must be " crazy, brain dead racists" who believe Obama is a socialist out to get them.
What they failed to read is one of the main conclusions of the study that shows that their efforts to paint working class conservatives as "racist idiots" is backfiring big time:
"They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country – a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites."
I wonder why they feel under attack? Maybe it’s all the liberal elites calling white, working class people "stupid racists."
Indeed, the focus groups found that race was not an important factor affecting the political opposition of white, working class conservatives. Indeed, the study found that mocking these people as racists, as I argued in my article, "Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists," only serves to stigmatize them more against liberal elites.
Talking down to working class people engaged in a class war against the elites isn’t going to win them over.
What liberals have to do is unite with the teabaggers and engage in a class war against Wall Street. Organized labor has succeeded in doing this by using constant, year-round, on-the-job political engagement to compel people to come over. As a result, Obama won by 23 points among white, non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, non-college voters.
We need to "Organize the Unorganized" in massive organizing drives like we did in 1930′s – the heydays for the progressive reform. Union organizing is the best way to engage people one-on-one on a constant year-round basis. We need be constantly sitting down with working class white conservatives one-on-one, listen to their concerns, and engage them in honest dialogue. Only real community organizing can do this, not the slick TV ad buys that DC liberals tend to prefer.
Part of the reason the Obama movement was so successful was that they invested so heavily in community organizing. We would treat them like human beings and engage in friendly conversation. We would find out what issues they cared about it and get them to critically look at issues in friendly, non-threatening communications. Much like Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy, we took no voter for granted. Our movement should do the same when it comes to voters if it expects to be sustainable over the long run.
Sure, we might not get them the first time or the second time or the third time; it might 20, 30, 40 or 50 long, deep conversations in order to win over these working white guys, but it’s worth it However, when you get a union on your job every day eight hours day, a good, well-trained union leader or shop stewards have plenty of time to get to that 20th or 30th conversation you need to win a guy. Furthermore, you have a common bond which you guys can unite behind – fighting economic injustice in your workplace.
As a union organizer in West Virginia, I remember some of our most active members showing up with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on their pickups. A lot of them would complain against liberals ruining society and then in the next breath argue passionately for a strike. Over time through constant dialogue and popular education, our union was able to win these members over to the liberal side. They realized that voting based on slick TV personalities made up to appear folksy was merely putting folks out of jobs.
Sure, not all of them came over, but enough that it was worth the effort. If we can just bring over one-third of white, working class conservatives, we can dramatically change the political landscape of this country. That’s what the Employee Free Choice Act would be able to do.
Many liberal political operatives in DC dismiss the Employee Free Choice Act as merely political payback to the unions for their help in the election. They fail to see the larger political implications – increased unionization would dramatically change the political dynamics of this country and prevent 30,000 workers from getting fired from their jobs every year for trying to join a union.
Many lament the loss of marriage equality last week in Maine. There have been a thousand analyses of why we lost this important fight for a fundamental civil right. However, what none of them pointed out is that if we had increased unionization, the fight for marriage equality would be dramatically easier.
Its no coincidence that ranks of the Christian Coalition began to swell as the ranks of unions declined dramatically in the 1980′s. Unions are organizations that bring people from different parts of society and unite them in a common cause. Union members know that their true enemy is Wall Street and not a couple of people trying to get married. This is why Obama won by 23 points among white, non-college graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, non-college voters.
We as progressives can win only when we get all the teabaggers into our movement through getting them into unions. As Lincoln said, "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." Only organized labor can achieve that type of unity. Failure to bring working people into the Employee Free Choice Act could easily lead to the election of a Sarah Palin.
Sure, liberals laugh off the idea of Sarah Palin being elected president. However, elitist, out-of-touch liberals laughed off Nixon, Reagan and Bush as unelectable. Well, guess what, they all won.
If we don’t stop laughing at white, working class people, we are going to lose too.
