by Mark Cuban
But this Manichean construction holds substantial risks for coalitions. Most political issues are not like ripping dissenters’ fingernails out or obliterating entire populations. Often they involve a clash of sincerely held beliefs held by fundamentally decent people. Healthy politics requires being able to reach working compromises so we can all live together, despite the fact that we see diametrically opposed truths as indisputably true.
The working class—of all races—has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain while elites have focused on noneconomic issues: this is the first generation in American history to experience lifetime downward mobility compared with people their age a decade before.261 In 1970, 90% of 30-year-olds earned more than their parents at the same age; by 2014, only half did.262 Neither party has taken effective steps to stop this precipitous slide. “Rural America is in a deep, deep depression that has been completely ignored by both Democrats and Republicans,” commented Frank Philllips.* It’s time to pay attention.
Obviously, reframing American liberal politics is a complex and long-term proposition. Here are some suggestions on specific issues.
Trade policy. It’s not a good idea to embrace a trade deal that’s good for the country as a whole, but bad for people working in specific industries without providing for job training for people in those industries. I’m no expert, but my friend Joel Paul is. “We live in a world in which capital can move easily across borders but workers can’t, so workers always get the short end of the stick in free trade agreements,” he told me. In roughly the decade after 2000, more than 42,000 U.S. factories closed, some due to recession; but most moved overseas. Around 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost. The most straightforward approach is, as part of the trade treaty, to have the U.S. government give vouchers to finance retraining in communities that lose many jobs. In 2015 house Democrats voted down a provision in Obama’s trade program that provided assistance to displaced workers.263 Typical support is for one semester in community college—“not enough so that the machinist can retrain as a plumber,” Paul pointed out. We’ve also built into our tax code incentives for companies to move overseas. Changing the tax code and trade adjustment vouchers should both be bipartisan objectives.264
Abortion. Kristin Luker’s 1984 study found most pro-choice advocates were college graduates who had incomes in the top 10% of working women, whereas pro-life women were less likely to be employed, earned less when they were, and were married to blue-collar workers or small business owners.265 The abortion debate is about gender, but it’s also about class conflict.
To many in the working class, abortion signals the elite’s obsession with self-development and self-actualization, its idolatry of work, and the professional class’s devaluation of family life. As the abortion rights movement has gradually learned, the best slogans are not “My Body, My Choice”—too self-focused to resonate outside the movement—but “Pro-Child, Pro-Choice, Pro-Family.” Anyone who truly values healthy families should support the choices of adults who don’t want children. Raising them is rewarding but difficult—so difficult that everyone who values families should help ensure that adults who don’t want kids don’t have them. This framing won’t resolve the conflict, but at least it deflates the argument that abortion rights are anti-family.
Immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment is very real; the first step is to attend to the economic woes of the working class. An important message is that immigrants typically do jobs whites don’t want, from backbreaking farm work to bussing tables. Many working-class whites have a stake in immigration reform. Small business owners will be hurt by criminalizing the hardworking bussers and dishwashers who keep their restaurants open. Here in California, farmers are nearly as concerned about the lack of immigration reform as progressives, because strict immigration laws prevent farmers from employing a stable work force.266
Civil liberties. These can be framed to appeal to the high value that working-class whites place on privacy (“not spilling your guts”) and their distrust of big government. Having a registry of Muslims is a classic example of government waste: 99.99% of Muslims aren’t terrorists. What a waste of money to keep track of the God-fearing, law-abiding 99%—money better spent on tracking down the tiny fraction of people who are terrorists, Muslims or not.
Climate change. This is a hard one, but one thing is clear. Insisting that resistance comes from plebeians too ignorant to credit science frames this issue precisely in the way most likely to enlist working-class opposition to climate change initiatives. When I hear some environmentalists talk, I feel like I’m listening to my German Jewish grandmother calling Russian Jews peasants.
Climate change is too important to be sacrificed to snobbery. Rather than turning the climate change debate into a fight over the authority of science, why not enlist the support of farmers who see the changes on the ground as desertification sets in? “Who cares why it’s happening?” one class-migrant climate activist advised. “Let’s meet them on the ground. That’s what they know, and they can see what’s happening.”
Policing and race. Perhaps no issue has proven more divisive in recent years than controversies over police shootings of African-Americans. This is an emotional and thorny topic. Here is my attempt to navigate it.
