VitalSigns posted:

So there's nothing a campaign can do PR-wise if anyone ever crashes one of their events? Nothing?

VitalSigns posted:

So there's nothing a campaign can do PR-wise if anyone ever crashes one of their events? Nothing?

All we can do is complain about it on the internet forever and ever?

I disagree, I think having a good answer for the cameras will blunt any PR stunt, and is probably a better plan than hoping BLM somehow manages to shame every single black person in America into never speaking out of turn and also suppress all the Tea Party false flag attacks by undercover black Republicans.

Condiv posted:

those op-eds were gonna attack bernie over something anyway. that's not what cost bernie the primary, dems rigging the primary is. hth

call to action posted:

Reformed Hillarymen like Majorian are ultimately a threat. Everyone likes to peddle this kumbayaa bullshit about how Trump pulled us all together, but the fact is that if it took 11/9 to get to that point, you are a risk.

Case in point: how Hillarymen coo along with leftists on the high notes, but then start screeching ANYTHING BUT TULSI, and hey maybe these other establishment Dems aren't so bad, based on the same bullshit criteria that lead them to follow their failed abuela. These are the people that WILL torpedo a progressive during the primaries in 2020 using electability excuses.

Digiwizzard posted:

My fears regarding Tulsi is that she's another Ellison or Obama. An attractive young outsider blank canvas that you can pin all your socialist hopes on, but who ends up being another centrist turd when it actually matters.

quote:

What happened on Election Night was, in a sense, unremarkable. The white working class, long a constituency at the very heart of American politics, simply found its way into the spotlight once again. Exit polls indicate, with about as much confidence as the entire enterprise of political polling can be held to indicate anything these days, that Donald Trump is President today because Hillary Clinton lost working class whites by an astounding margin. She was beaten by Trump among whites without college degrees by nearly 40 points. And, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has pointed out, she lost a significant amount of support from whites in this category who not only supported Obama, but likely comprised over a third of the coalition that brought him back to the White House in 2012.

Clinton’s atrocious performance among working class whites was, of course, reflective of a long-established trend. The Democratic Party has not won the white working class vote since 1996. Every Democratic campaign since Bill Clinton’s victory that year, save Obama’s 2008 run, has done worse with blue-collar whites than the last. Al Gore lost the white working class by 17 points. John Kerry lost them by 23 points. Obama lost them by 18 points in 2008 and by 25 points in 2012. Even against the Party’s dismal record, Hillary Clinton’s 39 point loss in November stands out. But although she lost the category by an unprecedentedly large margin, Clinton only needed to hold onto a small proportion of white working class voters in the swing states Trump narrowly won to eke out a victory. Given this, it would be absurd to suggest the Party not try to make up some of the difference moving forward.

The question, of course, is how.

The Left has been unanimous in its recommendations. Trump, a buffoon, a charlatan, and a racist, won they say because, in spite of everything, he spoke to working class pain with a full-throated populism. They rejected Clinton’s neoliberal prescriptions for their economic anxiety for a candidate that spoke out forcefully about the effects of NAFTA and globalized capitalism on American manufacturing. They flocked enthusiastically to a candidate that literally wore a message about how far behind they’d fallen as a piece of clothing and turned away from a candidate that insisted, despite lost jobs and lower wages, that things were mostly fine. If the Democrats want to win the white working class again, they argue, they will have to mount campaigns that not only speak to working class angst, as Trump did, but advance an agenda that promises to undo the economic havoc that neoliberal policy and the Democratic Party’s centrism and indifference has wreaked upon them. “A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table,” Naomi Klein wrote in The Guardian. “An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal.”

This was one of the lines of thinking that led many on the left to insist, during the Democratic primaries, that Bernie Sanders stood a much better chance of defeating Trump than Clinton ever did. After all, Sanders won in some of the heavily white working class states where Trump eventually won—Michigan, West Virginia, and Wisconsin for instance. Last May, Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick wrote that the potential impact of Sanders’ progressive agenda on struggling white workers was key to his appeal in those regions and offered a model for winning them moving forward. “The Sanders program is a recognizably working-class one: higher minimum wage, free college for all, labor unionism, and a re-regulation of finance with steep taxes on the one percent,” he wrote. “And his actual politics go far beyond that. He preaches the necessity and righteousness of class war, calls out our oligarchs by name and — in the case of his Immokalee farmworkers— asks us all to question ‘who benefits from this exploitation?’”