37 Comments
Some very important points, which are often overlooked by self-proclaimed Liberals. Very important since we have history to show us that BigMoney can harness populism to get people to vote against their own best interests.
Pat Spewcannon tries this all the time. Lou Dobbs now. This cannot be ignored!
However, I don’t agree with partnering with Teabaggers. These people are literally insane and will only complicate the movement (have you tried talking to any of these people?!?). Republicans…sure, but not Teabaggers. Big difference. Many of my Repub friends are horrified that Teabaggin is associated with the Repub Party, just as they were about the McInsane/Paylin campaign and ended up voting for Obama, which shocked me.
Keep the Teabaggers dividing and conquering their natural allies, and we can keep picking up some sane Repubs.
My only objection with this piece is that white, working class males are so much less important demographically than they were in Nixon’s era. So, at least to some extent, they can be ignored and mocked.
That said, there’s a lot here that rings true.
once again . . . inadvertently making the opposite point! turning into a reliable contrary indicator there.
A great long strategic post, but if Wall Street is really the opponent, then working with the Democrats just plays into their hands, because, as Matt Tabibi mentions, Wall Street actually has even more power and influence under (D) administrations.
the kind of shop-floor politicking Mike mentions can also to be used to persuade some lifelong Union Democratic activists to support an authentic Labor Party – and it helps that Obama and his team in Washington are making the case for this course of action clearer and clearer every day.
I have a lot of family, friends and neighbors who are teabaggers. The only people I have ever heard that are as passionate about campaign finance reform are the teabaggers. My dad is a prime example. Though he’s not all that concerned about insurance companies and bankers, he wants to keep union and trial lawyer money from controlling politics after all the ranting he has heard over the years about the evils of unions and lawsuits. I want to keep corporate money out of campaigning. We would fight side to side on campaign finance even though we just plain fight over almost everything else in politics. The way I see it, you agree to take out all the big money and the left still wins. The unions can put boots on the ground and voters in voting booths while Goldman Sachs only has a few hundred people and billions of dollars. The mainstream media even has an interest since they too can influence voters (see Fox News network) and would benefit from other entities not messing up their vision with piles of cash and an agenda that may not be aligned.
With a population made up primarily of those not willing to put themselves out even to vote every few years, we can use all the passionate people we can get on any issues we might have in common. But personal attacks will just make passionate adversaries out of them.
I’m not sure what you mean here. I agree with Mike’s suggested tactics. Just throwing out a note that convincing white, working-class males to vote for Democrats isn’t nearly as important as it once was to winning national elections.
As for third parties, you’ll have to change the voting system first.
This piece really gets under my skin.
First, the “liberal elitism” linked with Ivy League schools is in itself “old school” thinking. There has been a sea change in the kind of organizers one will find among the left; the one thing nearly all of them have in common now is their use of the internet.
And where there may have been a digital divide in 2000, by 2008, that digital divide was transcended by the prevalence of cell phone use over computer usage. You can thank the Howard Dean campaign of 2003-2004 for democratizing organizing by making accessible to anyone within reach of a keyboard, and under the Obama campaign, with a cell phone.
I am one of the new organizing generation; since joining the Dean for American campaign as a grassroots organizer in 2003, I’ve worked with many different people locally, statewide and nationally. They come from all walks of life; they’re so diverse I can’t even think of good examples to which to point, other than perhaps the Netroots Nation attendees and speakers. All colors, all sizes, straight-LGBT-none-of-the-above, all backgrounds, all disciplines, all educational backgrounds. A real rainbow of people working as organizers.
Tonight I’ll sit at a local party meeting, next to the beefy white guy who is president of the Steelworkers’ local for my area while he whispers and nags at me to update my Facebook page. On the other side of me will be the brawny African American rep from the UAW local, who’ll probably give me a hard time for not giving him a recommendation on a netbook that I’ve owed him for a month. I’ll chat with the chair of the Democratic club, a white female professor at a local state college, and with the prospective vice president of the club who’ll put their name in the hat for elections next week (they’re Hispanic and gay and a local college student).
