Democrats used to campaign on class and win. It's time to do it again.
The reason the Democratic Party lost the last presidential election is simple.
Or so a lot of Democrats seem to think.
In the end, says one school of thought, it was all about race. As the influential journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates asserted in a recent Atlantic magazine cover story, “whiteness brought us Donald Trump.”
(snip)
Unless, of course, November’s defeat wasn’t about race after all. The real reason Democrats lost the White House was economic, not cultural, according to the most powerful Democrat in the country (and his many allies).
“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things … you blame yourself,” declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this year. “I think if we come up with this strong, bold economic package, it will change things around. That’s what we were missing.”
(snip)
In a sense, it all came down to class, because class is the space where economics and culture overlap.
More than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, Trump erased the boundaries between culture and economics. Again and again, the impulsive, improvisational mogul — a man who launched his campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists” — capitalized on the resentments and rage of certain white Americans: toward elites, toward the “establishment,” toward nonwhites and non-Americans. At the same time, Trump broke with the bipartisan Beltway consensus to gesture, at least, toward an economic attitude — “agenda” is probably too strong a word — that reflected the populist desires and demands of the voters to whom he was also targeting his divisive cultural appeals. Unravel free-trade deals. Revive American manufacturing. Reanimate the coal industry. Halt immigration.
Never mind that as president, Trump has done little, so far, to deliver on any of these promises. In his campaign, culture dictated economics and economics amplified culture. The product was greater than the sum of its parts: the first Republican presidential bid in decades to be animated by the affinities and animosities of a particular class. As a result, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million but peeled off just enough voters in the traditionally blue states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — 77,744 of them, to be exact — to eke out a surprise victory in the Electoral College.
If Democrats want to wound Trump in 2018 and defeat him in 2020, they would be wise to learn from his success. Don’t ignore identity — embrace it. Then embrace the economic implications of that identity.
But which identity could Democrats embrace? And which economic agenda flows from it?
This, at least, should be familiar territory. For decades, every Democrat worth his or her salt knew the answer.
And again, it comes back to class.
(snip)
With the rise of free-market Reagan Republicanism, any mention of class was soon considered off-limits; “Class warfare!” shouted the newly dominant conservatives.
As a result, a Democratic identity that used to center on economics came to center on culture, and a post-New Deal generation of politicians — Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, the neo-liberals and New Democrats — steered the party toward a more moderate, market-friendly agenda designed to appeal to the college-educated, meritocratic, baby-boomer professionals who now comprised the party’s primary class constituency. Free trade. Financial deregulation. Welfare reform. Technocratic innovation. Out went a rhetoric that once revolved around “workers”; in came “the middle class,” a mushy mantra whose main political appeal was the fact that almost all Americans thought it applied to them, actual data be damned.
Which brings us to 2017. The question a lot of Democrats seem to be asking themselves now, in the wake of Trump’s electoral upset, is whether the turn the party took in the 1970s — a turn reflected and reified in the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — still makes sense today, with economic inequality looming, as Obama himself once put it, as “the defining challenge of our time.”
More, a lot more...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/democrats-used-campaign-class-win-time-090031609.html
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