The Democrats Must Choose: Wall Street Or The Working Class

If Democrats helped working people they would lose favor with their corporate bosses and the bipartisan barons of Wall Street who fund their campaigns.

Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

“As the sinking working-class vote for President Biden reveals, the Democratic Party has a mountain to climb in order to dig out of its anti-working-class hole.”

By Les Leopold
Common Dreams (12/4/23)

The Democrats want it both ways. The Party of the New Deal claims to be still championing the working class while it is also working to enrich Wall Street. The obvious goal is to secure campaign cash from the wealthy while, at the same time, attract working-class votes. After all, the thinking goes, working people don’t have any place else to turn politically. Certainly not to the Republicans, the historic party of the bosses.

But this thinking is wrong, and this approach hasn’t worked. And it’s still not working.

The more the Democrats have supported Wall Street over the past four decades, the more the working class, especially the white working class, has drifted away. Even after the anti-civil rights southern Dixiecrat exodus from the Democratic Party in the Nixon years, white working-class support for the Democrats remained strong. Jimmy Carter in 1976 gathered a solid 52.3% of the white working-class vote. Bill Clinton in 1996 received 50.0 percent, again a strong showing. But by 2012, Barack Obama won only 40.6 percent. And in 2020, Joe “Six-Pack” Biden stumbled to a meager 36.2 percent of the white working-class vote.

“Democratic leaders may have thought this was too complicated for working-class people to understand. But they were wrong. Working people know who is prospering at their expense. They have learned the hard way that their former allies, the Democrats, have failed to protect them from the ravages of free-market capitalism.”

And it’s not just the white members of the working class who are defecting. Recent polling reveals that Black and Latino working-class voters also show declining support for Democratic candidates.

What happened? It wasn’t the Democrats embrace of social issues. The research done for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers , shows clearly that the white working class has become more liberal, not more illiberal, especially on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, and abortion.

The real cause of working-class defections from the Democratic Party has been (and still is) mass layoffs. Working people got fed up with losing their jobs again and again, and they saw that the Democrats, who claimed to represent them, did little or nothing to stop the carnage. …

Read the rest:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/wall-street-or-the-working-class-the-democrats-must-choose

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The Left’s Fragile, Self-Destructive Identity Politics Is KILLING The Working Class!

“We must be heretics. We must blaspheme.”
— Professor Catherine Liu, “Virtue Hoarders.

The Jimmy Dore Show (12/4/23)

Liberals are absolutely convinced that they’re being virtuous and fighting the good fight by aggressively promoting the causes of people of color, members of the LGBT community and pretty much anyone who is a victim of oppression. But as University of California, Irvine film and media studies professor and “Virtue Hoarders” author Catherine Liu points out, this hyper-focus on identity politics serves the interest of elites by both alienating working people who don’t share the concerns over “identity” and ignoring the wider economic plight faced by a much larger swath of the citizenry.

Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger talk to Liu about why political leaders like Cornel West constantly harping on trans rights and white supremacy are actually helping the powerful to maintain control.