A Hard Reckoning for the Democrats: Race, Class and Joe Biden's Election - The Globalist - 0 views
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The disappointing election results also raise doubts about a widespread belief among Democrats that they are on the side of history because the population of non-whites — who tend to vote for Democrats — is growing faster than the population of whites. Therefore, many Democratic leaders have assumed that they do not have to worry about losing white working class voters to the Republicans because whites will be less important in the future.
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First, the often-cited numbers are misleading in and of themselves. The well-known New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote: “sometime in the 2040s, whites will make up 49% of the U.S. population, and Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51%.”
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But Friedman, like many other political analysts, errs when he classifies the largest minority subgroup, Latin-Americans, as “not white.” In fact, at least 65% consider themselves racially “only” white. Thus, if Latino-Americans are correctly classified (by their self-identification), whites will still make up 69% of the U.S. population by 2060. So, if racial identity really determines voting behavior, then U.S. politics will be dominated by white people for a long time.
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Second, the assumption that people will vote as a bloc according to their ethnic or racial identity is simplistic.
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despite Trump’s xenophobia and racism, a larger share of Latinos and black men voted for him this year than they did in 2016.
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Democrats also lost Texas again. During the campaign, the Democrats had targeted their appeal to Latinos by emphasizing Trump’s mistreatment of immigrants entering illegally from Mexico and Central America. But Mexican-Americans along the border supported Donald Trump because their jobs and wages are being undercut by the newer immigrants.
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Republicans of course have been the major promoters of policies that have beneftted investors at the expense of workers. But, shamelessly and cleverly, they have diverted white working class anger toward minorities, protecting the country’s elites.
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The Republicans’ trap for the Democrats White skin is still privileged in the United States of America and the Republican Party has increasingly pandered to racism. Democrats, for both moral and political reasons, must strongly support racial justice.
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But in an overwhelmingly white society, they cannot attract the necessary sustained political support with a message focused on generalized white guilt.
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Thus, for example, a majority of whites supported the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality towards Blacks. But the support dropped sharply when demands rose for whites to pay reparations for past oppression of Blacks.
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National polls showed that Latino-American voters thought jobs and health care, not immigration, were the most important issues for them.
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After all, several decades of stagnant wages, precarious employment and the erosion of upward mobility have left most whites in the United States today who must work for a living no longer feeling very “privileged.
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Economic class trumps racial affiliation Most Latinos and black Americans are working class — like the majority of whites. And the data shows the economic problems of minorities are now more likely a function of their class than their race or ethnicity.
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Thus, the central issue of income and wealth inequality is not the privilege of “whites” any longer. Rather, it is the privilege of “rich whites.
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As economist Adolph Reed, an African American, puts it: If you say to those white people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the United States is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top 10% of (mainly) whites.
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An engine of inequality Thomas Piketty and others have shown that modern capitalism has become an engine for the expansion of inequality between capital and labor. Thus, in the absence of substantial reform, incomes and opportunities for most working Americans — whatever the color of their skin — will continue to shrink.
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Trump succeeded in part because large numbers of white working people felt abandoned by Democrats. Over the last few decades, the Democratic Party’s establishment forged an alliance with Wall Street financiers who are liberal on social issues — such as racial discrimination, immigration and abortion — but very conservative on economics.
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One bizarre result was that throughout the campaign, voters saw the plutocrat Trump as better at creating jobs and prosperity than Biden.
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Have Democrats really learned the lesson? Biden’s less elitist style helped him with enough white workers to win three key Midwestern states that Hillary Clinton had lost. Still, had Donald Trump shown a minimum of competence in responding to the COVID 19 crisis, he could well have been re-elected.
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Republicans forcing the Democrats’ hands Because Republicans will do everything they can to make the Biden presidency a failure, the Democrats’ disparate factions have to unite behind him in a “popular front” against the authoritarian right. This may be hard for many on the Party’s left, but they have no choice. If Biden fails, they fail.
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Conclusion The election gave us some clues to where U.S. democracy might be headed, but the question remains unanswered: Can Biden and the Democrats restore enough security and prosperity to the American working class to finally eradicate the neofascist political pandemic?