If the Democratic Party decides to ignore the concerns of minority voters to get white 'Rust Belt'

[Uponthegears]

85. My friend, I fear

Last edited Sun Nov 27, 2016, 10:01 AM - Edit history (1)

that either by using a definition of white working class narrowed (or broadened, I am not sure which) to support your argument, or by imputing attitudes to white liberals and/or working Democrats which do not exist in a significant percentage of these groups, you are creating a division among Democratic Party constituencies which does not exist. I hope that it is unintentional. If it is not, I can only ask that you go back and study the history of the liberation movement.

First, allow me to suggest (or perhaps agree with you) that there are essentially NO Trump voters who we should be trying to bring into the fold. Anyone who placed a check next to the name of Donald Trump is an irredeemable racist. Because he offered nothing but hate during his campaign (blaming oppressed groups for white's "malaise" and offered no solutions other than to punish the already oppressed), and because Hillary (notwithstanding the perhaps fatal flaws of her campaign) was certainly no worse than every (male) candidate who came before her, every single vote for Trump was a vote for racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and religious hatred OR (and forgive me for not wholeheartedly accepting the argument as the sole cause) was simply a vote cast for no other reason than unbridled misogyny. As others have said, fuck them. They are either too stupid or too evil to be worth the effort needed to save them.

Here I feel is where we part ways. Trump voters are not what I consider white working class. I will be the first to admit that I do not spend much of my time talking to white people and I am, shall we say, "genetically and culturally disqualified" from understanding the white psyche, but voters making $75K (which would be about $110K family) and up are not what I call "working class." Trump voters are those white folks sitting out in the suburbs with his and hers Glocks to protect themselves from the mythical "'thug' hiding in the bushes waiting to steal the big screen TV," terrified that a Boeing 757 will come crashing into the shopping mall, or "one of "those" black kids will date their son or daughter, or that they won't be allowed to "cure" their gay child. Let me repeat, fuck them.

The working class are those people who used to make a good living without a college education, who used to have health insurance through work but (thanks to the USSC gutting of the ACA) are now forced to pay outrageous premiums out of their own pocket, who live paycheck to paycheck (and whose new low wages are stagnant - economic growth in "Rust Belt" states only shows someone is getting rich, not who), and who (apologies to die-hard Hillary supporters) have no interest in being re-educated so that they can start a new life after 40 y.o. making two-thirds of what they used to make with no benefits, who have voted majority Democratic for their whole lives, and who are looking for someone in power who has a REAL plan (i.e., not Trump) to make things better. Those voters are redeemable. (What's more, they come in all colors, nationalities, religions and, might I add, it is fucking offensive to say otherwise. Shocker, some of us actually work.) Those are the voters who came out for Hillary in the same percentage they came out for our President but who were so uninspired by her "solutions" and lulled into complacency by the "certainty" of her win that they failed to come out to vote in the same numbers.

If we define the working class as those voters, a number of your arguments need to be re-examined. The most important of those is this one: "In order to get those voters you must needs to throw black folks and Hispanics and others under the bus." That is incorrect. To claim that equality (which, IMHO, must include the still unfinished task of liberation) comes on the back of the voters I've just described as WWC, or, conversely, that WWC can advance only on our backs, is to accept that we draw from the same finite share (pool) of wealth, power and privilege. That ignores what both my mentors, and more mainstream civil rights advocates like Dr. King, knew, i.e., that the TRUE reservoir of wealth, power and privilege is held in the hands of the rich AND that in this reservoir, there is more than enough to achieve BOTH equality AND advancement.

Here lies the problem of the vilification economic justice, the casting it as the enemy of social justice. IF you are unwilling to call for REAL economic reform, for the distribution of wealth to its real creators, etc., then we really are fighting with the WWC (my definition)over the meager slice of the pie the 1% has put on our plate. While that is a war I agree we can win if we play it right, it is not the war we should be fighting. While we can never forget that Dr. King was murdered by a racist acting on behalf of other racists, we should also remember that the reason he was sitting in a Memphis motel on that history-changing day was to march for WORKERS, black and white, in the Memphis sanitation department.

As I said, I may not know much about white people, but I know that some white guy making $40K is not the guy holding me back.