They’re all of them working together and they may not all be union members, but they will all be supporting union workers. None of them are fucking liberal elites from Ivy League colleges.
If there’s anything toxic to liberal organizing, it’s the failure of factions within the left to learn that they must not validate the frames the right-wing uses.
As for teabaggers: they will not be converted by joining unions. If anything, there are too many teabaggers already in unions; we’ve called them “Reagan Democrats” for years because they have voted “God, guns, gays” since Reagan’s term in office. They give in easily to fearmongering and fail to question the agenda of those who tell them that liberals want to take their guns and make their kids “turn teh gay.” Even the union guys I hang with will tell you that they know teabaggers in their ranks.
Do some reading about people who are authoritarians; there’s always a percentage of the population which is authoritarian, and teabaggers are a large part of that percentage in the U.S. (And in reading about authoritarians, perhaps you’ll begin to understand why the teabaggers and their corporate masters have been trying to undermine and invalidate the authority of the office of the president since Bush left office.)
You’ll also learn that since there are authoritarians among us all the time, the real problem is keeping hard core authoritarians from having power or being encouraged. It means organizing everybody, all the time — not just union members, and not just for the purpose of unionization. Because when authoritarians hold power, we all suffer for it, including union members.
sure maybe not as demographically important, but if you bring over ten percent of them – you have less Blue Dogs and more solid democrats. This could make a big difference.
Um, I’ve mingled at some teabagapaloozas, and I’d say they are proud to be adversaries. In fact, it’s why this carefully constructed and well-funded (by the mega-rich of America/Australia) “movement” exists in the first place….to be adversarial.
Where was their “passion” for these supposed causes when the Constitution and the American economy was being dismantled right before their eyes from 2001-2008? Over the last year, things have improved immensely on so many of the fronts they claim to care about, so now that means they should go batcrap crazy and try to take down the people who are correcting so many wrongs?!? It’s pure insanity.
Sure, I’ve heard Charles Manson talk before and thought, “well, he’s got a good point there…” but that doesn’t mean I should go find “common ground” with him or his followers.
Just curious…have you done any community organizing yourself? I ask because from my experience organizing around issues, there has to be a clear goal for the group and a certain level of respect between participants, otherwise it goes nowhere. So because of that experience, all I see in any partnering with the incredibly rude and insulting teabaggers is a complete flustercuck. For instance, you say your dad is passionate about union and lawyer money to the point where he’ll get active about it. His motivation comes from a completely false notion, which is easily demonstrated, instead of where the real problem is, which apparently you understand – megacorporation control of the government.
This is a fundamental difference that in my opinion cannot be organized around. The umbrella of “campaign finance reform” doesn’t bridge the gap. Are we all then fighting for publicly-funded elections? You think teabaggers are going to go along with that? Plus, we’re talking about developing more unity in the blue collar ranks, so why would we want to work with people who villify unions?
As I said, I’m all for reaching out to people with different opinions and do it constantly in my professional/political life. I actually learn a lot from talking with people and having an open mind. Teabaggers are a completely different thing based on many hours of speaking with a huge variety of them. I concluded this even after never getting in arguments with them and simply asking them questions to explain their reasoning on a whole host of issues. There’s nothing to work with there.
So, I’m going to continue the efforts, and successes I might add, I’ve had in talking with reasonable Republicans. As this post suggests, we MUST do this en masse as the BigMedia continues their campaign to muddy the waters of our public discourse, and keep blue collar people voting against their own self interests, which means voting for Republicans.
Let the teabaggers continue spraying their spittle as they shout at anyone who’ll listen to nonsense.
Wait a minute? Have we stepped into a Time Warp back to the ’70s? Because this sure reads as if it was written circa 1972. Edit: While trying to justify support for McGovern against the unions trashing him.
