This week a few members of my family were in town. It was great to see them all. I had not seen some of the them for over two years.
I spent a great deal of time talking to my brother and my step-father about politics and the state of the country, both of whom are white, evangelical members of the working class which has caused such angst among Democratic Party leaders and strategists. My step-father was particularly interesting to talk to. As a 27 year employee at General Motors, Bob's perspective was extremely enlightening to me.
Bob consistently votes Republican now-a-days, mainly on cultural grounds, a fact that continues to surprise me, given his membership in one the last premier unionized blue-collar jobs left in America. What surprised me even more was the fact that it really didn't have to be this way with him. When all you hear is the likes of theo-crazies like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, you tend to expect the same stuff from their constituents. In Bob's case, I heard nothing of the kind.
Listening to Bob, I struck by how accurate Stanley Greenberg's diagnosis had been in The Two Americas. Greenberg believes that the Democrats swept to power in '92 with a golden oppurtunity to realign the electorate after the end of the Cold War and the corporate excesses of the Reagan era. He suggests that Bill Clintons's greatest failure was his abandonment of the middle class, particularly the white working class.
As I spoke to Bob, I realized how accurate this was. To hear him tell it, their union organizers had pushed hard for Clinton during the '92 election, and received one of the great economic brushoffs in American history for their effort. During the rest of the 90's, the Clinton adminstration consistently sided with Wall Street over organized labor, the highlight of which was, of course, NAFTA. From Bob's perspective, it has been an awefully long time since anyone in government did anything for him and his fellow workers. I can certainly understand his disillusionment and willingness to begin casting his votes on cultural issues, since to vote for economic reasons has gotten them nowhere.
There really is simply no justification for all of this. Culturally conservative workers like Bob are absolutely right when they claim that both parties long ago sold out to the big campaign donors on Wall Street and in Corporate America.
I came away from my time with my family with a new appreciation for the Ralph Nadar movement in 2000. Yes, it did bring Bush to power, and in retrospect, that is plenty enough reason not to have joined it. Yet, given the circumstances at the time, was a protest vote really so uncalled for?
Anyway, one thing is certain, Liberalism as a political movement and the Democratic Party very clearly can not afford to elect another president with Bill Clinton's kind of indiffence to the best interests of the party he leads--even if that individual happens to be his wife. Neither, for that matter, can America.