Are these the prescriptions for winning back the downtrodden white workers in the Rust Belt that Trump ran away with? During the primaries, liberals marshalled counterevidence against this line of argument. It was pointed out in Vox that same month, for instance, that survey and polling data showed Hillary Clinton was beating Sanders with the kind of older, low-income white factory workers that commonly come to mind when one considers the white working class. Moreover, researchers have questioned the extent to which economic anxiety was responsible for driving white workers to Trump in the first place. In a widely circulated analysis of survey data from 125,000 Americans, Gallup’s Jonathan T. Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found “mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support.” “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations,” they wrote, “but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.”

Now, no bits of information that have emerged since the election have truly disproven the notion that a Democratic Party willing to toss out centrism or “elite neoliberalism,” in Klein’s words, in favor of the kind of ambitious progressivism of Sanders’ agenda and the Democratic Party of old could make real inroads among white working class voters. But an assessment of Democratic presidential politics in the latter half of the last century suggests the prevailing narrative on the Left about how white workers and the Democrats have gradually parted ways is flawed.

***

The Left’s story of the split between the white working class and the Party goes something like this. The white working class has, over the past several decades, seen a devastating decline in stable, well-paying industrial work. The Republican and Democratic parties have both proven unwilling to address their plight in part because both have been captured by neoliberalism—the valorization of free market principles and supply-side logic across all areas of public policy—with the GOP naturally falling a bit harder for it than the once progressive Democratic Party. Both parties have cooperated in making matters worse by hacking away at the social safety net and further empowering multinational corporations and the wealthy through deregulation, passing tax cuts, pursuing free trade and undermining unions—all policy aims that have effectively redistributed wealth upwards and significantly deepened economic inequality. What’s more, Democratic liberals have spent years responding to the racist and bigoted attitudes of many white working class voters by calling them racist and bigoted, which has alienated them.

The white working class, dismayed, has responded to all this, and the lack of a truly pro-worker party, by either dropping out of the voting pool entirely or voting for Republicans who unlike the Democrats, are, refreshingly, nicer to them than they are to African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and LGBT people. Right-wing populist appeals, it is argued, have been the only truly populist appeals for decades. Consequently, white working class voters have swung right, in the direction of the only politicians that seem to acknowledge their pain—politicians who have, in fact, been deepening it even more than the liberal politicians who have ceased paying attention. The white working class, in short, has responded to the horrors neoliberalism has inflicted upon them by doing either nothing at all or voting for the more neoliberal party.

None of this, the Left says, was inevitable. Liberals have erred, they argue, in casting all working class whites as politically and perhaps morally irredeemable for the undeniable bigotry and xenophobia of some. And in pushing a narrative of the white working class’ exodus that centers their historical resistance to civil rights and identity politics, they say, liberals have ignored the class dynamics that have been the real driving forces behind their disillusionment—dynamics exacerbated by the Democratic Party’s decision to face right and commit itself deeply to neoliberal economics, as exemplified by the ascendancy of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). It was their move to the center, coupled with their disdain for white workers they see as marked by a kind of original sin that finally pushed those voters away and continues to do so. Blue collar whites have abandoned the Democratic Party simply because the Democratic Party abandoned progressive policies that spoke to the needs of workers and came to loathe the working class itself.

***

It’s a story both simple and substantially untrue. In fact, the decline in white working class support for the Democratic Party at the presidential level began well before the party’s retreat from progressivism and pro-worker politics. Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, and Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who presciently identified the disenfranchised white working class as a force to be reckoned with nearly 20 years ago in America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, laid out the timeline of their departure from the Democratic Party’s coalition in a 2008 Brookings working paper called “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class”. According to Teixeira and Abramowitz, the Democratic vote among whites without college degrees fell from an average of 55 percent in the 1960 and 1964 elections to 35 in the 1968 and 1972 elections—a decline of 20 points in just over a decade. What happened during the 1960s? Had the Party moved substantially to the center? Had the Party become less committed to progressive social programs that would help struggling whites? To the contrary—the 1960s and two Democratic administrations brought the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the expansion of Social Security benefits, the revival of food stamps, minimum wage increases, the launch of the Head Start early childhood education program for lower-income children, increased federal funding for public education, the creation of the Job Corps youth employment program and other vocational education programs, and a dizzying array of other government initiatives that constituted the most expansive array of progressive successes since the New Deal. None of it mattered.

Perhaps, as the labor researcher Penny Lewis has suggested, the white working class was more perturbed by the Vietnam War than popular accounts of the antiwar movement—which commonly frame blue-collar workers as having been hawks pitted against young, relatively well-to-do college students—have portrayed. But most of the drop in support, as nearly every historian surveying the period has agreed, can be attributed to the Party’s full embrace of not only civil rights, but also social liberalism more broadly. The Party emerged from the 1960s championing both economic and social justice and believed it could continue to do so without losing the downscale white voters it had relied on for years. As the election of 1968 made clear, it could not. Those voters fled to Richard Nixon and the segregationist former governor of Alabama George Wallace, who together won 64 percent of the white working class.