The goal of answering Wall St and Washington’s class war from above with populist class war is very dear to me, and I’ve been thinking alot about this same issue.
I don’t think the real screamers can be redeemed for anything, and I don’t think trying to reach out to them would accomplish anything.
But as to the broader argument that we should focus our attacks on the corporate and political elites, not on rank and files, there I concur 100%.
As for elites sneering at the less-educated, it seems to me that these days the people are more and more likely to be right on the policy substance. They were right on the bailouts; the elites were and continue to be wrong. And in recent months according to polls they’re out ahead of the elites on the war as well. They also consistently supported a real public option, and single payer has more support among the people than among the elites.
Climate change might be the only exception, although the elites aren’t enthusiastically right there either.
So on policy substance the people are mostly right, the elites wrong. As for common sense and morality, the desire to protect and uphold a protection racket vs. the desire to fight and destroy that racket, I again refer to the division of feeling on indenturing the country to Wall Street….
Thanks for those points. While these times, they are a changin’, I still think there are some remnants of that “Liberal elite” frame that do exist in reality, especially in the DeeCee bubble, as the article points out. I’ve seen it happen recently in some groups I’ve volunteered for, although as you said, I agree that it’s getting better.
I took this article as a call-to-action that we should make sure we keep that pendulum swinging in this direction, so that situation you describe of all the diverse backgrounds coming together happens more and more. The Labor Movement is a great thing to organize around, as long as people people keep their eyes on the prize and not let too many things get “under their skin.”
Interesting diary and I think the first at FDL I’ll recommend. What is your view of how gender plays into this? It seems like it is always the “what male” who is attacked not the white female. Because feminism is so prominent on the Democratic pseudo-left their attacks on men tend to be everywhere. In your Teabagger essays you mention the anger at being called racist (by implication as a white person) but you don’t say anything about the trend to blame men for everything which if anything is older and more ingrained but also more invisible.
Sarah Palin seemed like about the best of the corporate candidates in 2008 to me just because she was a loose cannon. I’m sure for the “liberal elites” (realistically just “elites”) that was precisely why she was the worst candidate — not including all the non-corporate candidates of course. With Obama, Biden, Clinton, Romney, McCain etc you knew it was just another elite prepped shirt. They would screw the people 100% of the time. Side with the elites 100% of the time. Palin was so weird you figured who knows what she might do? That was a good thing to me and it reminds me of your comment about “stick with the angry people”.
Who isn’t angry?
Perhaps for some it took longer as they had to see how Obama betrayed the base again and again, five times, ten, twenty, fifty times.
Since both parties are the same significant change will not happen without a mass movement along the lines of those in South America where majorites of 60 and 70 percent are needed, not the scant 26 or 28 percent needed to select among the corporate candidates put forward every four years. That’s not about to happen so change is significant imposible, but if it were to happen it would require that the divide and conquer tactics of the elites, splitting the people into fighting each other, must be overcome.
I do think there’s something to the anger at the teabaggers though. They are not innocent. Throughout history the nobles have played at the game of securing the loyalty of the peasants by stirring up their anger at the middle-management, the clerical class, the slightly more educated. Or again by stirring up anger at minorities. When Stephen J. Gould said he could always hire one half of the working class to go kill the other half, he meant the teabaggers.
Fair point. I just don’t think we need to bend over nearly as backwards for them as we used it.
Sorry, Mike, but Liberals need to blame, sneer at, and hate someone. Without that artificial sense of superiority their self esteem would crumble. Equality isn’t enough: they need a demographic they can “ignore and mock” (and doesn’t that sound nice and democratic?).
If you mean “What’s the matter with Kansas?”, the issue is not that people can be tricked into voting against their economic interests, but that the white working class realised that the Democrats don’t do anything for their economic interests. If neither party is going to help you economically, it is logical to vote on some other basis than economics.
