Burying the white working class

[nxylas]

Apologies if this has been posted before:

MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald claimed, “Many attributed the outcome to West Virginia voters’ discomfort with Obama’s race. The state is one of the whitest in the country.” To be fair, it’s now widely known that Hillary Clinton keeps hot sauce in her purse at all times.

These kinds of statements are the name of the game for today’s Democratic elite. The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care. As liberal hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist — it’s that it’s not even true. The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda. And it’s even less interested in that specific chunk of the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality of the economic system they cherish.

More at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/white-workers-bernie-sanders-clinton-primary-racism/

[ViseGrip]

1. kick....

[NewImproved Deal]

2. The apologists here for the Former First Lady...

...always inject gratuitous and vicious White-Bashing into discussion threads. Why is this one form of Racism not only acceptable, but fashionable among "New Democrats"?

[silvershadow]

3. kick

[appalachiablue]

4. Some real truth here, about the punditocracy and who they represent, the professional,

elite, Uber loving 'creative' class for damn sure.
Excerpts.
Instead of acknowledging the size and importance of this part of the electorate, Democratic Party elites have simply constructed a new narrative to suit their interests — a narrative that was on display after West Virginia. Following Sanders’s win a significant chunk of the punditocracy came to the conclusion, mostly by abusing the hell out of exit polls, that a vote for the Jewish socialist was actually a vote for white supremacy.

..After decades of being told white workers would never support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the socialist candidate because they are racist. Yes, this is where liberals are in the year 2016.
Unfortunately, the miseries, hardships, and exploitation of white workers don’t fit into an easy capital-friendly framework. Liberals then have two options: blame the individual moral failings of white workers or call into question the very nature of capitalism itself.
Guess which one they choose. More and more, liberals just point and scream: “racist.” Certainly, many members of the white working class reject the Obama/Clinton program of inclusion and meritocracy for reactionary reasons (and vote Republican), many more are pretty lukewarm about it. When polled, they support far more egalitarian policies like the kind associated with the Sanders campaign. But when it comes down to it, few of them show up on election day.
And frankly, it’s hard to blame them. There’s not much in it for them. There’s no political party looking out for their interests — only ones telling them to do more with less.

The working class is central to a meaningful progressive politics because they have the numbers, the economic incentive and the potential power to halt capital in its tracks — to check the power of our ruling class and build a truly democratic society out of this miserable oligarchy we all find ourselves stuck in today.
It becomes clearer every year, particularly with Sanders’s popularity, that the American ruling class has made out like bandits simply by keeping portions of the large (and potentially powerful) working class from uniting in a single political party behind even a social-democratic program. And that such a scenario would be nothing short of a disaster for them.

It’s obvious that this kind of popular politics will never be built if segments of the working class — much less a majority of it — are written off. So when I hear liberal pundits saying that white workers are morally compromised beyond hope or on the way to irrelevance, I tend to get a little suspicious. But when those same pundits claim — despite all evidence to the contrary — that most of these workers are more invested in cultivating racism than their own material and social emancipation, I think it’s time to stop listening to them altogether. Because they’re not just wrong anymore. They’re on the wrong side.

[BillZBubb]

5. This was the goal of the Third Way. Throw the working class out the window.

They did it with the help of many so-called liberals--who were really only marginally liberal on social issues, but downright conservative on economic and foreign policy. The sad part is that they don't see themselves that way, because in relation to how far to the right the republicans have moved, they know they aren't that far out there, so they must be liberal.

The Democratic establishment now doesn't want to talk about class or corporate power. They certainly aren't prepared to really fight for the poor or even the middle class, much less taking on instead in buttressing corporate power.

Sad days.

[hopemountain]

6. yes. their greed

and hard hearts clouds even their common sense.

[historylovr]

7. K & R