So middleclass and underclass whites may have decided to stop being the veal pen for Republican elites? Can they attract enough serious planners to actually gain power for some populist planks that are not idiotic? Might youth find an opening for progressive alliances?
Is Trump Wrecking Both Parties?
“The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign — both through the support Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated, more affluent voters — has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party. Once a class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and, importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/opinion/campaign-stops/is-trump-wrecking-both-parties.html?_r=0
Also, an even more trenchant article…
Trading Places: If the Democrats Are Now a Coastal Elite Party and the GOP Are the Populists, Trump Is Only the Beginning
(Yeah, Hillary will probably win. But unless Democrats can be more than the Whole Foods party, they’re doomed.)http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trading-places-if-democrats-are-now-coastal-elite-party-and-go
p-are-populists-trump
So far, Republican Reformicons have not embraced anti-corporatism, but the vein is definitely open for exploitation.
Hmm, some already exploring:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/16/can-anti-corporatist-populism-save-the-gops-electoral-fortunes/
The Democratic party has alomst abandoned the working class voter. 2008 HRC was held up as a champion for that particular subset of voter with Obama as the out of touch intellectual. 8 yrs later, she is scambling to hang on to those votes by assuming the policy posistions of Sanders. Remains to be seen if she will follow through or go against her corporate donars. That would mean addressing income equality, taxation and CEO overpayment.
Trump had a real chance of capturing those voters, white and other, but blew it by talking crazy talk and scaring all but the most devoted white nationalist or those who feel most downtrodden. Now he will only get the 20-30% of the GOP hardcore base.
The Federalist article is interesting in that they are even talking about it; Trump’s numbers are have the effect of concentrating the mind, like a hamgman’s noose. If the GOP had the guts, they would “gut” the Deomocratic Party. Of course, a lot of things the author complains about has been the mainstay of GOP Congressional efforts since Reagan. If the Dem party returned to its Progressive/Reformer roots, they would run the country for decades.
Ridge
—–excerpt———
First, let me try to very loosely define what exactly is being advocated here: a “libertarian-populist” platform would focus on a “fair shot” for all Americans by demanding a market freed of BizGov meddling. It would target corporatism and corporate welfare, the fiscal irresponsibility that results from this, and openly reject the decades-old K Street influence on party positions and congressional votes. The goal is to expand the party’s tent by actively stating and pursuing achievable changes within the U.S. government that appeal to the screwed-over, the suspicious, the cynical, and the rest of the clear-headed realists out there who have seen party differences narrow, the government-corporate complex expand, and have felt their voice and vote increasingly ignored….
It is collusion with the government through corporate welfare and bailouts, the writing and rewriting of legislation to punish and eliminate competition, and regulatory capture that needs to be loudly stopped. When bureaucrats and boardrooms “come together,” things get nasty…”
http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/16/can-anti-corporatist-populism-save-the-gops-electoral-fortunes/
During the primaries, I wondered which party would cry uncle first and adopt a more populist anti-corporatist platform. Based on the actions of the Dem elites during the primary, it will be the Republicans who do so and they will win at the national level after their painful realignment. The Dems will be stuck with the reputation as the party of Wall Street and that has never been a winner in this country. Additionally, the Dem elites alienated the Youth vote and that was a mistake.
Doubt that Republicans will do so; they just hope for more scum like the following to attach to Democrats:
LA Times — Another reason to hate Mylan, which jacked up the price of life-saving EpiPens: It’s a tax dodger :
Mylan’s glass ceiling breaking CEO is Heather Bresch.
Big Pharma may be the worst of all of them on a moral basis, along w/Big Med, Big Food and Big Insurance. They are all sellers of false hope and they all collude with one another. On every level.
By the simple expedient of cleansing the nation’s food supply…simple in concept of course, certainly not in application…the terrible health of the country could be improved immeasurably. But NOOOOOoooo…literally billions of dollars are spent each year by these forces on lobbying, on buying legislators and other pols and on massive propaganda and advertising efforts. (Propaganda and advertising are the same thing, really. One is subliminal and the other isn’t. Dr. Kildare knows…)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Even the bought and sold pols fall for it.
PLEASE!!!
