I was there, and I've checked the history and the following is just Wrong!
(But I do agree we need to win back the working class.)
"But the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 marked the end of that tenuous cross-racial coalition. Furious and full of racial resentment, white working-class voters fled the Democratic Party into the open arms of Richard Nixon and the Republican Party."
The 1964 CR Act was signed July 2, four months before the election. And it had been top of the news for long before that. And in that election LBJ (who rammed it through and signed it) was elected by the largest landslide in the 182-year history of the Dem Party!!! And in June 1965 he made a speech proposing the most comprehensive racial-equality package (not civil rights, but economic equality) ever proposed and this was well received nationally.
That proposal was derailed by Black Power (not yet named) advocates in CORE, by leveraging the Watts riots and by charging LBJ's proposal with blaming the victim. Seth, I can send you a chapter I've written about this if you want.
The larger part of the white working class was offended not by Civil Rights, but by urban riots and Black Power. Stokely Carmichael himself toured the country saying, that MLK's Civil Rights Movement was "was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy." He also said Black Power was a "movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”
This is the kind of thing that offended the working class.
May 3, 2023·edited May 3, 2023Liked by Seth Moskowitz
This is a global phenomena (or at least Western phenomena). Let me use a few data points from the UK. The Brexit vote was a consequence of many things. Europe is a mess and that’s not changing. However, the details of Europe’s woes were never the real issue. The real issue was stated by Andy Burnham (then the British Labor Party Shadow Home Secretary and a Remainer) wrote.
“We have definitely been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull in recent times and we need to change that. Here we are two weeks away from the very real prospect that Britain will vote for isolation,”
Of courser Hull voted for Brexit and Hampstead voted for Remain. However, the real point is that Corbyn actually gained votes in university towns. Nationwide he was disaster.
Interesting. If your goal is to promote the working class, though, why not just meet them where they are and support Republicans? If it's because the Republicans themselves are not doing the things you recommend, give them the advice.
If you're speaking to the Democrats, though, because you agree with them on all the non-working-class-related stuff that you're telling them to hush up about, aren't you recommending that they mislead working-class voters? "Vote for us. We'll get you better medical care, better jobs and a secure retirement (and we'll wait a while before we send you to mandatory DEI training and indoctrinate your kids with ideas that you hate about gender and religion)."
If Democrats want to attract working class voters, then they must promote policies that attract good, meaningful, working class jobs. A problem is that industries that provide good working class jobs find red states more attractive than blue states for their businesses. For example, electric vehicle manufacture and supporting industries such as battery production and recycling are locating in states like South Carolina.
It's true that jobs being created in red states are non-union and pay somewhat less than similar union jobs. However, these non-union jobs do provide workers with opportunity to stay in or move into the middle class in areas with relatively low costs of living.
Here's an interesting "coincidence." CRT is, according to Kimberle Crenshaw who named it and organized its founding conference, Critical Theory (CT) applied to Race. CT was launched in 1937 by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school, which was upset that the working class had backed the Nazis and attacked the communists. So CT explicitly rejects Marx's idea of depending on the working class.
Instead CT (and CRT) advocate depending on the "marginalized," or in Marx-speak, the Lumpenproletariat. This found its way into the Black Power movement.
In May 1966, Eldridge Cleaver (I heard him speak in UC Berkeley's Student Union building) wrote the following as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party.
"The Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism."
The only way Biden and the Democrats attract working-class voters is if the Republicans continue to crap all over themselves failing to attract working-class voters. So there is a real chance that Biden and the Democrats can attract working-class voters.
Why has this Democratic administration paid so little attention to Palestine? Done so little to help and enact reforms to prevent future such disasters? This action will certainly lose many working class voters and probably put Ohio into the Republican camp.