Black Lives Matter is an important movement because of the historic and continuing segregation and racism black people face in this country. Black men have been targeted by the police since policing was invented. It’s disturbing that it took the cell phone to draw national attention to the issue of police violence against African-Americans. Many of us know young black men who have been pulled over time and again. The implicit association test documents the association of black people with violence, a stereotype that can escalate police encounters at warp speed.267 “We laugh about how white perpetrators of mass murders manage to be captured alive time and time again,” wrote a friend describing her reading group of 12 black women, while African-Americans meet death at the hands of the police for selling cigarettes. In Oakland, California, near my hometown, some police sent racist texts while others were involved in a sexual misconduct scandal involving an underage girl.268 Baltimore police routinely violate constitutional rights, discriminate against African-Americans, and use excessive force, the Justice Department concluded in 2017.269 Toxic organizational cultures exist. They need to change.
At the same time, police have a stressful and dangerous job, and most work hard to do a tough job well. There are a few bad apples, but the problem goes beyond that. There also is an institutional culture that communicates . . . what exactly? That black men need to be immediately and consistently submissive? That if they don’t they present an existential threat? That would help explain Eric Garner, but not the numerous men who have been shot as they ran away. Nor does it explain the way Sandra Bland was mistreated.
All true, yet we need to discuss these pressing issues without fueling populist rage more than necessary. I spoke with a lawyer who’s a class migrant about the neighborhood where he grew up, in Staten Island, which voted heavily for Donald Trump:
It’s full of New York City civil servants—fire fighters, cops, garbage men—and Trump spoke very directly to those people. Most people are working class and antagonistic to Black Lives Matter. People are scared for the cops. After Eric Garner, one guy walked up to two cops in Brooklyn and murdered them. He made a post on social media, and then went and shot them in the head. Many people I know hate [New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio for the way he reacted to the Eric Garner thing. And police officers don’t take kindly to people saying they are racist, terrible people. Neither side is giving honest credence to what the other side is saying.
Shifting the tone of the debate about policing is similar to the shift I’ve seen in my lifetime in attitudes toward the military. When I was in my teens and images from the My Lai massacre were in the news, people spat on soldiers returning from Vietnam. Eventually we stopped. Some 40 years later, we now thank soldiers for their servi
ce. We thank them even though the military is still a very flawed institution where women soldiers fighting in Iraq were more likely to be raped by a colleague than killed by enemy fire.270 We need to change destructive organizational cultures in both the military and the police, but at the same time we must respect the women and men who do the difficult and dangerous jobs that keep the rest of us safe.
One message with the potential to enlist white working-class support to end police violence against unarmed civilians is this: Police work is hard and dangerous work most of us aren’t qualified to do. Having the courage, the composure, and the self-discipline to defuse potentially violent situations rather than escalating them—that’s rare. Most people don’t have what it takes. This argument also may help avoid situations where white juries side with the police even when the evidence suggests police have violated their own rules of engagement and constitutional norms.271
The bottom line is this. Business-as-usual in American politics means that class conflict is driving the country further and further from the mainstream, into deep wells of swirling fury. We need to defuse class conflict so we can return to common sense.
CHAPTER 14
Why Are Democrats Worse at Connecting with the White Working Class than Republicans?
“ANYBODY GONE INTO Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Barack Obama asked a baffled Iowa audience during the 2008 presidential campaign. “I don’t know what it is,” a hospital clinic assistant confided to a reporter. “Maybe it’s a Hawaiian thing.”272
It’s not a Hawaiian thing; it’s an elite thing. The class culture gap is a huge driver in American politics today. Consider: Michael Dukakis had lettuce problems, too, when he discussed endive on the campaign trail. John Kerry meant to convey youthful fitness when he released a photo of himself windsurfing; instead he communicated class privilege. Obama was derided for his awful bowling score.273
The class culture gap is driving politics in Europe, too. Three Dutch social scientists found that a pronounced increase in “cultural voting”—voting on family values and other cultural issues—accounts for most of the working class’s shift to the right both in the United States and Europe. It is “not so much those with low incomes who are socially conservative but rather those who are poorly educated,”274 they conclude, mixing important class insight with casual class affront.
Yes, politicians on the right occasionally suffer from this sort of class cluelessness as well—think of Mitt Romney’s clumsy attempts to connect with working-class Midwestern voters by, for example, mentioning that his wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” an American-made car.275 But this kind of thing is more common on the left. An Iowa attack ad famously called Howard Dean a “tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show,” which provides a thorough elision of PME folkways and Democratic politics.276
How did we get here? It started with a shift in the liberal coalition. The New Deal coalition, organized around economic issues, won the Democrats the presidency seven out of ten times between 1932 and 1968. That coalition was anchored by blue-collar workers, white Southerners, and African-Americans. But after passage of the civil rights legislation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Democrats and white southerners parted ways,277 and Democrats focused on building the other pillars of their coalition. In 1972, Democrats cemented this shift by nominating candidate George McGovern, who appealed instead to young college-educated activists.278 Now Democrats are composed of two quite different factions, wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall in 2006: “downscale” Democrats (minorities, union members, public employees, the poor) and “upscale” Democrats. Upscale Democrats include academics, librarians, psychologists, human relations managers, editors; in other words, they are the intellectual reform-minded elite, who often define themselves in opposition to the business-minded elite. “Although this well-educated, culturally libertarian, relatively affluent progressive elite forms a minority [40%] of the Democratic Party,” noted Edsall, “it is this activist stratum that sets the agenda for the Democratic Party.”279 It was true in 2006, and it remains true today.
