Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?
The
conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card.
In
the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George
C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.
Later,
Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft
on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified
blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).
The
bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican
rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and
Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who
don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”
All
true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white
working class.
Democrats
have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in
that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable
Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical
Leave Act, for example.
But
they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has
rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the
working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it.
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They
also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white
working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose
meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form
unions with a simple up-or-down votes.
I
was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t
want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same
promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.
Partly
as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was
elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost
bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
In
addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences
of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but
let millions of underwater homeowners drown.
Both
Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the
result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.
Finally,
they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first
presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his
primary and general-election campaigns.
And he never followed up on his
reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning
“Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates
to big money in politics.
What
happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts,
growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform?
You
shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working
class.
Why
haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced
increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of
Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.
In
part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter”
– so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent
professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes.
Meanwhile,
as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough
as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.
“Business
has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the
majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head
of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats
assumed they’d continue to run the House for years.
Coelho’s
Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from
corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a
Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big
corporations and the Street.
Nothing
in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working
class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of
whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in
wealth and power to the top.
This
would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy –
rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing
concentration of wealth and power in America.
But
to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban
swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall
Street, and the wealthy.
Will
they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and
beyond.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California
at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He
served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time
Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the
twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best sellers
“Aftershock, “The Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and,
his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of
the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
