Why Aren't The Democrats Working Class Heroes?

 Johann N. Neem's Revenge of the Poorly Educated: On Will Bunch’s “After the Ivory Tower Falls” in the Los Angeles Review of Books is one of several pieces I have seen lately questioning the Democrats problems with all working class workers. From where I have worked since my release from prison, I have been surprised by the working class attachment to Trump or their complete apathy towards politics (which is often the same thing).

TALK-SHOW HOST Rush Limbaugh, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom under former president Donald Trump, relied on his listeners’ resentment of college-educated folks throughout the 1990s to stoke the fires of culture war. There was something about what colleges did that convinced many of Limbaugh’s listeners that, in journalist Will Bunch’s words, “nothing in America made sense anymore.” And it was this confusion, Bunch argues in his new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It, that produced the biggest divide in American politics, between those with and without college degrees. Rather than dismiss the concerns of Limbaugh’s listeners, Bunch takes them seriously. They are not wrong to sense that “the American way of college went off the rails,” Bunch concludes.

The story begins with the real economic dislocations that accompanied globalization and increased the earnings gap between Americans with and without college degrees. But Bunch’s story ultimately is about culture, not economics. As white working-class Americans struggled to make sense of economic and cultural change, listening to Limbaugh and other talk shows let them know that “they were not alone.” For these Americans, the people responsible for their problems were neither the CEOs offshoring jobs and putting profit above American workers nor the Republicans decimating unions and embracing free-market fundamentalism. Instead, they were the educated elites (including many immigrants) who were thriving in the new economy, as well as the political leaders from both parties who didn’t do anything to help. Today, Republicans have crossed the line from criticizing to demonizing higher education. Ohio Republican Senator-elect J. D. Vance proclaimed that “the professors are the enemy,” while in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies actively threaten academic freedom.

Whether Republicans’ arguments are being made in good or bad faith, Bunch argues that “the political left in many ways had forged the ammunition […] by turning inward” and embracing “PC culture” and “identity politics.” The rise of the “Atari Democrats” in the 1980s foretold a new alliance between the values of West Coast urban elites and the Democratic Party. Today, universities are perceived as unfriendly to conservatives. Many working-class whites feel abandoned by the educated elite, not just economically but also culturally.

As the cultural gap between degree-holders and those with no degree was expanding, the United States made it more expensive to go to college. Bunch spends a good part of his book exploring why the college dream “morphed into a nightmare.” College became less affordable “right at the very moment it became critical for getting a good job.” Seeing Americans desperate for degrees, “Wall Street smelled blood in the water.” Not only did nonprofit and public universities chase student dollars, but a new breed of mercenary profit-seeking universities also sent Americans into debt without much of an education to show for it. The whole system seemed corrupt.

Solutions are proposed for both sides of the political divide.

In other words, college needs to be a public good, but the larger issue that Bunch emphasizes is our need to overcome the division of American society into the college-educated worthy and the non-college-educated unworthy. Is this possible at a time when many Republicans run against expert knowledge and treat universities as enemies? Is it possible when many Democrats find it hard to empathize with the anxieties and confusion of non-college-educated whites, seeing all their concerns through the lens of race?

Bunch thus closes his book with a call for uniform national service. He knows it’s unlikely, but it’s his reminder that as long as we do not rub elbows, as long as we live in neighborhoods divided by class, race, and education, it will be very hard for us to respect each other. And if the college-educated look down on other Americans, those other Americans may respond in anger. But that anger, justified as it might be, has unleashed many bad things—anti-intellectualism, racial resentment, nativism—that tear at the very fabric of our society.

But I was told a long time ago by my college-educated aunt that my college education would divide me from my sisters. Yes, it has to some extent, but those divisions were born before college in sibling rivalry. There is no need for snobbishness. Education means more than just book-learning. I have seen many educated morons.

That this is not a new phenomena is borne out in Mental health is not an individual matter, but a political one.

The Liberal Patriot hunts a similar game with Working-Class Politics How to Get Beyond the Identity Trap to Bring About Big Social Change, also a book review,

But if Biden is serious about advancing a blue-collar agenda, he needs to do more than push a series of concrete ideas to improve the material conditions of working-class Americans—important as those programs are for people. He must also distance himself from the race essentialism on the far left that elevates racial disparities over economic inequality and pushes divisive ideas that alienate many working-class voters of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

That’s the big takeaway message of a significant new book, No Politics But Class Politics, by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed and University of Illinois literary critic Walter Benn Michaels. Michaels and Reed argue that, “Racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn’t what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won’t eliminate it." 

