The New Realignment
by David Atkins
I'll have more thoughts on this later, but for now, this is a good and important read:
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But 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.
All pretence of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.
Less educated whites have been a stumbling block for Democrats for decades. Democrats held them together under the New Deal coalition pretty much until the Civil Rights movement, after which the conservative movement successfully transposed a "cultural" elite trying to enforce race and gender equality over the financial elite that this group had resented previously.
Democrats had been trying to "win back" these voters for decades with compromises designed to assuage their anti-welfare, anti-equality sensibilities. But with current demographic trends, that's increasingly unnecessary--even if it were possible. Ideally, the Democratic missions of securing the safety net, increasing the minimum wage and safekeeping middle-class jobs should appeal to less educated whites. But it won't. A more strident progressive message would do a good deal to bring these voters back and convince them that Democrats best serve their interests, but it's still mostly a lost cause. The right-wing propaganda machine has been very effective in creating a tribal mentality with these voters that will be nearly impossible to break.
For those most concerned with social issues, this development will represent a step forward: Dems will feel increasingly emboldened to openly support women's rights, gay rights and the like without feeling the need to seek cover. Yes, minority groups tend to be more socially conservative on these issues, but they're also not the defining issues on which minority groups are voting. Few Latinos will vote for a party of anti-Latino racists just because that party happens to agree more with them on the subject of abortion--not even if that party is led by the likes of Marc Rubio.
On the other hand, the new coalition of upscale (mostly white) liberals plus minority groups has big problems. For one, the interests of each group are fairly divergent, and educated whites tend to vary significantly internally as well, split largely between angry progressives, and comfortable neoliberals who enjoy reading Thomas Friedman and prize civil tone over progressive legislation. The anger against President Obama is mostly an upscale educated white phenomenon: a vanishingly small percentage of the electorate has even heard of Al-Awlaki; Guantanamo Bay is a nearly irrelevant issue in this election; very few voters have any idea what a credit default swap is, or what Glass Steagall was. Minority groups, meanwhile, still have very high approvals of the President.
The abandonment of less-educated whites also poses a big problem in terms of labor unions, which are a crucial part of the Dem base. Not to mention the Occupy Movement, which is based on uniting the interests of the 99% against the 1%, and breaking down the tribal barriers that have kept the middle classes from uniting against the economic predations of the top 1/10 of 1 percent.
So the problems with this coalition are many.
But all in all, it's conservatives who should be most worried. They have doubled down on appealing to less affluent whties with a calumnious message of lies and pure hate, targeted to a disappearing demographic. And they're counting on a magic hail mary pass to win back Latino voters with Latino figureheads after they have wrung every last drop they can out of white resentment. That's not a sound strategy, and it won't work for them over the long haul, no matter how much money they have to spend on it.
Meg Whitman's disastrous campaign for California Governor proved as much. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can't buy love from people you've spent decades kicking into the dirt.
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