Redneck Revolt Says Deal With Racism First, Then Economics

[JHan]

4. Yep, and it was seen in the compromises with the dixiecrats when the New Deal was being formulated.

But as a concept "identity politics"is nothing new. Conventional wisdom among the anti-identity politics brigade is that this is some kind of new cynical move by modern liberals to pander to groups when Truman himself recognized "identity politics" - and he followed FDR.

this memo from Clark Clifford “THE POLITICS OF 1948” (1947) about the re-election of Truman is revealing. http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/clifford.htm

"President Truman will be elected if the Administration will successfully concentrate on the traditional Democratic alliance between the South and West. It is inconceivable that any policies initiated by the Truman Administration no matter how "liberal" could so alienate the South in the next year that it would revolt. As always, the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy, it can be safely ignored.

The only pragmatic reason for conciliating the South in normal times is because of its tremendous strength in the Congress. Since the Congress is Republican and the Democratic President has, therefore, no real chance to get his own program approved by it, particularly in an election year, he has no real necessity for “getting along” with the Southern conservatives. He must, however, get along with the Westerners and with labor if he is to be reelected.

The Administration is, for practical purposes, politically free to concentrate on the winning of the West. If the Democrats carry the solid South and also those Western states carried in 1944, they will have 216 of the required 266 electoral votes. And if the Democratic Party is powerful enough to capture the pest, it will almost certainly pick up enough of the doubtful Middlewestern and Eastern states to get 50 more votes (e.g. Missouri's 14 votes). We could lose New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Massachusetts -- all the "big" states -- and still win.

Therefore, political and program planning demands concentration upon the West and its problems, including reclamation, floods, and agriculture. It is the Number One Priority for the 1948 campaign, The Republican Congress has already done its share to give the West to the Administration."

He then goes on to assess the different demographic groups Democrats would have to reach out to: catholics, italians, jews, "negroes" etc etc.

The main reason people have such difficulty with this I believe is that Class has never really been acknowledged in America, because America is not ethnically homogeneous. America's founding was built on a racial caste system so you can't thread race and class separately . It always strikes me that in America , race is discussed the way class is discussed in other countries.

What compounds this problem is that the white working class -specifically white males - are seen as neutral (supposedly neither motivated by race nor gender) and without an identity of their own - and this is wrong, wrong in the present day and historically wrong.