Sorry, not giving up on gun control. That’s nuts! I’m not a “single issue voter,” but if you held a gun to my head (!) and forced me to characterize myself this way, I’d say it’s because the Dems are mildly, barely pro-control, that I vote for them. Were they to drop even this pathetically weak form of pro-control, I might have to found a new party. (Remember, Bernie is a gun nut, so can’t go there.)
Maybe I have my head in the sand about my country’s obsession/pathology. But people can be re-trained. We were a littering society not long ago, and a casually racist and sexist one. I know, this gun thing is more deeply entrenched, and it’s in the Constitution.
So, if it takes 50 years to remake the collective American mindset about guns, then we’d better start today. If during those 50 years Democrats must be even more wishy-washy on gun control in order to attract the white less-educated voters, I guess so be it – but I hate this about America, and I hate that the Democrats have to be so weak about this in order to win elections.
Every time I hear someone complain that Obama or Hillary is going “take away their guns,” I think, “IF ONLY”!
The thing is that the “enemy” of working class white people is not “illegals” or “them lazy people”, the enemy is rich white people whose main goal in life seems to be getting as low a tax rate as possible for themselves while screwing everyone else over. This includes people like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Trump himself. It’s a long term strategy, but what Democrats need to do is work on convincing working class white people that they have more in common with working class minorities than they have in common with rich white people.
I think a good start would be to focus on Rural poverty. Right now when most people think of poverty they think of inner city blacks. Going into West Virginia and Kentucky, and finding out what people want and need, and developing programs specifically designed and promoted to address their needs would help.
Another possibility would be to try to revive the labor movement as a force against the rising inequality, but its been pummeled by everyone for so long, that it may be beyond saving.
On the down side I don’t see the Republicans as taking too kindly to us trying to poach their voters, and will do everything they can to sabotage any benefits actually flowing to their constituents if there is the remotest possibility that a Democrat might get credit.
Actually, the infrastructure that comes with the first manufacturing plant (roads, water and sewage plants, support businesses) serves as a beacon to others. Couple that with a ready made workforce in a low cost of living area and in a generation, there are several industries to fill coal’s shoes.
The state of Tennessee, with many of the same geographical and cultural challenges, has a goal of a four lane highway from each county seat to an interstate within the next two decades. We are actually beginning to see some results from this.
Republicans have convinced the white unskilled workforce ‘Right-to-Work’ is pro-business and therefore better for them, Democrats need to work harder on that front.
Democrats could also make government subsidized retraining for those who have lost jobs overseas which will never come back a bigger platform plank.
Thurston Howell III is dead, and his type is dying. In 2016, “rich white people” look a lot more like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Cuban – which is to say, liberals – than they do Sheldon Adelson. IIRC, every single CEO in the Fortune 100 is backing Hillary, and if the polls hold, she’s going to win the vote of those earning over >$100,000 pretty handily. Some of that is due to Trump’s unique Trumpiness, but it’s the direction the parties have been trending for awhile. Heck, even the dreaded Koch Brothers are, in fact pretty liberal on most of the identity-shaping social issues. Pretending the parties haven’t changed since the 1940s isn’t going to help.
On a strictly economic level, this is obviously true. But for a couple decades now, the Dems have been advocating pro-minority policies that disproportionately affect working-class whites. When State U (or an employer or anyone else) adopts policies to make it easier for minorities to get succeed, those opportunities won’t come at the expense of rich whites. Almost anything you do to help minorities gain ground relative to “whites” in general is always, almost by definition, going to come at the expense of the least-advantaged whites.
A working-class white guy lives in a doublewide next door to a bunch of oxycodone addicts, making $30K a year and trying to figure out what the hell his “Bronze Plan” covers … and then he turns on the TV and sees a democrat in suits making ten times his salary talking about how he enjoys “white privilege” and “systemic racism.”
Whether they’re right or wrong as a philosophical question irrelevant: as a matter of politics, they’re pushing him away.
