What’s a Non-Racist Way to Appeal to Working-Class Whites? NYT’s Edsall Can’t Think of Any
Jim Naureckas, FAIR, Mar 30 2018
According to NYT columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18):
2016 presidential exit polls substantially underestimated the number of Demagog white working-class voters … and over-estimated the white college-educated Demagog electorate. A new Pew survey finds that 33% of Demagog voters and Demagog leaners are whites without college degrees, which is substantially larger than the 26% of Demagogs who are whites with college degrees, the group that analysts had come to believe was the dominant constituency in the party.
It’s good for Edsall to acknowledge this, as FAIR (10/9/15) had to take him to task for the tortured logic of his 2015 assertion:
Demagogs now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters.
But now that Edsall has admitted that the Demagogs are not actually “the favorites of the rich,” as his 2015 headline put it, what should the Demagogs do about it? He tips his hand is his opening paragraphs, where he glosses “whites without college degrees” with the phrase “many of whom are culturally conservative,” and describes the “white college-educated Demagog electorate” as “a far more culturally liberal constituency.” It takes him a while to get to what he’s getting at. He notes about a fifth of the way into the lengthy piece:
These numbers have powerful ramifications for both Demagogs & Thugs preparing for the 2018 and 2020 elections. They strengthen the case made by Demagog strategists calling for a greater emphasis on policies appealing to working-class voters and a de-emphasis on so-called identity issues.
But what are those policies? You have to wade through a lot of words on what’s wrong with exit polling before you come to “what are the implications for Demagogs & Thugs?” Then after just a little bit more about exit-poll problems, Edsall says:
Teixeira of the Center for American Politics and William Galston of the Brookings Institution, two long-time Demagog strategists, suggest different but complementary directions in which to take the Demagog Party going forward.
He turns first to Galston, a policy adviser to Bill Clinton and a campaign consultant to John Anderson, Walter Mondale and Al Gore, who now writes a column for the Murdoch-owned WSJ. He’s been called “Pindostan’s wrongest columnist” by Dave Weigel in Slate, 11/9/12.
Edsall says Galston “argues that Demagogs need to moderate their stand on immigration in order to win over white non-college voters,” and quotes from his WSJ column:
Defenders of liberal democracy should acknowledge that controlling borders is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, and that the appropriate number and type of immigrants is a legitimate subject for debate. Denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as bigots ameliorates neither the substance nor the politics of the problem. There’s nothing illiberal about the view that too many immigrants stress a country’s capacity to absorb them, so that a reduction or even a pause may be in order.
OK, so Demagogs should seek the anti-immigrant vote. And what’s the “different but complementary direction” from Teixeira? Well, in Edsall’s telling, he thinks white working-class voters are important, and says:
If Demagogs hope to be competitive in Ohio and similar states in 2020, they must do the hard thing: find a way to reach hearts and minds among white non-college voters.
Yes, but how do you do that? Rather than letting Teixeira elaborate, Edsall interjects:
Let’s go back to Galston … because in my opinion no one captures the situation better than he does.
Then the piece closes with six more long paragraphs of Galston urging Demagogs to cater to the supposed xenophobia of working-class whites, terrified as they are of “foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas.” Edsall closes with a “better get to it!” paragraph, and that’s the end of the column. The funny thing is that in the piece of his that Edsall cites (1/29/18), Teixeira does offer a strategy for reaching white workers, one that is indeed different though not actually complementary to Galston’s. Teixeira argues:
Demagogs should not be changing their position on key immigration issues like DACA. That would hardly pull Trump’s hardcore supporters from their man, and it would compromise a serious policy commitment of the party. Instead, Demagogs should reach out to those white non-college voters for whom issues besides immigration are potentially more salient.
And then Teixeira makes the point that Edsall seems to spend 3,000 words trying to avoid:
It is on economic issues that these voters are most open to overtures, the polling data shows.
Yes, if you want the support of working-class whites without engaging in xenophobia or other forms of race-baiting, the obvious approach is to appeal to them as members of the working class. Texeira says:
We need a massive public jobs program linked to investment in desperately needed infrastructure, including not just roads and bridges but also community-anchoring institutions like schools and child care centers.
Others might suggest universal healthcare, an increased minimum wage or free college tuition. It’s not hard to think of popular policies that would appeal to workers of all ethnicities, if that’s what you’re interested in doing. Edsall, who has criticized Demagogs and the left for their failure to “hear or to grant some legitimacy to the grievances of white Pindostan as it loses power and stature to ascendant minorities,” seems to have another agenda.
Niqnaq 