A crucial inflection point was the 1968 Democratic convention, which featured a violent confrontation between young protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago police. Here’s how Bill Clinton described it: “The kids and their supporters saw the mayor and the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar ethnic police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft upper-class kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam.”280
The next step was for the Republican business elite to align with working-class whites. This alliance led Republicans to a defense of patriotism and family values, and with the rise of Ronald Reagan, to an overall hostility to government.
The role of big money in fueling all this is well documented.281 But it’s insulting, as Thomas Frank did in What’s The Matter with Kansas, to depict the white working class as stooges duped by big money. Big money has been effective only because working-class whites have been persuaded.
This has left progressives scratching their heads. Liberals are mystified that working-class voters support tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else. But once you understand the class culture gap, conservatives’ appeal makes more sense. Because the white working class resents programs for the poor, to the extent that benefit cuts target the poor, that’s attractive. To the extent that tax cuts for the rich hold the promise of jobs, that’s attractive, too. As unions’ strength and reach diminished, their politicized view of structural class inequalities has been replaced by a sense that unions protect good jobs for the few, while capitalists provide good jobs for the many. Arlie Hochschild describes her growing realization: “Oil brought jobs. Jobs brought money. Money brought a better life.” She describes the euphoria when a new business comes to town. “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism,”282 mused one of her Tea Party friends.
As progressives’ attention shifted to issues of peace and then equal rights and environmentalism, blue-collar workers felt abandoned. Sometimes they were: the Uber story provides an example. After taxi drivers paid $250,000 for taxi medallions (licenses that allow the holder to drive a cab), progressive San Francisco allowed Uber and other rideshare companies to break the laws taxis had to abide by, causing the value of medallions to plummet. Then the city issued even more medallions, further eroding their market value. Progressives in San Francisco had little interest in blue-collar cab drivers (many of them immigrant men of color); their solicitude was for “disruptive” companies run by the PME.283
Not only are blue-collar whites no longer the center of the progressive coalition, in some circles, they are no longer seen as part of it. In 2016 the Clinton campaign acted on the accepted wisdom that working-class whites were no longer even a part of the coalition. Bill Clinton warned repeatedly that Hillary’s campaign needed to address working-class issues. But these warnings “fell on deaf ears” as he waged “a lonely, one-man war . . . to appeal to working-class and white rural voters.” His advice was “often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map,” noted Politico.284
Why can’t Democrats just ignore this group and count on their coalition of professional-class whites and minorities to deliver elections? That didn’t work in 2016 and here’s why: the Electoral College gives the white working class out-sized political power. The Electoral College was designed to overweight the rural vote—today, that means working-class whites. We’ve all seen the electoral maps that show that vast interior of rural red rimmed by the thin blue lines of the East and West coasts. Unless hipsters move to Iowa, an infuria
ted rural electorate will continue to hold disproportionate power. For the 112 years of American history prior to the 2000 election, the candidate who won the popular vote also won the Electoral College vote.285 In the five elections since, two Democratic candidates who won the popular vote have lost the Electoral College. The system is flawed, but it’s the one we have.
The white working class is important not only for strategic but also for ethical reasons. Ideally, no politician should ignore whole swaths of the country. And the left professes to care about diversity and level playing fields. But they can barely look class issues in the eye.
In elections past, none of this mattered, because unions were influential in delivering white working-class votes for Democrats in key states, notably Michigan. But unions’ strength has contracted, from a third of the workforce 50 years ago to 6.4% of the private workforce today.286 The political impact of unions’ decreased strength cannot be overestimated. And with unions so embattled, they have less money to fund massive get-out-the-vote efforts. In 2016, union leaders openly worried about Trump’s strength even among union members. Most astonishing is that one out of five members of the American Federation of Teachers voted for Trump,287 despite the Republican assault on teachers’ unions, particularly in Wisconsin. Most of the country’s largest labor unions endorsed Clinton as early as 2015, yet many union members voted for Trump. One article quotes a union member: “Growing up we were very strong Democrats, but the Democrat party left us,” he said, and “the unions have left us, too.”288 Working-class whites blame not only government but also unions for the loss of good jobs.