Did you note where Altemeyer says that after christian fundamentalists the second most authoritarian group he found were feminists? It’s in chapter four.
Good point, David. Or to put it another way, if both sides f**k you, why vote for the one that spits on you, too?
That’s my experience of progressives too if you get them on a topic where they have irrational beliefs. The truth is they are probably like that on topics where they have rational beliefs too but since I agree with them there, I don’t notice. You can irrational hold rational beliefs.
Take it from someone who gets it in the neck from both sides; you’re just not that different.
What you mean, I think, is that the elites have different priorities than the people. This is more usually and concisely called,
CLASS WAR.
Poor thing. Do you feel better now that you have some validation for your existence?
yeah, why vote for the ones that f*ck the lower economic brackets, condescend to them when they are right on the Bailouts and the Wars, yet take huge swathes utterly for granted, like African Americans and Labor, and then lie in even numbered years about how deeply they care about the common man?
at the very least the thieving Republican elite faction seem to believe in their own incoherent batch of lies, and they fight for, defend, and put some semblance of their policies into practice when in power, rather than whimpering about ‘we don’t have the votes.’
related to the elite condescension issue is the sincerity issue – Obama resembles Reagan with his convincing delivery, but we all know now that Hope-n-Change was just finetuned marketing, right?
Turns out, Americans will vote for people who are sincere, and this is a great advantage to principled 3rd Party and Independent formations.
No, they do the same thing as the Democrats do. They just do it in a slightly different way. For example consider how little Bush achieved for the Pro-Life movement when he had a Republican House, Senate, presidency and Supreme Court. Obama has actually done more for them so far I think.
I can’t think of anything the Republicans did for their base. The incoherence helps, that’s true, but to the extent you can think of anything their base coherently wants they don’t ever get it. Immigration? Nothing. Family values? Nope. Bush threw out a bone with his bribe the churches thing I guess (which Obama has continued).
Considering the right are more advanced in their attempts to “take back our party” than the progressives are with the Democrats this doesn’t exactly bode well for the validity of the “more and better Democrats” strategy.
true – the wingnuts do seem to have made a lot of progress on the “infiltrate and transform from within” process that a certain subset of progressives like to advocate.
and, as you point out, they do get betrayed on some of these issues.
but really – they get thrown lots of bones, too, more than the (D)’s ever toss to their ever faithful Progressives.
Supreme Court Justices? hard core ideological conservatives, as just one example.
and, the grassroots and Xtian right are waaay more willing to sit out elections or vote for splinter candidates to enforce their notions of purity than the Naderphobes who clutch their pearls at the thought of sincere anti-war citizens voting their principles.
Yup, class war. As I called it in the first sentence. Now we just need for everyone to understand that and call it that. The corporate elite and their flunkies sure understand it and never lose sight of it for one second. That’s why they keep winning.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Liberals need to speak from a more populist center but trying to appeal to teabaggers? Those people will never, ever vote liberal and it’s delusional to think so.
How or why any human being would listen to what any of Conserative says is beyond me. But I could say the same for extreme liberals.
What we all should be focusing on is both sides are distroying this Country, and we need to get rid of both. Clean out the parties, the people, and both from our Government.
We keep switching from one to the other while things get worse.
It’s time for two new parties, and scrap the old one before it’s to late.
The other fundamental problem I see with this post is that organizing is frequently self-selecting.
Who can work for chickenfeed in the field except folks who are either utterly desperate (low income folks) or who have other support (folks who can afford to go to higher-end schools)?
I can think of a kid whose dad is an attorney who has been working on organizing; his dad has been a long-time donor to the party, and can afford to help his son financially while the kid does organizing. Both are strong union supporters, I might add.
I can also think of numerous kids who could find no other work except organizing, no other support at home.
The old-school notion that only Ivy League kids are doing this is just plain flawed.
Oh, and class war: those blue collar union folks have been paying for their kids to go to good colleges for years now. Ask them what they want their kids doing. Is it class warfare, or simply generational shift?