Those voters never really looked back. The theory that they would have had the Party offered up truly economically progressive candidates has to contend with the failed candidacies of George McGovern in 1972, whom Nixon trounced with 70 percent of the white working class vote and the staunchly pro-labor and union-backed Walter Mondale, whom neoliberal archdaemon Ronald Reagan trounced with 65 percent of their vote in 1984. Since 1968, two Democratic presidential candidates have done well with the white working class: Jimmy Carter, who dramatically outperformed George McGovern in the demographic by running as a conservative Democrat against Ford in 1976, and the DLC-anointed bubba neoliberal Bill Clinton. Ross Perot’s insurgent populism and his warning that NAFTA would produce a “giant sucking sound” as blue-collar jobs were lost to Mexico failed, ultimately, to prevent the man who backed and signed NAFTA from winning narrow pluralities of the white working class vote in 1992 and 1996.

This is not a voting record that inspires confidence that the white working class has been itching, deep down, to cast votes against neoliberal economics upon hearing the right progressive pitch. But looking at general election results offers only an incomplete picture of the white working class’ exit from the Democratic fold. They largely tell a now-familiar story about Democratic collapse among blue-collar and other whites in the south that masks the gradual erosion of white working class support in northern states where Trump won. It’s the Democratic primaries in the wake of the New Deal coalition’s final rupture in 1968 that provide the clearest picture of how even the portion of the white working class presumably most sympathetic to left-of-center politics—northern blue-collar whites—has moved rightward.

call to action posted:

Reformed Hillarymen like Majorian are ultimately a threat. Everyone likes to peddle this kumbayaa bullshit about how Trump pulled us all together, but the fact is that if it took 11/9 to get to that point, you are a risk.

WampaLord posted:

You are a regressive shitheel and a fake "ally" so I don't particularly care what you have to say, and you laughably trying to call out posters in this thread is loving sad. Go yuk it up with your buddies on r/the_donald.

Glazier posted:

I don't want Tulsi because shes a raging Islamophobe and racist who supports genocide, her leftist economic positions don't play into it.

call to action posted:

Quote me something regressive I've said. I know it pains you, man, but not everyone that isn't a Hillaryman in 2017 posts on the_donald. Also I don't think I've ever said I'm an ally about anything?

dont even fink about it posted:

lol Sanders would have won if not for BLM causing him to lose harder than Hillary did in 2008 with a single protest.

The sickness in D&D goes deeper than I thought.

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

https://agenda-blog.com/2017/07/03/primary-colors-on-democratic-presidential-politics-neoliberalism-and-the-white-working-class/


The rest of the piece is too long to quote here, but it goes in depth into the '72, '76, '80, '84 and '88 primaries

call to action posted:

Quote me something regressive I've said. I know it pains you, man, but not everyone that isn't a Hillaryman in 2017 posts on the_donald. Also I don't think I've ever said I'm an ally about anything?


And yet supporting Clinton, who has a higher Muslim body count than Tulsi, isn't racist because...?

Body count is important. Whenever somebody tries to say something stupid, like Trump is worse than Hitler, or Clinton is worse than Gabbard, always be very suspicious and check the body counts first.

Neurolimal posted:

I'll never understand the handful of people that think this thread is bad but constantly monitor it for a chance to blow up an offhand statement and announce it in other threads


I have to disagree with the article's conclusions, both because the level of information available today is much greater than 20 years ago, and because it makes a constantly-made error in assuming that everyone who voted were the only people that ever voted; that because Trump didn't have an enormouse base of blue collar workers meant that blue collar voters didnt act on economic issues, despite Hillary heavily underperforming among working class democrats.

quote:

It is obvious that the Democratic Party must substantively move left regardless of whether the white working class in particular takes to a new agenda—the policies the failures of contemporary American society demand of us are left policies and there are millions of Americans likely already inclined towards left-liberalism and leftism that can be galvanized by a new approach even if the white working class cannot. But the particular circumstances of Donald Trump’s victory and the sense that white working class voters ought to be a natural constituency for progressive policy will center the white working class in debate about the party’s deeply needed transformation for some time to come. Again, the pro-worker party the Left rightfully insists should be crafted out of the ashes of the current party is, to a large extent, the strongly pro-union, unapologetically pro-redistribution, and deeply economically progressive Democratic Party of old — the party that white working class voters suddenly began abandoning in droves for the Republican Party and the party that the white working class voters who stayed influenced by rejecting progressive candidates.

