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.
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