And when is it just plain racism? Are you telling me there’s never any racism? Because there are photos out there of neo-nazis working with teabaggers; they view the movement as optimum recruiting environment.
This post is, in short, arguing for insanity.
Catering to the lowest common denominator is not the way to go. Most “conservatives” and independants are actually progressives but don’t realize it.
- Most people love Medicare and want to see it expanded.
- Most people aren’t hawkish about wars (deep down) and want us out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Most people want Social Security fixed, not removed.
- Most people want Public Education fixed and expanded. This includes getting better access to college eductation.
- Most people desire an economy that is fair, meaning livable wages and a career, not just a dead-end job.
- Most people recognize that our environmental challeneges are critical to our future and want something done about it.
For all of these things, people EXPECT our government to be involved in fixing these things, regardless of the “tea-parties”, “Death Panel” rhetoric, etc.
President Obama didn’t win the election telling people how he isn’t a Muslim or if he promises to be a good liberal. He won by explaining many of these ideas and how he wants to work on each item listed.
If we want to win, we need to forcefully advocate solutions for the problems listed above, not fight the crazy.
The conservative movement is dying. You are seeing its last hurrahs. If you want to get problems fixed, let’s start acting like their ideals are dead and keep the pressure on the current administration.
My community is Prop 8/Palin country. I’m talking guns, God, gays and Glenn Beck. You can’t community organize around parties or even ideologies here. They are proud conservatives and anti-intellectuals who are afraid that they are under attack and that reverse discrimination is going to take away their economic opportunity. Even the tile guy who was only a generation away from being Mexican ranted to me about having to close the borders and crack down on illegal immigration. It would seem hopeless as a political alliance, but on specific issues we can find common ground. I even got a bunch of neighbors calling our Republican, of course, Congresscritter over the public option (though they would fight single payer as socialism to the death) and net neutrality.
They are passionate but are motivated by fear and by relationship. They decide they trust Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin and they believe what they tell them. But because we have a relationship, they’ll listen and think about what I say, too, even though they would not respond to someone phone banking. I think that’s why this diary resonated with me. It’s the guy in your union or your neighborhood that can make a difference with these people. It’s easier to just leave them to their craziness, but I’m not sure we can afford to write off any populists who might make common cause when the opposition has so many advantages we need to overcome to make progress.
In general I strongly agree with this post.
This is an example of serious misunderstanding, in my view, that is stultifying the left. The Obama campaign and the Howard Dean campaign did not “democratize organizing.” What they did was simply use new tools to expand the traditional undemocratic model of organizing. They set policies and then conducted outreach using new technology. But real democracy is not about tools, it’s about the common man empowering himself to actually shape specific policies.
Obama was able to mobilize this vast army that he created in the service of his campaign. But that army had very little influence on policy. They were not part of the inner circle that actually makes decisions on how society should be run. He very much was able to play his ground troops by simply being better than McCain. And he was indeed better, but that’s pretty faint praise.
Is this clear? Caucasians are still a strong majority in the United States.
Race Percentage Number
White alone
(Not including the 23.2 million
White Hispanic and Latino Americans: 66% or 198.1 million) 74% 221.3 million
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, of any race 14.8% about 44.3 million
Black or African American alone 13.4% 40.9 million
Some other race alone 6.5% 19 million
Asian alone 4.4% 13.1 million
Two or more races 2.0% 6.1 million
American Indian or Alaska Native alone 0.68% 2.0 million
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander alone 0.14% 0.43 million
In general there’s a very serious problem on the left with demonizing teabaggers and then failing to realize that they’re only dominating the scene because there’s no credible leftist alternative. Howard Dean and Barack Obama are not credible alternatives: they favor center right economic policies. In the current health care debate, HCAN does not present credible alternatives, and is in fact simply a rubber stamp for whatever the Democratic consensus is in Congress. In the blogosphere, Daily Kos and Firedoglake both have editors that refuse to take on the Democratic establishment, despite appearing to do so by taking isolated stands against particularly odious transgressions.
