The size of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote advantage in this
last presidential election indicates that the nation isn’t particularly at odds
with the party that has occupied the White House these past eight years. What it more accurately indicates is that a
significant segment of the usual coalition that has supported that party is
disaffected with it.
In the last posting, that segment was
identified and named as the white working class (WWC). And this is not the first time in our more
current history that that portion of the electorate has shown its disaffection. To place context as to what just happened, a
stroll down that history is useful.
This current
leadership of Democrats has mostly ignored the growing estrangement of the
WWC. Going into the 1960 election, the
traditional coalition of voters that made up the Democratic Party was clear and
understood by all. It consisted of
labor, leftists, urban interests represented by big city political machines, and
those who found it difficult to meet the economic challenges of the day.
It was the party that grew out of the
New Deal programs which FDR instituted to meet the devastations caused by the
Great Depression. Some of those included
Social Security with its old age pension, unemployment provisions, and welfare,
such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
In addition, the Dems favored
pro-union legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and
minimum wage. All of these provisions,
with the exception of the right to work provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act,
seemed to have institutionalized a set of protections for the working
class. Those battles that created these
protections, in the minds of many, were over.
Of course,
there was an opposing coalition. This
was made up of small business people, white collar workers and professionals
(from bank tellers to local lawyers and doctors), pensioners, executives of
minor to large corporations, and those who derived income from rural interests,
such as farm owners. They made up the
bulk of the Republican Party.
Add to this mix an earlier version of
alt-right, the members of the John Birch Society, and one has the mix of people
who were represented at the Republican National Convention of 1960 in Chicago. They had just witnessed a rewarding decade,
the decade which expressed a continued sentiment: “we like Ike.”
This reflected
a clear division within the electorate, but then along came the Vietnam War that
disrupted things. And to understand that
disruption, one needs to appreciate the challenges the Cold War had stirred up
during the fifties. Without getting into
the details, that decade saw a conservative shift in the general tenor of the
nation’s politics.
Because of China’s fall to Communism,
during Harry Truman’s term, the Republicans had been able to tag Democrats as
being soft on Communism, a growing menace which was equated with the rise of
Nazism during the thirties. The accepted
belief was that Communism had to be stopped wherever it threatened to expand.
One of the
resulting hot spots where this menace was being observed was Vietnam. Since 1954, that nation had been divided into
two parts – North and South – one Communist, the North, and the other supported
by the US. Communist insurgents, the
Viet Cong, were mounting an armed movement to depose the government of the
South and reunite that nation.
The details are complicated, but
slowly, during the sixties, that conflict escalated to a full-blown war. Under the administration of Lyndon Johnson,
the US became further entangled in the conflict. By 1968, the US had a half a million troops
in Vietnam with no end in sight. That
year, the Communists launched the Tet Offensive which indicated to many
Americans that there was indeed no end.
The casualty rates were rising to
alarming levels with over 300 Americans being killed per week (the rate of
Vietnamese being killed was many times higher).
And all of that resulted in a growing anti-war movement that came to a head
at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968.
That week demonstrated how anxious,
frustrated, and angry many Americans were over the war. Add to that the earlier assassination of the
Democratic frontrunner, Robert Kennedy, along with race riots (the Martin
Luther King assassination), high crime rates, and things were seemingly getting
out of hand.
Richard Nixon, the Republican, won
over Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate who had not won any primaries
during the months leading up to their convention. Humphrey, who coming into the election was
the sitting vice president, had not committed himself to end the war. Nixon, the Republican, promised a secret plan
to end the war. There did ensue, after
the election, a de-escalation of the war and finally in the mid-seventies, the
US cut its losses and pulled out.
But that left the Democratic Party in
disarray and needing a reorganization. A
committee was set up and the result was a nominating process heavily reliant on
primaries and a stripping away of power of the old machine structures that had
controlled the party up to that time.
That newer system has since been
tweaked, but it has mostly survived until the present day. What it did do was shift the center of power
away from labor unions and urban politicians.
The shift did not filter down to the working class, but to another set
of elites.
What emerged was a more professionally
oriented power structure that was led by a young group of politicians such as
Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. Collectively,
they were labeled the neo-liberals. They
represented the interests of the professional classes – the middle class – and
favored such policy that addressed educational opportunities, deregulation of
finance, and the opening of international trade. Bolstered with the advent of the computer and
its promises of democratizing education, the neo-libs shifted the focus of the
Dems away from the laboring class.
In terms of policy, the new focus
left the working class off the radar screen.
Opening trade to cheaper labor markets here and abroad along with
automation would, in the ensuing decades, devastate the manufacturing sector of
the traditional manufacturing states of the northern mid-west.
With those changes, the long-held
strongholds of Democratic support in states like Michigan, West Virginia, and
Wisconsin weakened and was lost in this election. This result was foreshadowed in the 1980
election when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
In those states, one sees these
disaffected working class voters taking out their frustrations with the
Democratic Party. Along with the more
traditional Republican states, like the solid South, Clinton didn’t have a
chance despite her overall vote totals.
It is unfair to say that Clinton did
not, in her platform, address the needs of the working class. She did, but she did not sufficiently
communicate that concern. The disaffected,
what George Packer calls the “unconnected,”[1] placed
their trust in the rhetoric and ill-defined promises of Donald Trump. Whether their trust is well placed, time will
tell. But as for the Democrats, there is
some rearranging to be done.
Currrently, conversations are being
conducted in trying to determine what exactly should the face of Democrats be
and then presented to the nation. Should
the party stray away from the more professional class – the educational
elitists – whom they have courted of late and return to their labor base? Or should they attempt to meld the interest
of the technologists, engineers, financial experts, global traders, and other
professionals with that of the working class?
What is clear from this election –
and that of 2000 – that it is not enough to win the most votes. It is this context – the historical overview
presented above – that a civics student needs to get a handle on in order to
understand what is going on nationally with the current political arena. Political observers need to hold on to their
hats because this whirlwind is not over and the upcoming years promise to be
different from anything the nation has seen before.
