The bloodbath of the 2020 election and its subsequent fallout has led to a great deal of finger-pointing between Democrats and the left. While Democrats won the biggest prize, defeating Donald Trump, the supposed Blue Wave never materialized, with democrats losing House seats and failing to retake the senate, the race coming down to two runoff elections in Georgia, both of which appear to be longshots for Democrats.
The Democratic establishment has maintained that their losses were the fault of the party's Progressive wing, creating the impression that Democrats want to defund the police and pass socialist policy like Medicare for all and free college. Indeed, Republicans pounced on this message in many of their attack ads. Progressives like AOC have retorted that Democrats who lost their races in swing districts (or even in districts thought to have been safe) lost because of weak social-media presence, no in-person doorknocking (which Republicans continued to carry on, pandemic or no pandemic), and boring, cookie-cutter campaigns which built their messaging around opposition to Trump rather than taking a principled stand on any particular issue- both out of fear of being attacked for those positions and frankly, out of fear of offending donors. Surprisingly, even a dyed-in-the-wool establishment Democrat like Beto O'Rourke acknowledged this.
But while I agree with Progressives on the DNC's general incompetence and incredibly parochial view of what actual Americans want to hear, I think there is a deeper miscalculation. I think what we're seeing is a shift in the whole political spectrum along which the electorate aligns itself, or rather an entrenchment of a phenomenon we saw in 2016 and which had been brewing for far longer. The swing we are seeing is happening among voters who do not see politics from a Left vs. Right perspective- they are seeing things in terms of Populists vs. Elites. Perhaps in some subconscious sense, they always have.
That the middle class white collar voter was so shocked by this is unsurprising- you had to have actually been rubbing shoulders with poorly educated blue collar workers to have noticed it. In 2016 I had several friends who swung from Bernie to Trump after the primary, and had been clear about their intention to do so from the beginning. Such voters were not strongly affiliated with either party on social issues, felt ambivalent or disinterested in abortion, but were clear about one thing- the political system is broken, politicians are corrupt bastards and they need to be shown the door by a candidate who actually represents the people. Most voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, because this was who Obama claimed to be. By 2016 they didn't much care if that candidate was a socialist who sounded like an old-timey labor organizer who cut his teeth in the civil rights movement or a (supposed) billionaire from a family of perpetually wet-looking, cigar-chomping Manhattan slumlords. The important thing was that the media and elite snobs who represented "the System" hated both of them.
Was Trump a racist? Yes, and they didn't care. Even many blacks and Latinos didn't care (I remember being told exactly that by a Nigerian I made fast friends with on the T as we made our way to a Bernie rally). In fact, that the dude could say these things and all the moralizing vitriol in response just rolled off his back was refreshing. Where's the half-assed apology? Where's the pandering? When he lied, it was so obvious he was lying it was almost endearing, like a radical and subversive sort of hyper-honesty. The brazenness of his lies made them something other than lies- they became a weapon, a self aware assault on reality itself and the pencil neck losers at the Atlantic or Washington Post who pumped out one op-ed after another spasmodically raging about the knuckle dragging poors who fell for this garbage, at least between appointments at cushy consulting gigs and whatever else it is rich people do.
The best part? He wasn't a fucking Clinton, and that could make up for almost anything.
And so Trump won, making a clean sweep of Midwestern states that were once Democratic strongholds.
It's understandable to be angry at Trump voters. They may not necessarily be racists, but they were willing to vote for one. They may not hate women, but they were comfortable voting for a man who publicly bragged about casual, routine sexual assault. Hell, a majority of white women were willing to vote for the guy. But the amazing thing to me is that the reaction of liberal media was to immediately and almost gleefully accept that roughly half the country was made up of irredeemable racists who think women are an inferior species, who plan on becoming multimillionaires and want a favorable tax code for the day they do. Never did they look at what had been offered as an alternative, nor was a critical eye drawn towards the system that Trump supporters wanted to dismantle at all costs. Was it not possible that if Trump voters were willing to vote for such a monster, it was because, in their eyes, his opposition was even more monstrous still?
It was this reaction, strictly of the urban elite, that joined and confirmed to Trump supporters that there was a war being waged against them and their way of life. They were the Deplorables, and it was elites pointing the finger at them between sips of chic pepper-infused cocktails, the masses of young godless educated whites, black and brown urban poor, and a sea of illegal immigrants in lockstep behind them. The backward, mouthbreathing rural masses finally had a weapon to fight back: a radical acceptance of the debasement and indignity they had been painted with for so long. Their standard bearer embodied it- a man of digusting personal character who, hard as the libs tried, just couldn't be cancelled.
