The Forgotten Democrats of the White Working Class

Democrats just lost an election that they seemed to have in the bag, despite nominating a deeply-flawed candidate. I’ve heard a lot of blame thrown around since November 9, with everyone from sexist white males to uninformed youth and third party spoilers playing the foil, but none toward the policies Democrats have been giving the American people and the possibility that a sizable chunk of them were fed up with what they saw as a long-running abandonment of core issues.

I spent last weekend back home where I grew up in Schuylkill County, PA, a rural part of east-central Pennsylvania that has not fared well in the new economy. The Skook, as we call it, made it all the way to the Wall Street Journal after the election, where it was noted for playing a pivotal role in Donald Trump’s ability to turn a blue state red.

The Skook is a heavily white, working class county and typically votes Republican, but, as the WSJ noted, Trump turned both Republicans and Democrats out in droves, managing to get twice as many votes as Romney in 2012, while running against a president who is not very popular there, to say the least (Romney still won the county by 13 points). That begs the question: why did so many white Democrats and independents in rural parts of PA, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio vote for Trump? Simple, they were tired of being ignored.

A lot of people found it difficult to imagine Bernie Sanders supporters migrating toward Trump in the general election, but it’s in these small, working class towns that you find such political animals. Party-line Democrats naively looked at the Sanders movement and saw the far-left progressive wing of the party that was largely out in front of it. However, that wing is not nearly big enough to explain Sanders' historic success. If it were, candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean and Ralph Nader would not have been relegated to the fringes.

Sanders didn't make his biggest inroads on issues like the environment, equal rights, police brutality, gun laws or other progressive touchstones. He made it by speaking to the enormous class of Americans who have seen their lot in life continue to wither in recent decades. He spoke not to the welfare class but to the working poor, the people whose parents worked in factories for $25 an hour with good benefits and pensions, while they themselves work for half of that in warehouses or big box stores for few benefits and no retirement plan. He reached not the lazy person looking for a handout but the person working two and a half jobs and still not getting by, or the young person who did everything they were told right up to mortgaging their future earnings on a college degree that suddenly wouldn't pay off.

Many of these voters didn't know or care about any of the other issues. They just wanted someone who would acknowledge that they've been getting the short end of the stick and pledge to work for them rather than the special interests. Many of these voters heard the message Sanders was selling and when they perceived him as falling victim to a Democratic Party poised to keep things running at the status quo–the very one they’ve been getting screwed under–Trump's message was the next most appealing.

Since the 1970's, the Democratic Party has been moving away from the working class and toward two polemics and a third point in a different realm. This triangle was effective, largely based on rhetoric, but when the results kept failing to follow, it crumbled. On the one side, there is the welfare state. With Republicans always talking about the privatization of Social Security along with Medicare and Medicaid, then following it up with fights not to give cost of living adjustments to beneficiaries, Democrats could reliably count on a majority of those who were on the public dole, especially those in the SSI/Medicaid bracket. They didn't have to do anything specific for this group beyond opposing the efforts of the GOP.

On the other side, you have the special interests who backed the party and have benefited from their largess. Yes, Republicans have Big Oil, Big Coal, the Military Industrial Complex, mining interests, hospital chains and a host of other sugar daddies that the left loves to demonize, but little is thought of the cozy relationship the Democratic Party enjoys with Wall Street, the big banks, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley, the insurance industry, etc. The third axis is social issues. Many of the big donors in tech and finance tend to be socially liberal, as does the youth vote and a solid bloc of progressive issue voters, meaning that so long as you are the only party supporting LGBT issues, environmental protection, a woman's right to choose, pro-immigration and other hot-button positions, many more votes can be counted.

This strategy is not that different from Republicans who've long used their own social issues– right to life, traditional marriage, the blending of church and state, gun rights, etc.–tied to their special interests and the anti-tax/pro-war neocons to form their own triangle. The problem is that by leaving this very large demographic on the table, so to speak, Democrats created an opportunity for Republicans to go from a party in which it was realistic to ask whether they'd ever win another presidency after stunning losses in 2008 and 2012, to one that has just regained the entire federal government.

So, what caused the shift that left these voters twisting in the wind? I wrote about it in-depth in a column that can be found here, but in an effort to summarize, it was a new wave of post Vietnam, Ivy League liberals who didn't believe in the New Deal and thought globalization was not only the wave of the future but one that should be welcomed with open arms. They envisioned a middle class that was not sustained but instead morphed into a professional class of white collar workers like themselves, who, through expanded access to education, would dominate the post industrial world the same way that we dominated the post-agrarian one after World War II.

This theory was flawed on many levels and also presupposed that even those who were left behind in a sense would see their standard of living increase via access to much cheaper goods. That part has largely happened, as evidenced by any Black Friday circular showing you how cheap giant flat screen TVs, laptop computers and hi-tech smart phones have become. What they didn't account for was rampant inflation in other more essential areas like healthcare, food and higher education, all of which have outpaced wages by 200-300 percent.

Long hours, low or stagnant wages and difficulty getting by also breeds resentment. These workers look at the Democratic Party as the party of the welfare class. The Skook, like most poor white areas (including parts of Manatee County), is littered with people collecting suspect disability claims or procreating at an accelerated rate in order to increase their monthly take on everything from welfare checks and food stamps to utility subsidies. There are a lot of people who would be working in the lowest paying sectors who are instead living off of the tax dollars of others and that has created an opening in low-wage labor in some sectors that has been filled by Spanish-speaking immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, setting up yet another source of tension that can be politically exploited.

Sure, there are counters to all of these issues. Social welfare programs are a very small part of their tax dollars and there is much more fat in wasteful military spending, tax loopholes for the wealthiest citizens and biggest corporations, corporate inversions and other bogus relocations of U.S. companies to tax havens, etc. But these people don’t come face to face with hedge fund managers or follow the Pentagon’s budget. On the other hand, they see the skimmers. They watch as more and more stores begin to post signs in Spanish. It's a startling experience in a culture that has been so homogeneous for multiple generations when they take their family to the local lake and it's populated with large groups of families speaking a different language, blasting very different music and grilling unfamiliar foods. It might seem xenophobic, but it's clear that many of them feel as if the local identity and culture is being threatened, a phenomenon that’s playing out similarly in so many other communities. Then they read about the growing heroin epidemic in the newspaper or see a friend's kid in the obits. They don't want more of the same.

Like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, there are also a lot of hunters and gun enthusiasts, who care more about even a perceived threat to their guns than any social policy–another area in which the Senator from Vermont was okay in their eyes. None of this bodes well for the mainstream Democratic Party among the hard-working people in these rural places who've seen their opportunities to climb the economic ladder recede further with each generation. You can argue effectively that Trump has not offered any sort of evidence that he can or will improve their situation, but he at least acknowledged their pain in a way that had grown unfamiliar. Why not take a chance and see if somebody from the outside who's not beholden to donors can do better?, was the attitude I heard expressed most often. Worse case scenario, maybe there are tax cuts and my take home pay goes up.