 Reed, who is black, and Michaels, who is white, are leftists who are far more radical than Biden and most Democrats (or me.) But the series of essays and interviews compiled in their book has an important overall message: the fashionable views of highly-educated whites on how to address racial inequality are backfiring, particularly for poor black people.

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...In adopting this racial program, Michaels and Reed say, highly-educated white liberals display four problems:  

(1) They misdiagnose the nature of racism, which is not just an end in itself but a means to advance economic interests; 

(2) They cynically divert attention from bedrock issues of class inequality that are more expensive to address and require greater financial sacrifice from highly-educated whites;

(3) They unwittingly feed right-wing efforts to divide and conquer multiracial working-class coalitions that are necessary for social change; and

(4) They advance a “trickle down” approach to inequality that ultimately hurts working-class black Americans. 

The remainder of the article fleshes out these problems and their solutions. It may be my age, it may be what I saw growing up - of working class whites and blacks getting the same union wages and the neutralizing of racial issues - influences me to say that addressing class issues will help the racial issues. i do nto tsee emphasizing racial issues ameliorates either problem

At the end, Liberal Patriot crosses over to the area of the Los Angeles Review of Books review:

But Biden could and must do more. One important test will come sometime in the next four months—probably June—when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on whether Harvard and the University of North Carolina can continue to use racial preferences in college admissions, preferences that tend to benefit the most advantaged students of color.  

Most observers expect the Supreme Court to curtail or strike down these preferences, and Biden will surely be tempted to denounce the decisions as racist or racially insensitive, perhaps drawing parallels to the Supreme Court’s worst decisions on race like the “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. 

That approach would be unwise in a county where 74 percent of all Americans—including 59 percent of black people—think race should not be a factor in college admissions. What Biden can and should say is that working-class people of all races deserve a leg up in admissions. A disproportionate share of the beneficiaries of an economic-based boost will necessarily be black and Hispanic, which is a good thing in light of our nation’s history of discrimination. But working-class white and Asian students will also benefit, as they should, given the challenges they face.  

I think this writer has the correct idea for Biden. It would also be a good idea for all elected Democrats to make this the party line. 

Now, he is not a Democrat, but Bernie Sanders is kicking up a fuss for the working class that, if as The Jacobin's Bernie Sanders’s Interrogation of Howard Schultz Made Democrats Pick a Side, the Democrats are following.

Schultz’s denials of illegal union busting, Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told the former CEO, were “akin to someone who has been ticketed for speeding a hundred times saying, ‘I’ve never violated the law, because every single time — every single time — the cop got it wrong.’ That would not be a believable contention.”

t was important that the excoriations of Starbucks came from Murphy and indeed, all the Democrats present, not only from Sanders. All Democrats present expressed support for the workers and harsh condemnation for Starbucks. None of them went easy on Schultz — not even Senator Patty Murray, who represents Washington State, where the company is headquartered and who has received campaign contributions from Schultz. She questioned Schultz about complaints from workers, saying that she was “troubled” and “disappointed” to hear about the company’s widespread union-busting efforts.

The working class may find the educated easy targets for their resentments, but if they think the Republicans are truly their friends, they do so to their own detriment.

Republicans seemed amused to find themselves defending a known Democrat like Schultz but made clear that their commitment to capital and their class solidarity with bosses eclipsed any other values they might espouse. Mitt Romney joked about the oddity of finding himself, as a Republican and a Mormon who eschews coffee for religious reasons, on Schultz’s side, but quickly pivoted into a full-throated defense of the ownership class.

“It’s somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job,” Romney said to Schultz. “And yet they believe that they know better how to do so.”

Like most anti-union ideologists, the Senate Republicans effused over the importance of supporting unions in other far-flung situations, unions in the past (back in the dark days when workers were exploited) or those supporting the Keystone Pipeline (of course), but repeatedly insisted that Starbucks didn’t need a union.

There is a reason that Republicans prefer the under-educated (and i do not necessarily eliminate the college-educated from that group), they can more easily manipulate them. Just take a look at the educational system Republicans constructed for Indiana. Even worse is what DeSantis has begun in Florida. The Republicans will use working class resentments for maintaining their power. They would never change the economic class disparities which underlie those resentments. The Democrats would if they wake up in enough time to remember their own history.

There may be profit if any reads this for them to also read  Alan Jacobs's David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics Between enthusiasm and superstition.

And because I am tired of being tiresome today, because I do not think anyone will pay attention, because without a change we are doomed to a fascist future for it will be from the working class the fascists will recruit, I leave with this:

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