Well, I don’t see them swinging R, this year or in the foreseeable future, and I don’t see many of them showing up at Trump’s rallies, either, and those who do are running a risk. I do see them preferring Clinton to Sanders for some reason, but that is intramural, as it were.
It does – specifically it brings the interests of whites and minorities of the same class ever closer; but, culture has not yet caught up with interests, and the white and black and Latino working classes are really three separate social classes – three distinct sections of the same layer of the cake – and they will remain so until neighborhood, socialization and intermarriage between them is much more common than it is now. And therein lies a large part of Trump’s appeal – to working-class whites but not to minorities.
I hope so. But that will not happen until after the social changes posited above already have happened. When it does happen, the WCWs will go Dem, not the minorities Pub, because that is where their common interests lie – or will lie, because that change will also marginalize the Dem Establishment in its present form.
Not “as a result” of that, no – that is, it won’t take nearly that long for the parties to change more than they have since the post WWII era. That is happening already; that is what the OP is about.
The point being? Sure, Salon’s garbage but Michael Lind is (or rather was) the one writer worth reading on there.
Now that you mention it, there may indeed be a strategy (deliberate or not) of entryism by “moderate” Republicans into the Democratic Party much as certain fringe Trotskyites sough to hijack the Labour Party in the UK. Such attempts, of course, must be suppressed with utmost ruthlessness and brutality if the frightening future of an emasculated, flaccid Democratic Party you describe is not to come to pass. The solution of course is to double-down on socioeconomic populism while pursuing pragmatism on cultural ones-some forms of cultural liberalization such as gay rights and drug legalization have strong impetus and popular support behind them but issues such as abortion and guns are not evolving in such a direction and so the party should allow for a broad spectrum of views on those issues.
How so? Michael Lind has been if anything the Cassandra of our present American Crisis, having talked about the alienation of the white working-class from the Democratic Party, rising income inequality, growth of divisive forms of identity politics, and so forth even in the halcyon Clinton years when neoliberal orthodoxy was supremely ascendant.
And the problems of the white underclass in this country are not going away either. Their communities have been destroyed by deindustrialization, the growth of permanent and chronic underemployment, the pushing of deadly, addictive painkillers by asocial pharmaceutical companies, and so forth. Yet, besides TRUMP and a few lonely voices elsewhere, there is no real solution offered by the Republican Party besides Reaganite garbage about “trickle-down” and “supply-side” where the answer to the white working-class’s problems is apparently even more free trade, tax cuts for the wealthy, and elimination of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Now, the mask is starting to come off for these cosmopolitan right-bourgeoisie elites who publish blatant classist attacks on their very voting base in terms they hitherto have reserved for racial minorities. No, TRUMP has far too many ideological contradictions and immaturities to be the final form, but he is but a portent of a greater future.
Which does not mean there is not a discernible objective truth of the matter. In this case, it is true that the American economy is doing much better now than it was under W; but it is also true that it is – not is doing, but is – much worse, fundamentally and systemically, than it was in the 1960s and even the
'70s. Liberte! Fraternite! Egalite!
Other than “all things change” what are you basing this on?
African-Americans have been solidly Democratic since 1932. That’s 84 years. The current Republican party has been alienating them for decades. As I said above, Reagan specifically targeted cities and for the specific reason that they voted Democratic and were increasingly minority and therefore increasingly Democratic. Today’s party is covertly rather than overtly racist, but has not reached out on any issue. What exactly would any foreseeable Republican Party do to attract African-American voters over the next generation? Or is your forecast so far into the future that the entire core of the party will be dead?
Hispanics at one time looked persuadable to Republicanism because of their conservatism on some social issues. Again, the current Republican party has been actively hostile, mixing the “native born” population with the legal immigrant population and illegal immigrants. What would make either side of that equation change in any foreseeable future? How could it be sold to either side, for that matter?
Of course, blacks and Hispanics are just two of a long string of minority populations that the Republicans have targeted for attack, individually and institutionally. What plausible mechanism for change do you have to offer for any set of these minorities? Heck, white women overwhelmingly vote Democratic because it is clearly in their interest to do so. They will do so until the party fundamentally reinvents itself. Even if the current party completely disintegrates, why should any new party coalesce along totally different lines, giving up every single one of the hatreds that define them?
Your statement is without basis. Trump’s rallies are explicitly racially inclusive.
The reason is that being black has historically left less room in life for idealism.
You underestimating the degree of mixing that has occurred. Ghettos full of black people exist in America, but most blacks in America do not live in them. Most live and work among white people.
You are making a lot of assumptions here, basically that your view is correct and therefore of course people will adopt it.
A lot of people disagree with you. The one thing that has kept blacks voting for Dems is the history of the Republicans during the Civil Rights era. But history is doing what history does, it is fading into the past. If blacks can get past Dems being KKK buddies, they can get over Republicans opposing desegregation.
Yes, but it makes the assumption that the racial alignments will stay relatively unchanged, when that is the one of the biggest factors that is going to change and shake things up as a result.
The GOP doesn’t have much racism overt or covert as it is, that stuff is part of a bygone era. They just aren’t anti-racist, which some take to be the same as being racist.