Biden needs a series of Sistah Souljah moments between now and the election:
Condemn the left for assuming that white people are racist if they don’t espouse fully progressive views on race
Condemn the left for calling people transphobes if they’re wary about children changing their gender
Condemn the left for demonizing crisis pregnancy centers
Condemn the left for wanting open borders at a time when child labor among unaccompanied minors has spiked
I was there, and I've checked the history and the following is just Wrong!
(But I do agree we need to win back the working class.)
"But the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 marked the end of that tenuous cross-racial coalition. Furious and full of racial resentment, white working-class voters fled the Democratic Party into the open arms of Richard Nixon and the Republican Party."
The 1964 CR Act was signed July 2, four months before the election. And it had been top of the news for long before that. And in that election LBJ (who rammed it through and signed it) was elected by the largest landslide in the 182-year history of the Dem Party!!! And in June 1965 he made a speech proposing the most comprehensive racial-equality package (not civil rights, but economic equality) ever proposed and this was well received nationally.
That proposal was derailed by Black Power (not yet named) advocates in CORE, by leveraging the Watts riots and by charging LBJ's proposal with blaming the victim. Seth, I can send you a chapter I've written about this if you want.
The larger part of the white working class was offended not by Civil Rights, but by urban riots and Black Power. Stokely Carmichael himself toured the country saying, that MLK's Civil Rights Movement was "was a subterfuge, an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy." He also said Black Power was a "movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”
This is the kind of thing that offended the working class.
This is a global phenomena (or at least Western phenomena). Let me use a few data points from the UK. The Brexit vote was a consequence of many things. Europe is a mess and that’s not changing. However, the details of Europe’s woes were never the real issue. The real issue was stated by Andy Burnham (then the British Labor Party Shadow Home Secretary and a Remainer) wrote.
“We have definitely been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull in recent times and we need to change that. Here we are two weeks away from the very real prospect that Britain will vote for isolation,”
Of courser Hull voted for Brexit and Hampstead voted for Remain. However, the real point is that Corbyn actually gained votes in university towns. Nationwide he was disaster.
Interesting. If your goal is to promote the working class, though, why not just meet them where they are and support Republicans? If it's because the Republicans themselves are not doing the things you recommend, give them the advice.
If you're speaking to the Democrats, though, because you agree with them on all the non-working-class-related stuff that you're telling them to hush up about, aren't you recommending that they mislead working-class voters? "Vote for us. We'll get you better medical care, better jobs and a secure retirement (and we'll wait a while before we send you to mandatory DEI training and indoctrinate your kids with ideas that you hate about gender and religion)."
If Democrats want to attract working class voters, then they must promote policies that attract good, meaningful, working class jobs. A problem is that industries that provide good working class jobs find red states more attractive than blue states for their businesses. For example, electric vehicle manufacture and supporting industries such as battery production and recycling are locating in states like South Carolina.
It's true that jobs being created in red states are non-union and pay somewhat less than similar union jobs. However, these non-union jobs do provide workers with opportunity to stay in or move into the middle class in areas with relatively low costs of living.
Here's an interesting "coincidence." CRT is, according to Kimberle Crenshaw who named it and organized its founding conference, Critical Theory (CT) applied to Race. CT was launched in 1937 by the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school, which was upset that the working class had backed the Nazis and attacked the communists. So CT explicitly rejects Marx's idea of depending on the working class.
Instead CT (and CRT) advocate depending on the "marginalized," or in Marx-speak, the Lumpenproletariat. This found its way into the Black Power movement.
In May 1966, Eldridge Cleaver (I heard him speak in UC Berkeley's Student Union building) wrote the following as Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party.
"The Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism."
The only way Biden and the Democrats attract working-class voters is if the Republicans continue to crap all over themselves failing to attract working-class voters. So there is a real chance that Biden and the Democrats can attract working-class voters.
Why has this Democratic administration paid so little attention to Palestine? Done so little to help and enact reforms to prevent future such disasters? This action will certainly lose many working class voters and probably put Ohio into the Republican camp.