Do you really think this hasn’t been done endlessly? They don’t want programs, they want decent-paying jobs for low-skill workers. (i.e. manufacturing)
Unfortunately, nobody really knows how to make that happen, at least not without compromising other policies and arguably making other problems worse.
I think that’s a huge issue in more ways than that. First, that guy sees his government, or at least a specific political party making a choice to disproportionately affect him negatively through those policies, and then, worse, they call him racist if he complains or even disagrees, even if it’s not really a gripe against minorities.
So this guy hears this, and then hears Republicans decrying it and railing against the Democrats who ostensibly did it, and he’s set up to misinterpret things, through no fault of his own.
I see a lot of, “No one is trying to take your guns!”
But then I see a lot of calls for “common sense gun regulation,” which sounds an awful lots like, “This is what we’re going to call ‘taking guns’ so it’s more palatable.”
I think if the Democrats disowned just ignored the hardcore anti-gun contingent of their base (I mean, who else are they going to vote for?) and, more importantly, listened to people’s concerns about immigration instead of just calling anyone who wants stronger border controls a bigoted bigoty bigot, that’d go a hell of a long way toward neutralising the Republican grip on working class whites.
This is probably the most absurd post I have ever read from you. You honestly think that focuses more on minorities will win over working class whites? Overemphasis on that is one of the biggest things that fueled this Trump dumpster fire in the first place. Working class whites see the Democratic party of being a coalition of wealthy elites and minorities using political power at their expense. They assume, and sometimes rightly so, that, even if the Republicans don’t always do much to help them directly, at least they don’t have to listen to a everchanging and constant stream of complaints and lectures from the minority or fringe group of the week.
You also seem to believe that working class whites just aren’t familiar with minorities yet? Where did you get that idea? Have you ever been to the South that is both a hotbed of Republicanism and working class whites. It is impossible not to know more than any Hollywood liberal about the lives of every class of minority, especially blacks, because they are everywhere including teachers in schools, doctors and nurses in hospitals, heads of government and everywhere else. Many Southern cities are majority black. In other parts of the country like Massachusetts, working class whites are the ones that live in the most mixed neighborhoods.
I am not working class, Republican or Democrat but I grew up with working class conservatives and work directly with them now every day. The last thing they want or need is another indoctrination lecture on their own privilege and the appropriate terms to use when you encounter a transitioning person at a wine tasting. I can’t say I disagree with that mindset myself. It gets irritating no matter who you are especially when you have problems of your own to deal with. Meanwhile, back in Appalachia and the Deep South, there are real problems all around but the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to care about that much at all.
You mean like Federal Form 4473 which already exists! and must be filled out at FFL locations like gun stores and gun shows when buying from a dealer, the “gun show loophole” that is referred to in the media generally refers to a private sale, person to person*
*as long as seller and purchaser are residents of the same state and the seller believes that the buyer is not a prohibited person (felon, illegal drug user, domestic abuse, any disqualifying condition on the 4473)
I’m really hoping for Hillary, mainly for the certainty of her vs. Trump, even for some of my views, which are to the right of many here.
That being said, the Democrats brought this nail-biter, if not potential loss to Trump, on themselves. Obama waded his party way too far into the culture wars like transgenderism, and letting the GOP own terrorism, courtesy of not saying “Islamic terrorism.” Are WWCs necessarily socially conservative? Depends on where they live, and they do indeed vote. The moralistic tone of progressives on these issues, whatever happens, will have been a factor, and if Democrats want to avoid a hard fate, then they’d better drop it. You also can’t run tons of ads with like 2 white people, a lot of LGBT in the ads, and expect to easily win.
Also, Bernie definitely weakened Hillary; he made her run this very liberal campaign to please his fans. He also gave Trump a lot of cannon fodder. This is the price for Obama’s left-wing version of Reagan Revolution.
I keep hearing commentators on TV and radio say that win or lose, Democrats are going to need to “reach out” to non-college whites after this election. I have done various jobs as a volunteer for the Democratic Party, but they are going to need to look for someone else when it comes to that one. I cannot stomach that task.