for as long as the left has not been about the working class and been about university educated white collar government workers this has been true though. It may have been true prior to that too i just dont have living memory to back it up. There is something about being removed from the reality of how the metaphorical sausage is made that turns the left from having some valid concerns but usually wrong ideas on how to address them into actively incomptent civilization destroyers. I would love to know why.
When you go back to The New Deal, its absolutely the case that the Dem coalition was much more effective at delivery. To some extent because FDR acted very aggressively with executive action.
My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition. It would be far more effective in a number of ways... with broader appeal.
>My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition
They need to run the goddamn country.
Whether it's liberal white women with their whole foods and Starbucks or conservative men with their 100k pickup trucks the morals and political whims of "people rich enough to not get fairly instantly screwed if they make bad decisions" have been a disaster for this country.
It’s a different coalition now though. The FDR Democrats were labor focused. Then the 60s happened. The New Left student movements reoriented away from labor and towards racial/gender/sexual equality, and Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act. Southern whites opposed this and you had George Wallace pop up, splitting the Democrats, and then Nixon swooped in with the Southern Strategy. The Democrats needed a new coalition and they went with disadvantaged racial/gender/sexual groups instead of labor.
The transition didn’t really finish until Clinton and the New Democrats though. Campaign money and TV ads got to be really important in Presidential politics, and to get that money, Democrats had to appeal to rich people, so they got rid of most of the labor aspects of the platform. Clinton signed NAFTA and MFN for China. Now there were two pro-business parties that served different identity groups. Ironically the last gasp of labor was the billionaire Ross Perot in 92 and 96 who ran on an anti-NAFTA platform. The only way he could do this credibly was to use his own money to buy TV time.
Now come on, man. There's no explaining the decline of organized labor in the Democratic Party without the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Probably so. I don't know enough about the politics at that time though.
Kennedy did not sign the Civil Rights Act, Kennedy was dead. He wanted it, but it never got any support until after his assassination. It was LBJ who got bipartisan support for the bill. After it passed and LBJ used federal powers to force southern states to stop being so racist, many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
The democrats did not leave their labor base. The Democrats have never stopped pushing labor rights and unions and similar.
The voters who were pissed with being forced to desegregate left the democrat party. Turns out there were a lot of people who thought it was more important to be able to be racist than unionized.
I don't know why you believe billionaire Ross Perot, Texas businessman and prominent supporter of the war on drugs, who told Larry King that we should "cut medicare and social security for those who """don't need it""" " is "pro labor" ffs. He's the same kind of "we should run the country like a business" populist as Reagan and Trump, and just as wrong. He was literally a big supporter of Reagan as Reagan dismantled Unions and union rights!
NAFTA did not send your job to China, business executives did. Business executives like Ross Perot, who made his money selling computing services to the US government, and didn't really do much else before or since.
Even if NAFTA had been completely blocked, average Americans would still have been screwed from Reagan's changes to the country. Underpaid workers in other countries are not getting all the money, surely you recognize that right? The money never even leaves the country.
> many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
In this case, "many" is at most 2.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators... Thurmond was the only US senator who switched parties in the 60s. Harry Byrd (from Virginia, not Robert from West Virginia) stopped caucusing with Dems in 1970.
No other US senators switched parties until 94.
Before Thurmond, the previous switch was by Morse (Oregon) who went from Republican to Democrat in 53-55.
The same seems to be true of the House of Representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_represen... .
Pretty much every prominent Dem segregationist only left office when he retired.
That's why the "first Republican elected since Reconstruction" events didn't start until the mid 70s and didn't really get going until the mid 80s.
You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.
Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.
NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.
Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.
Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.
The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate. He wasn't authoritarian, he was operating with the clearest mandate America had until Reagan (not that I agree with the mandate Reagan was handed and followed through on)
The reason he was able to threaten the Supreme Court with packing is that it was a credible threat.
The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it. Several prominent (terrible human beings) Dixiecrats screamed about "Democrat authoritarianism" for (checks notes) forcing southern states to stop being racist as fuck, and the south has been thoroughly republican voters since. Don't worry though, Strom Thurmund insists he wasn't a racist, he is just against being forced to allow black people to get the same legal treatment as white people.
A bunch of racists aren't willing to support welfare and public investment if black people get it. How do you form a coalition between them and black people?
These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans, and they do not care about the rest.
FDR had this support because Americans rallied behind the New Deal because 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. That's the pain it took before America was willing to do socialism-lite.
If you want democrat policy, you need to elect them. Simple as.
> The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate.
FDR directly embedded his staff in Congress and told them what they were going to do, and vigorously attacked anyone who got in the way of his agenda by any means necessary, including using the FBI and IRS against them, denying them federal funds, etc. He also was very effective at bullying the press - look at what went on with radio licenses. He even (via the Black Committee and FCC) conducted mass surveillance on his political enemies.
FDR did have a lot of support in Congress but brutally punishing people is what made him effective. He was certainly one of the most authoritarian Presidents in American history and we should probably thank our lucky stars he was a good one.
> These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans
I really want to know when this was because all the men (white or not) who worked the mills and the mines in my memory were effectively functional alcoholics because life sucked so much.
Its anemoia - nostalgia for a time you didn't live through.
They don't want the actual 50s, they want an illusion of what they saw on TV shows depicting white, wealthy, suburbia.
> The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it.
Odd, that the working class stayed with the Democrats for half a century after your claimed divergence.
It is true that progressive politics played a major role in the shift in the 2010s. But neither is that equivalent to the CRA, nor does it answer the question of why the working class reoriented around stupid bullshit. That latter, deeper issue has to do with the governing and professional classes of the US, which have shifted toward symbolic and procedural issues over broad material wellbeing, mostly because symbolic shit doesn't adversely affect professional classes' pocketbooks that much.
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.
The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.
It hasn't always been that way. The US political left did used to focus more on working-class issues. They only really lost the plot in the early 2000s when they started navel gazing on performative ideology and luxury beliefs, leading to an inversion in some of the voting blocks for the two major political parties.
It’s universities. I’ve seen this myself - universities are the heart and souls of the American left. It used to be the labor hall.
The universities could have continued in their socially productive capacity if their leadership realized their obligations should take precedence over career advancement. Instead, they chose to embrace cost disease. The reactionary right remains committed to finishing off whatever remains.
More importantly what that did was split the working class. Even in this very thread there's people referring to the "working class" as if they also aren't in it.
If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
If we want solidarity again we need to dispel the notion of working class meaning poor, blue collar workers. We've been pitted against ourselves, our divide shouldn't be left v. right it should be ALL working class against the ultra-rich.
> "If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class."
TIL that CEOs and other C-level executives (ones hired from the outside by the board, not founders) are working class. It's a definition that is clearly too broad to be useful.
>If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
The petty bourgeoisie is a thing, and if you receive stock-grants as part of your pay-package, you're in it. You own real-estate in an expensive city where your property is an appreciating asset? You're in it.