For my part, coming from a disappearing cohort of working class urban whites, this worldview is baffling to me. But we all need to see it and understand it so we might know how to supplant it. In no uncertain terms, failure to do so paves a road to fascism.
It should be considered that the real root of the recent rightward swing of working whites is not merely one of racial animus, but a rejection of a complex of beliefs being proposed by precisely the Clintonite Neoliberal establishment that pounded the nail in the white (and black, and latino) working class coffin that Ronald Reagan couldn't. It wasn't necessarily primordial racism, but a response to racial pluralism coming from precisely the people who cut taxes on the rich, deregulated banks, gutted unions and slashed welfare that led to a frustration with the self-appointed advocates of racial pluralism in elitist academic institutions and both the major parties. As their absurd claims to economic populism disintegrated, so went the narrative of racial equality paired with friendly oligarchy, and the path was paved for a candidate who was willing to blame both the top and bottom of the economic ladder in tandem, the urban elites and the immigrants of which they were supposedly benefactors (the fact that Obama was notorious for his draconian deportation policy behind the scenes was easily swept under the rug, along with the long undisputed fact that immigrants have no visible effect on the job market or crime rate).
This isn't a new phenomenon- white identitarianism and economic deprivation have long gone hand in hand as the ever flexible tool the wealthy have used to redirect the natural rage that poverty engenders. W.E.B. Du Bois explains this phenomenon in his fascinating essay Georgia: Invisible Empire State. Du Bois, writing of the tools used to disempower the post-Reconstruction labor movement in Georgia, says (emphasis mine):
It is usual for the stranger in Georgia to think of race prejudice and race hatred as being the great, the central, the inalterable fact and to go off into general considerations as to race differences and the eternal likes and dislikes of mankind. But that line leads one astray. The central thing is not race hatred in Georgia; it is successful industry and commercial investment in race hatred for the purpose of profit. All the time behind the scenes in whispered tones and in secret conference, Georgia is feeding the flame of race hatred with economic fuel. And while it is not the conscious and deliberate action of all, it is so with some and subconscious with many others.
The point I am making here is not to say that race must be ignored so as to make a leftist appeal to poor white conservatives- quite the opposite. My concern is with the unreconcilable nature of today's racial politics. If it is our goal to bring the white working class into the fold of the left, rejuvenate its hunger for democracy and suppress its tolerance for authoritarianism, we must inevitably address the subject of race directly, but humanely and not with the vogue trend of dehumanizing and vilifying anyone who isn't already part of the enlightened group. The poor white racist has to be viewed as what she is, an individual in a constant state of flux, someone who was made a racist by someone else, and who can thus be unmade, or at least find her way to a grudging acceptance. This is the prescription of Du Bois, but also of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and others. We have to make it clear that the policies that would most benefit people of color- free college, single-payer healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, massive public investment into renewable energy infrastructure, greater workplace democracy, campaign finance reform, easier access to the ballot box- all of these things will in fact benefit everyone.
But the cure to our present problem seems that it needs to reach deeper still, and it needs to be delivered to virtually everyone of every political stripe. What sticks with me most in all this strife is the way everyone seems to be following *somebody* in lockstep. Have you noticed how everyone falls into maybe four or five broad political categories and within those communities, every individual sounds virtually identical, as if they're reading from a script when you prompt them to address a certain issue? Maybe they sound like Trump, or Ben Shapiro, or Joy Reid, or any given university Sociology department. It is a rare and refreshing treat when they simply sound like themselves.
What we need most of all is to stop listening to appeals from leaders demanding we regard each other in one way or another. We need to start listening to each other and ourselves instead. And it is through this- direct appeals to working class solidarity and shared economic interest, a populist discourse delivered in the tongue of the people themselves, a broad dismissal of elites- that we will be able to find our unified desire for a more egalitarian, thoughtful, and participatory democracy. This has always been a utopian goal, likely never one to be fully realized. But the extent to which it has been achieved is the extent to which we have achieved anything resembling a moral civilization, and it is the rope we pull to drag ourselves away from the gaping maw of facism, and if we're lucky its austere neoliberal precursor.