It’s not the Republican party that has or that needs to change to attract black voters, although they will to maximize the effect and because of all the knock on effects of the shakeup. It is black voters that will change, as the proportion of them that were born before or during the Civil Rights Era shrinks, and the number of them as well off as their white neighbors increases.
I remember back when the band NWA was around. There was a story about how Eazy-e, one of the groups members, had crashed a GOP function in DC. It was reported as if it was some kind of performance art piece or something. People could not get enough of it, they thought it was the funniest thing that they had ever seen Eazy-e, hanging out with Republicans. In their minds he represented the absolute opposite of the GOP.
But the thing was he wasn’t crashing it. He was genuinely, ideologically, interested. And why shouldn’t he be? At that point he was a rich and successful person who had earned everything he had through hard work and risk taking.
It’s easy as pie. American citizenship is very very valuable. Like other valuable things, it has the potential to be made less valuable by being created and given away. It’s the same reason that people move to Aspen or Laguna Beach, build a mansion on a hillside, and then immediately begin voting to end development around them. In this sense, it is in the interest of poor American citizens of all races to severely limit immigration, since the value of their American citizenship makes up such a huge proportion of their inheritance.
I don’t have any kind of good idea how it is going to reconfigure, I just know that the current scheme’s days are numbered.
The change is conceptual. As the potency of the characterization of conservatism as inherently racist continues to erode, native non-whites will vote more and more the same way that whites do, for the same reasons. Some of those reasons are simply aspirational. People want to be successful, and they hope to be more successful in the future, and so some will tend towards politics that reward success, or at least does not punish it.
That’s a given, but you’d think that some of them would be informed enough not to buy it, more than 8%. That’s just sad. This is NY, not the Bible Belt.
“I got mine. Now sucks to be YOU, loser.” You gotta admit it’s something of a tradition. As is claiming “I” got mine fair and square and the hard way and on my own.
Let’s pretend for a second that this actually represents the Republicans. Not being anti-racist in a racist world would mean that they would be *enabling *racism. They would be allowing, even encouraging, racism to fester and grow. It’s like not being anti-cockroach in an infested kitchen. No minority would cozy up to a party that is not overtly anti-racist any more than they would flock to a restaurant known for its roach infestation and its policy of “we let them thrive.”
The Republican party is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Other in every possible variation. Trump’s rallies are not racially inclusive, unless you define that as being able to find a black face in the crowd when you take out a magnifying glass. We know who Trump supporters are.
[ul]
[li]They Didn’t Go to College[/li][li]They Don’t Think They Have a Political Voice[/li][li]They Want to Wage an Interior War Against Outsiders[/li][li]They Live in Parts of the Country With Racial Resentment[/li][/ul]
Your entire argument is that these people will vanish off the earth, possibly in the rapture, so that the Republicans will become more palatable to minorities who will, in the same type of miracle, acquire beliefs that will make them look like the vanished Trump voters.
Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” The corollary is that it is very easy to make bad predictions about the future. Yours is very bad.
I didn’t see the Suspended under Hank Beecher’s name and just saw the thread in ATMB. My post stands, but I won’t make any more references to his posts while he’s gone.
It seems like we might be headed towards a very unhealthy, almost third world state, where poor and middle class whites control one party’s agenda, poor and middle class minorities control the other party’s agenda, and rich whites try to control both parties behind the scenes.
You think your average New Yorker is some sort of a politics junkie who follows Department of Labour economics statistics? Just because they aren’t Southern Baptist doesn’t mean they are some pseudo-intellectual either.
Why in the world is having the poor and middle class controlling everything–the people who make up the bulk of the citizenry–supposed to be a bad thing? It’s only the rich (the white part not being important) trying to control things that is the problem. Sure, when their interests are aligned with everyone else, that’s fine, but when they aren’t, they inherently hurt more people than they help.
And why would any of this be even remotely like a third world country? Most third world (in the modern sense) countries I can think of have the government completely controlled by the elites. That’s what we want to avoid.
Bernie Sanders’ movement has to be taken more seriously. Sanders has a core message that strike at the heart of fears that working class voters of all races have. Sanders voices a pessimism about American capitalism - not about capitalism per se but about what it has come to mean for the average person: profit taking at the top and flat wages and rising costs for everyone else. The Clintons have addressed these issues over the years, but they have also voiced support for the institutions responsible for maintaining the existing economic and political status quo. They have supported this world order more on the assumption that they need to in order to be able to introduce incremental changes.
The republican ‘movement’ is quite different. For one thing, there isn’t a clear movement. There’s plenty of ideology but I don’t think Trump is the face of it. He’s the face of a white socioeconomic and sociopolitical counter-insurgency. Christian conservatives might feel that Ted Cruz is a more authentic voice of religious conservatism. Libertarians might be inclined to believe that Scott Walker is most apt to carry the water for modern l’aissez faire economics. But these guys just aren’t winning. And they aren’t winning because the not-quite-majority but apparently not-so-insignificant number of paranoid whites in the republican party are willing to put those issues aside. The election of Barack Obama, long hoped to be the beginning of a post-racial America, has instead incited a tidal wave of fear among white conservatives that their America is being lost. 2016 is their Birth of a Nation moment. Trump is their white knight.