I swear…alien invasion is as good an answer to why this is happening as any other explanation. At the very least, the people who are intimately involved in this ongoing scam are alien to any common human feelings of decency.
The teacher of…certain things…G. I. Gurdjieff had a term for these people. (Emphases mine.)
Sound somehow…familiar?
It does to me.
Later…
AG
Now a standalone article.
The Depravity Of The Ruling Class.
If you wish to comment, please do so there.
Thank you…
AG
Geez, AG , when are you going to start flogging the GOP talking point about Hillary Clinton’s allegedly poor health? I’m sure your Botox crack isn’t the last word.
Just wait til generics disappear with the new trade protections. Thanks, Obama. I still find it hard to believe…
There were a few ways to go from my comment. One being the ACA in general. Another, as you did, on the future of drug prices with the TPP.
However, at the level of electoral politics which is what my comment focused on, I was probably a wee bit too subtle. Check out Heather Bresch CBS News Martin Shkreli thinks Bresch is cool. It’s how predatory capitalists and capitalism is intended to work. And such capitalists cross gender and political party lines. Not a dimes worth of difference between Fiorina and Bresch or HRC.
Going for millennial youth might finally exorcise teh white supremacists from their party. Now if the libertarians would just get over their checkbook economic theories. All deficits are not equal.
Depends on the definition of “Dems.”
What is the GOP without the GOP elites? The big and/or old money that has long propped up the party along with the conservative leaning bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, accountants, small business owners). The teabaggers, fundies, and dregs of the GOP elites don’t have the numbers to keep going except in pockets. And they aren’t about to align themselves with those on the left because there really isn’t any comment ground. The GOP voter mindset is infused with delusions of personal grandiosity if only government and liberals would get out of their way.
Those GOP elites have been revealing themselves of late — either overtly or symbolically. Coming out as pro-HRC is merely the latest manifestation. They had turned on GWB and after that Palin. They were okay with Romney, but Obama was okay as well and better a second-term President that had learned all the ropes than a newbie they would have to teach. With Trump being so uniquely horrible, it gives them plenty of cover in supporting HRC.
Wish I could see some flaw in how the political party of the 21st century elites is being built to dominate for the next couple of decades, but I don’t.
Emerging among the rank-and-file of both parties as shorthand for the same group “neoliberals” and the “donor class”; watching this space carefully.
While the same words may be used, doubt they mean the same thing among those dissatisfied within their parties. It was remarkable that Sanders pitch didn’t fall on completely deaf “conservative” ears, but he kept it simple and palatable enough that it didn’t challenge their well-entrenched beliefs and predispositions.
With Hillary’s transition team looking like 1980 DLC old home week, anti-corporatists have no home.
Indeed, it is TINA.
1992 (and on) DLC without the AR home boys (except for Bill, of course) and Gore. However, anyone that expected anything different is a fool.
Knew the minute I posted, I was in teh wrong decade. lol Need edit function for careless peoples.
Hate when that happens. Particularly after posting when only I get that vague body sense that I got something wrong but what doesn’t rise to the level of consciousness.
Indeed, the anti-tax fervor just kills them as a party able to produce goods.
OT, but did you see this, Marie?
http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/renowned_lawyer_who_represented_julian_assange_died_after_being_struck
_by_train_in_west_hampstead_1_4507283
I did. However, as we are reminded continuously in the west, some highly accomplished westerners commit suicide. And the facts as publicly known in this case support that conclusion. Now if he had been a Russian lawyer working for opponents of Putin, we’d know that Putin had him offed.
Do you have evidence suggesting foul play?
Progressive democrats have a nostalgia for the Democratic Party of the New Deal, a party celebrated in every speech thereafter as one of the unity of farmers and labor in a workingman’s alliance that brought prosperity. That rosy, gauzy view is belied by the harsh black-and-white photographs from the Roosevelt administration, often by photographers of the Farm Security Administration or Works Progress Administration.
Where the country stood at the time of the death of FDR shaped that rosy view in memory; the same would happen after the assassination of JFK.
