By John Daniel Davidson
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein last week
launched a quixotic recount bid in a handful of Midwestern states. As of
Tuesday, Stein had raised nearly $7 million to finance lawsuits and recounts in
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all states Donald Trump won in the
November 8 election. Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would
participate in order to ensure the process is fair.
Nothing will come of Stein’s recount (she earned less
than 1.5 million votes nationwide) but her motivations probably have more to do
with the future of the Democratic Party than with the outcome of the election, or
even the fate of her own party. So far, Democrats’ reactions to their stunning
defeat—weeping, riots, #notmypresident trending on social media—suggest the
Democratic Party will turn even further to the Left.
That could well mean the Democratic Party turns into
something like an enlarged Green Party: popular enough in progressive coastal
enclaves, but not a party that can win a national election. In that case, Stein
might as well stay in the headlines as long as she can.
Democrats Have
Abandoned Working-Class Whites
It’s not all that far-fetched. Democrats have been
drifting leftward for years, prioritizing issues like gay marriage and climate
change as they reshape their coalition to rely on college-educated urban whites
and lower-income black and Hispanic voters. That of course means abandoning
working-class whites, whom Clinton lost by a staggering 39 points. Exit polls
showed Trump’s margin among this group was the largest of any candidate since
1980.
The lesson Democrats should
take away from 2016 is that they need a bigger coalition, one that includes
blue-collar whites in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. The lesson they seem to
have taken instead is that half the country is racist and sexist, and they
don’t want those kind of people in their party.
This shift has been underway for some time. After Bill
Clinton’s 1992 victory, Democratic strategists worried that working-class
whites were going to abandon the party, and that Democrats couldn’t win
national elections without them. Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and
strategist who served as an adviser to Clinton’s ‘92 campaign, wrote a memo in
1995 warning that whites without college degrees were “the principal obstacle”
to the president’s reelection. Democratic analysts like Ruy Teixeira agreed,
arguing that a failure to bring working class whites back into the fold would
doom Clinton’s reelection bid.
As it happened, Clinton did well with those voters,
winning a plurality of them in both his elections. But Democrats have struggled
ever since. In 2000, Al Gore lost working-class whites by 17 points. John Kerry
lost them by 23 points in 2004. Obama also struggled, but improved Kerry’s
margin, losing them by only 18 points in 2008.
By the time Obama was preparing to run for reelection in
2012, Democrats had all but given up on working-class whites. As Thomas Edsall
noted in 2011, the Democratic analysts who had warned party leaders about the
flight of the white working class in the 1990s had changed their tune in the
Obama era. Greenberg wrote a 2011 memo with James Carville about the “new
progressive coalition,” made up of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women,
and affluent suburbanites.” They made no mention of working-class whites.
That same year, Teixeria penned a report with John Halpin
arguing Obama needed to do as well among working-class whites as he did in
2008, or at least keep within Kerry’s margin of loss. One of the “primary
strategic questions” of 2012, they wrote, would be, “Will the president hold
sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials,
single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white
working-class voters?”
Like Clinton, Obama did well enough to win, but the
writing was on the wall. Even before the election, Edsall could write with
confidence that, “preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election
make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the
white working class.” Instead of appealing to widely shared concerns about the
economy, Democrats would build their coalition around identity politics.
No Longer a Party
of the Working Class
Obama’s 2012 victory confirmed all this. He did well
among rural and suburban whites in the industrial Midwest and Northeast, but
the Democrats’ future appeared to be a coalition that had little need for these
voters. Democratic leaders accepted the notion that “demographics is
destiny”—that growing numbers of minorities, especially Hispanics, meant
Democrats could disregard the economic anxieties and fears of working-class
whites.
Instead, so the thinking went, a coalition of
college-educated urbanites and millennials, together with a strong turnout
among minorities, would render working-class whites obsolete. Indeed, they
would play virtually no role in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Once she secured the nomination in July, Clinton went out
of her way to court the supporters of her primary challenger, Sen. Bernie
Sanders, whose folksy socialism resonated with a younger cohort of potential
Democrat voters. Clinton spent barely any time campaigning in the Rust Belt,
assuming the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would hold
for her as it had for Obama.
But it didn’t, which brings us back to Stein’s recount
and the future of the Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Committee’s
first post-election meeting, interim DNC leader and erstwhile CNN commentator
Donna Brazile was giving “a rip-roaring speech” to staffers when she was
interrupted by a young man identified only as Zach. He blamed Brazile and other
party leaders for backing a flawed candidate and questioned why they should now
trust her to lead the party. Then he said, “You and your friends will die of
old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this
happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”
That statement captures precisely the logic of Green
Party progressivism. If you really believe that climate change is going to kill
you before you grow old, why wouldn’t you take an extreme position on climate
policy? Why wouldn’t you be willing to place most of the economy under state
control? Why wouldn’t you jail climate deniers? And if you lose an election,
why wouldn’t you contest the results or, failing that, resist the incoming
administration, even to the point of taking to the streets? After all, the
world itself is at stake.
By the same logic, if you believe that most Trump voters
must be racists and misogynists, why would you try to bring them back into a
coalition based on left-wing identity politics?
Dems Doubling Down
on Identity Politics
A recent New York
Times column by Columbia University’s Mark Lilla argued that Democrats
should walk back their focus on “identity liberalism,” the constant catering to
discreet voter groups defined by race, gender, and sexual identity.
Lilla imagines a Democratic Party based on FDR’s famous
Four Freedoms speech in 1941: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship,
the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. By appealing to universal
liberal principles, to “Americans as Americans,” Democrats could cast a much
wider net, maybe even reassemble the Obama coalition.
But Democrats are unlikely to heed Lilla’s advice. Two of
FDR’s four freedoms, the freedom of speech and worship, have consistently drawn
the fire of Democrats under Obama. Every single Senate Democrat in 2014 voted
to repeal the First Amendment, and Obama’s Justice Department appeared before
the Supreme Court more than once to argue that Obamacare’s contraception
mandate trumped Americans’ religious freedom.
Identity politics and the policy imperatives of social
justice, climate change, and European-style socialism will probably be the
guiding light of the Democratic Party and the American Left in the years to
come, just as it is for the Green Party today. Slate’s Michelle Goldberg, apparently unconcerned with persuading
actual voters, has argued for a confrontational approach: “If Democrats
standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best
response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies:
Fuck your feelings.”
Writing and shouting such things no doubt feels good to
Democrats reeling from an election loss that’s exposed the weakness of their
post-Obama coalition. But if Democrats choose to double down on left-wing
talking points and progressive platitudes while ignoring the white working
class, then they should get used to lining up behind the likes of Jill Stein
and reconcile themselves to a long sojourn in the political wilderness.
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