The white working class is far from being entirely to blame for the immersion of the party and its leaders in rentier politics. This intellectual evolution of the party’s elites took place largely out of the public eye and voters can’t be held responsible for the concentration of economic power and influence over the party that followed. But it remains an inescapable fact that the white working class, largely over race and social issues, has, for decades, helped sink progressive candidates that may have stalled or prevented the party’s full capture by neoliberal centrism and the moneyed interests their move to the center has benefited. In doing so, they’ve not only voted against their interests, as the cliche goes, but also voted against the interests of those worse off than themselves—poorer whites hurt even more acutely by the cuts to programs and middling policy solutions pushed forward by the Republican and conservative Democratic politicians the white working class has taken a shine to, as well as minorities doubly impacted by regressive economic policy and racism.

This isn’t a call for pessimism. It’s not 1988 anymore, and it’s plausible that Jesse Jackson’s model of engaging disenfranchised whites without relinquishing identity politics would work substantially better now. But the success of Donald Trump’s xenophobia-driven campaign suggests this isn’t a given. We ought to give Jackson’s approach another real try anyway—again, shifting the party’s margins with working class whites even slightly would have a significant electoral impact. The case for a new liberal agenda, though, does not ultimately rest upon whether it improves the party’s prospects with them.

WampaLord posted:

Your rap sheet speaks for itself.

MooselanderII posted:

Aren't you the moron who thought that my acknowledgment of Pelosi's personal views on single payer meant that I was defending her as a single payer champion, despite the fact that I said her personal opinion was meaningless if she wasn't going to act on it in her capacity as House minority leader?

call to action posted:

Mark my words the "reformed" folks in here will be the ones advocating for an "electable" Chelsea/Booker/Zuck/Gillibrand mashup, just you wait

Playstation 4 posted:

Toxx on it or shut up already.

call to action posted:

Pretty sure it speaks more to the opinions of the mod staff - check the post for my month long probation

And feel free to quote me some of that regressive poo poo I've posted. I'll wait.

call to action posted:

Racism, pointing out racism, it's the same thing you see. To city dwellers, I guess. That's such a loving city dwelling Democrat thing to do, you probably think Gil Scott-Heron is racist because he says "friend of the family" a lot.

Please post literally anything racist I've ever said in any other thread, tia bitch

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

call to action posted:

It's pretty cool how so many posters here want our cities to resemble Delhi, with a rich urban core surrounded by landless peasantry that cleans out sewer clogs for tips.

Lightning Lord posted:

Isn't the fear that anyone who could get in the position of possibly being a Democratic president is like that

call to action posted:

Pretty sure it speaks more to the opinions of the mod staff - check the post for my month long probation

And feel free to quote me some of that regressive poo poo I've posted. I'll wait.


I honestly don't remember who you are (I don't pay that much attention sorry) but anyone supporting Pelosi at this point is probably a moron

call to action posted:

Quote me something regressive I've said. I know it pains you, man, but not everyone that isn't a Hillaryman in 2017 posts on the_donald. Also I don't think I've ever said I'm an ally about anything?


And yet supporting Clinton, who has a higher Muslim body count than Tulsi, isn't racist because...?

Body count is important. Whenever somebody tries to say something stupid, like Trump is worse than Hitler, or Clinton is worse than Gabbard, always be very suspicious and check the body counts first.

Nevvy Z posted:

I could have sworn it was him having less votes

Condiv posted:

nah, the dnc was cheating on hillary's behalf the entire time

can't really claim your side won if they can't do it without cheating

edit: oh wait why am i bothering to respond to you. you put me on ignore

WampaLord posted:

Glazier posted:

Or maybe, and hear me out, we could elect economic leftists who also support social equality for racial and religious minorities.

call to action posted:

I honestly don't understand how any of that is regressive though? Maybe you can explain.

WampaLord posted:

Well how about don't call women bitches for starters. Let's work from there.

call to action posted:

(Hint: the reason these folks are SO MAD about me, and are bringing up such incredibly weak burns, is because they're the reformed Hillarymen I'm warning you about)

call to action posted:

That's my bad, I didn't know the poster I was responding to was a woman! Thanks for correcting me.

And please, quote all the times I've used "cuck". It'll certainly reinforce your notion of me as an alt-right shitheel, lol

Lightning Lord posted:

So is this thread about circlejerking over who's a secret regressive or...?

call to action posted:

Reformed Hillarymen like Majorian are ultimately a threat.

quote:

Case in point: how Hillarymen coo along with leftists on the high notes, but then start screeching ANYTHING BUT TULSI,