Farmers and workers, “ordinary people” in the parlance of the time, might have voted for Roosevelt in large numbers but very few understood themselves in the ideological terms that those looking for a working class party see it today. Farmers, especially in the southeast dominated by export crops, had been in an agricultural depression since the demand created by World War I ended–going on twelve years for many at the bottom of the farm economy in spite of migration away from agriculture during the automobile boom of the 1920s. Workers were politically organized in small firms but not consolidated industries and still lacking the power to shape equitable bargaining agreements. It wasn’t the Democratic Party organizing farmers and workers. It was movements like the Grange for farmers and a variety of socialist and communist and reform parties for the workers. Just look at who the members of Congress were in 1930 and 1932. And look when the openly socialist members were elected in the Democratic Party.
When the farmer-labor alignment did take place was the late 1940s and up through the 1960s. And Republicans responded with the Red Scare that spooked Harry Truman because the Soviet Union was the other great power left standing after World War II and it was well from full recovery. Just replacing one threat with another. Who cares what the content of that threat actually was or is. The Roosevelt era was on 16-year-long realignment that ended up coming out for civil rights after another 20 years. World War II patriotism covered over the class divisions that were the pain of that realignment. The 1% were brought down the few notches that they created with the Great Crash and slow recovery. The 99% moved from povety (mostly) to prosperity in the terms of 1940. Even minorities, which brought the hope of political liberation. But both of those brought on the full cultural force of the secular, scientific, and urban changes of culture that has bubbled up through cosmopolitan capitalism and delivered by the promise and reality of universal education.
Most of the leaders of the white youth movements of the 1960s were mixtures of that old and new middle class — often the first in their families to go to college. And the farmer-worker class who were their parents were appalled that their offspring or the offspring of those lucky to send them to college were (1) being so unpatriotic in the middle of an existential war (not Vietnam the proxy but the Soviet Union and China) and (2) were ruining their chances with future employers. And many had already crossed into splitting their ticket supporting Eisenhower because Adlai Stevenson did not look like a farmer or a laborer to these now-middle-class farmers and laborers. As the number of farmers dwindled, the remaining farmers got more land and bigger equipment and a nicer house and more technological education at the Ag School and investment funds and commodity contracts. And others fell between the local cracks.
Even without Nixon’s ethnic strategy, the farm vote was edging Republican; the ethnic strategy (it was a farmer-labor strategy not just in the South) made the flip in some regions. Wallace picked up the old farmer vote in the South; Nixon picked up the farmer vote outside the South and consolidated it in 1972. And Nixon picked up the “patriotic”, “masculine”, “family man”, white labor vote in Catholic ethnic communities of the North and Midwest. That process got its Southern farmer-labor contingent in 1980 through the legerdemain of the Religious Right that unified segregationists and ant-abortion Catholics around private an parochial school support and vouchers. But even that alignment was not complete until 2002. And now it is falling apart because it did not and could not, given its ideological terms, deliver benefits (other than psychic) to its farmer and labor voters.
To discern where the realignment is coming with the collapse of movement conservatism, it is helpful to sort out who are the farmers, who are the laborers, and who are the middle class in that 99% that can restore democratic governance instead of aristocratic and plutocratic governance.
First of all, all three of those groups are increasingly less stuck in intergenerational poverty identifiable by race. There are some prosperous black farmers out there as well as numerous working farmers and still enough farm laborers stuck with substandard farm wages.
Second, as the workforce and labor unions desegregated, the power of unions disappeared through bad legislation and poorer negotiation of contracts. “Workers” increasing means minority and women workers, not white mean alone. But white men still are privileged workers to employers. That privilege is critical to many families’ survival, however.
Third, the nature of the labor force is that the supply vastly increased with the influx of working women and minorities, the number of jobs did not increase fast, and the drive to deskill and automate the labor force meant even the jobs that did remain were valued lower. Employers deliberately sought ways to turn every bit of talent into “a dime a dozen” control of labor costs.
That means that “labor” now returns to the Marxian meaning it had during the days of the Robber Barons: anyone who does not have the power to negotiate but must accept the arbitary setting of wages, which then converge on the Malthusian wage, that sufficient to produce the next generation of workers.
