Recently I found myself having great difficulty breathing, ultimately ending up in a hospital emergency room at NYU Langone Health. After a few hours of tests, I was sent to a large, airy room in the cardiac unit where my heart was monitored. Linked to many wires and anxious, I spent a sleepless night having my temperature and blood pressure taken every few hours. It was Nov. 3, so my sleeplessness was spent fitfully watching MSNBC on a giant TV screen that highlighted election results and discussion between Rachel Maddow and other of my favorite anchors that preside over the station’s daily political programs.
I am obsessed with the political course of the country, and was dreaming of a Trump loss and a Democratic sweep of both houses, so I was far from exhilarated by Tuesday night’s results. I may have been more disturbed by the fact that Trump received 70 million votes than that I need TAVR surgery to replace a heart valve. The fact is that Trump is still extremely popular with the white, non-college-educated working and lower middle classes, and even a pragmatic, centrist, blue-collar-tinged Biden cannot reach them. Though I have a feeling he did much better with them and suburban women than my preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would ever have achieved. The party’s progressive wing may talk to me and to Berkeley, Cambridge and Seattle, but not to “the people.”
There was once a time in the ‘30s and ‘40s when the white working class and their unions were one of the mainstays of the New Deal and then Truman’s Fair Deal. They also were willing to engage in many militant strikes and sit-ins. In the mid-‘30s, FDR passed a flurry of legislation that would come to be known as the “Second New Deal.” The Social Security Act and Aid to Families with Dependent Children both provided old-age insurance and relief to poor families. In addition, the Second New Deal greatly expanded public works programs.
Most importantly for the working class, the Second New Deal helped energize the U.S. labor movement by providing federal recognition of the right to organize. That led to the creation of the CIO in 1935 by John L. Lewis, who was a head of the United Mine Workers. In 1938 the CIO broke away from the American Federation of Labor. Both the CIO and its rival, the AFL, grew rapidly during the Great Depression. The aim of the CIO was to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial not craft union lines — the auto industry rather than carpenters.
Union workers were dependable members of the liberal wing of the party until the ‘60s, when the war in Vietnam split them from the anti-war coalition in the Democratic Party. In addition, unions declined to 10.3 percent of the labor force by 2020, when they were once one-quarter of that force in the 1980.
Trump knew exactly how to appeal to the white working class by promoting racism, anti-immigration and anti-“socialist” sentiment, a commitment to anti-abortion and stoking the resentment of elites (e.g, media, urbanites, even intelligence agencies) to hold a 60-34 percent lead over Joe Biden among whites without a college degree before the election and win by similar numbers on Election Day. When the term “working class” is used, it’s non-college-educated that is now the primary basis for what is meant. It includes small-business owners and various “white collar” workers (those in service jobs) and “pink collar” (jobs traditionally held by women, such as caregiving roles).
How to reach some of the group is the question, especially if economic entreaties become less significant than cultural- and identity-oriented appeals.
However, as the days pass and Biden wins, I hear the honking and cheering in the streets, which, if I were younger and not ill, I would happily join.
Biden’s victory ushers in at least a reign of decency, humanity and stability. And there will be a different, more caring and able order of men and women who will be appointed to the Cabinet and to head the regulatory agencies. But Biden will still be delimited by McConnell’s ominous power, and by a country whose working class wants a corrupt autocrat and performer to rule them.