Until we come to grips with our own internal contradictions, we can’t expect to win over anyone else.
I also think it’s important to note that the poor, even the white poor, voted Democratic in the last election. So how we define “working class” is very important. If working class is below $20,000, then they’re Democratic, but if we adopt a more reasonable definition that includes say up to $75,000, then they’re not.
Finally, it’s not necessarily true that the Democratic candidates will win more elections by taking more economically progressive positions, because the Republicans aren’t necessarily going to move any further left in response, and that means you just lose the votes of people in between. So what is needed in addition is organizers on the ground actually supporting progressive efforts and getting them elected.
Another note: the rich are, in general, no more socially conservative than the poor. If anything they might be less so. Hence, our ability to work with poor and middle class voters depends crucially on being able to separate social and economic issues.
Exactly. A lot of these people seem sincerely deluded that their center-right economic ideology is “progressive”. (Just look at this health care bill, for example.)
They’re unaware that the establishment political and media spectrum runs center-right to hard-right, that there’s a vast gaping vacuum to the left of that which the people are crying out to have filled, and that one way or another that vacuum WILL be filled by either real leftist populism, or the fascist simulacrum of it.
I believe I was talking about white, working class males. Definitely a shrinking minority in the electorate, both in terms of raw numbers and in terms of turnout and party ID.
Do you realize, Jason, how much you sound like Rush Limbaugh? “They’re only 12% of the population. Who the hell cares?”
Sarah Palin self destructed and took down McCain the minute she opened her mouth and was unable to form a complete sentence, much less a coherent one. And that was LONG before Katie Couric softballed Palin to a level of ignorance only Palin herself could have dragged herself down to.
Her massive appeal is to a less than a 23% rabid and ignorant white base, and slips daily.
While the author of this post is obviously a working man, and a champion of same . . . which I applaud heartily, his objection to a liberal elitism is as said above, old school.
The ‘working class’ is not just blue collar, it’s not just white males.
It’s white collar, women (more than half the force now? or almost?) and minorities, and blue collar and MORE.
It’s we the people!
As to the need to reform banking/fin, healthcare, establish EFCA, and end war in Iraq/Af/Pak to SAVE billions to invest into DOMESTIC needs . . . and put forth a jobs bill as great if not LARGER than what FDR did, I support THOSE things to the hilt.
But a strategy to target prog/libs because they are perceived to be ELITIST, or even such a note of ‘caution’ as crafted above, serves no one, and certainly serves not the independent or recently Dem Leaning constituents Mr. Elk purports to want to help.
Please, it sounds like some kind of Rovian Speak to drive wedge issues into the whole prog/lib change platform.
Mr. Elk, the teabaggers are marginalized, Sarah Palin is marginalized, and they both appeal to a small base that’s racist, misogynist and homophobic and ONLY interested in the kind of change that will benefit THEM, and no one else . . . . and only the corporate owned feudalist MSM is keeping them alive.
While I too believe The Villagers, Veal Pen and our elected offals are out of touch with the masses, it’s NOT because of pedigree, it’s because they are bought and controlled by the corporate feudalists who seek to keep a status quo.
I’m afraid though, that the challenges we the people face are MUCH greater and all encompassing than trying to pit prog/libs against a diminishing blue collar white working class.
We The People need change, but not the kind of change that embraces a whackaloon, rightwing Xtian white only fundamentalism that’s as equally abhorrant and ignorant as any of other religons or groups of extremists.
The Times, Mr. Elk, They Have Been A Changin. We change with them, or we become a footnote to the history of our own making.
My heartfelt thanks for your time spent in crafting your missives. And thanks too, for your service to the working class, your lifelong commitment to us all in that regard deserves the HIGHEST of praise.