And farmers increasingly are divided into two types: those who continue to make moeny from industrial agriculture and even holding company ownership of other farms. And the other group of farmers–those concentrating on small-scale, local, organic production shopped to local restaurants, grocery stores, and farmers markets. Among these are entrepreneurs who do little more than arbitrage prices between the markets for the two groups of farmers. Increasingly, you will see among this group urban farmers reclaiming vacant inner city land, restoring it from pollution, and growing crops to sell within the neighborhoods.
A “Whole Foods” party ignores the corporate nature and industrial “organic” farming of the large-scale arbitrage that Whole Foods is actually doing. The coastal elite party is really a professional class party nationwide; it just that in some areas the professional class is less cosmopolitan capitalist than in others. It might describe the DC vision of the Democratic Party members but not Democratic voters. That is not even the default alignment happening because it ignores the substantial minority and cultural groups that vote Democratic defensively.
The Republican alignment really is an alignment around the landowners, farmers/ranchers, and working class (and their communities) who are involved in extractive resource industries and still want to take Mother Nature’s saving account for free and haul it for sale on subsidized carriage and extract it from public lands. It also includes the major employers of immigrants: the hospitality industry, the casino industry, the construction industry–but not their workers or communities. And it includes the members of the 20%, the professional class whose jobs are in and depend on those industries. It is geographical to the extent that those industries are localized. It is rural to the extent that those rural areas are not dominated yet by locallly-sold organic agriculture. The Republican alignment includes exploitative industries dependent on essential captive isolated small-town labor. And the more freewheeling players in the finance industry and information technology sector. And a marginal group of entrepreneurial bigots, religious institutions, and other grifting industries and their customers. The Trump coalition is far from populist or working class. You mistake the pitch for voters for the actual interests of the players. And overtures to law enforcement and the miltiary are matters of tactical necessity and not necessarily because those workers are respected for what they do — although individual Republicans do individually have sentimental and family attachments to both institutions.
“… it ignores the substantial minority and cultural groups that vote Democratic defensively.”
Yep. How long-suffering will they be?
Where can they go? And how? and how do they become other than just more complicated schisms?
We have a LOT of Hispanic Republicans in Texas. A lot of Hispanic small business. Latino prejudices here are predicated on income. North of SA, Hispanics are pretty mainstreamed. Many mixed families and a definite mixed culture. Trump might be a hiccup, though.
Old-time problems still in the Valley, esp in agriculture.
How long does this get a pass?
“Pro-business members on the all-Democrat 15-member council were able to hold together an alliance against the higher minimum wage and voted 8-6 to return the proposed legislation to committee for revision. The maneuver appears to have effectively killed the bill, at least for this year.”
inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19392/baltimores_democratic_city_council_kills_15_minimum_wage_bill_f
or_now
Doesn’t explain why Sanders performed far better with those under 45 than those over 45. They have no memory of before and after the New Deal, including the expansions under LBJ, and are one or more generations from those that did.
fascinating, thanks
I happened to be in upstate NY recently and spent two hours in Hyde Park at the FDR PRESIDENTIAL MUSEUM. I write in that context.
What makes anyone think that the New Deal coalition lacked intellectuals and affluent people? It’s not as though people matching those descriptions just joined the Democrats in the last 20 years. As for those former New England Republicans, or here in the Pacific northwest, the “mossback” Republicans, who flipped to the Democratic party, they were increasingly alienated by the Southern religious cranks who took over the GOP. I fail to see why people like those NE and NW Republicans shifting to the Dems is a bad thing.
The idea that the Dems no longer attract working class voters has been repeatedly challenged by Digby, who notes that there are lots and lots of working class Dems. They just happen to be ethnic minorities.
I question the whole bicoastal elite claim. Seems to me that as long as we have immigration and internal migration, places that receive new blood are going to continue shifting, slowly slowly, to more open, liberal minded societies.
Was there actually a close link between the Reagan Democrats, the working class whites, and the more affluent Democrats? The claim by Edsall etc. seems to be that such a close link existed and has been dumped by Democratic elites. However, i think we know that once the Dems fully took up the cause of civil rights, the New Deal coalition would have to change. Has the integration of non-white working class voters into the Dem party substituted for the Reagan Democrats?
The Edsall etc. analyses feel to me like economic determinism. Actual humans don’t behave that way.