The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class

[bigtree]

Mark Murray ‏@mmurraypolitics 21m21 minutes ago
Via @DKThomp, impt corrective to idea that Hillary Clinton didn't talk about the working class or how to help them https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/ …

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

...After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.

The long-term future of the U.S. involves rising diversity, rising inequality, and rising redistribution. The combination of these forces makes for an unstable and unpredictable system. Income stagnation and inequality encourage policies to redistribute wealth from a rich few to the anxious multitudes. But when that multitude includes minorities who are seen as benefiting disproportionately from those redistribution policies, the white majority can turn resentful. (This may be one reason why the most successful social democracies, as in Scandinavia, were initially almost all white.) Nobody has really figured out how to be an effective messenger for pluralist social democracy, except, perhaps, for one of the few American adults who is legally barred from running for the U.S. presidency in the future...

read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

[mcar]

1. Not a myth, it's a lie

Just like the dozens the media has gleefully told about her for decades.

[BainsBane]

2. That's a good article

I read it last night. Thanks for posting. I hope some of her detractors actually read it.

[Else You Are Mad]

3. Hillary had a great platform for the working class...

The problem was that the media would rather report on what Trump just tweeted or about some bullshit email scandal. So, the only thing that people on the fence knew about Hillary was that she was 'corrupt' while Trump is championing for the American worker. And, the problem is that those that were on the fence were the working class they never were able to learn about Hillary's platform.

[Cha]

4. Thank you for posting that, bigtree!

...After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

[emulatorloo]

5. Thanks for posting, rec for fact-based journalism.

[gordianot]

6. There was enough information Hillary's policies clearly were in the best interest of workers

Having to depend on ad buys to convince voters suggests to me an uninformed ignorant public but that is not the reason Trump won. I maintain voting for Trump was a conscious act. If you voted for Trump you voted for what he said and chose YOUR stand. There are no excuses for individual voters and large groups voting for Trump. There is no excuse falling for propaganda, disinformation, or the prejudice you bring to the table. No one certainly this country forces you to vote.

[Whiskeytide]

7. I don't think the problem...

... was that she had no jobs program. The problem was that ALL of her policy positions were overshadowed by the perception that she was more of the same in a cycle where change was the primary desire of the electorate. Trump tapped into that and positioned himself as the change candidate - the fact that it looks to be bad change was beside the point. Trump attacked the entire esrablishment - the right, the left, the media, lobbyists, DC in general. The voters chose him as a weapon of revenge.

Add to that the fact that the right has vilified her for decades, the fact that there were controversies over the primary results (again feeding that anti-establishment hunger), that there was a perception that Clinton was cozy with Wall Street (and not releasing her speeches fueled that), the "public position" v the "private position" quote (in my view the most damaging of the campaign because it, again, fed that image), and her middle east politics (which drove away anti-war progressives) ...

I know it's popular to say we didn't see this coming, but all of the data was there. We just didn't interpret it correctly. Trump and his team of con artists did.

[dhill926]

8. K & R to infinity.....

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. Maybe she should have lied and made promises she couldn't keep like Trump.