At one time in America, the kind of people who today make up the White working class and White middle America were at the forefront of the liberal tradition.
While Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are not viewed fondly by liberals today, the fact is they were the founders of the liberal tradition in America. It was they who railed against income inequality and the outsize power and influence of the wealthy, the powerful, and of business and financial interests.
As the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Age of Jackson:
American democracy has come to accept the struggle among competing groups for the control of the state as a positive virtue – indeed, as the only foundation for liberty. The business community has been ordinarily the most powerful of these groups, and liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community. This was the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, and it has been the basic meaning of American liberalism. (Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, 505)
And they got their support from the “common man” who were mainly White men of average means, usually wage earners or small yeoman farmers.
From Jeffersonian Democracy, to Jacksonian Democracy, the Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the push for the first progressive income tax, to the New Deal, it was often common White folks from middle America who fueled these movements. The original “What’s The Matter Kansas” was an editorial written in 1896 by a young newspaper man named William Allen White, in which White ranted against the wild-eyed Populists who had taken over his state (ironically White would be converted into a leading progressive voice over the course of the next decade).
In 1912 the state of Oklahoma gave 14% of its presidential vote to Socialist Eugene Debs, and in rural Winn Parish, Louisiana, Debs won a plurality of the vote. In 1924 the Progressive Party ticket, which ran on nationalizing railroads and water systems and was endorsed by the Socialist Party of America, won the state of Wisconsin, along with 45% of the vote in North Dakota and 37% in Montana.
A decade later Winn Parish, Louisiana’s favorite son, Huey Long, took the nation by storm with his Share Our Wealth movement, a program that was explicitly about redistribution of wealth, and which got most of its support from working and lower middle class Southern White folks and urban White wage earners. The big tax, regulatory, and spending programs of the New Deal had overwheling support from rural voters, particularly in the South.
All the great progressive-populist movements of the 1930s that pushed the New Deal in a bolder direction — the labor movement, the Townsend movement, the Farmer’s Holiday movement, the Bonus Army, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, the Progressive Party of Wisconsin — got their support mostly from working class Whites and White middle America.
But there was no mistaking that America turned in a more conservative direction in the years 1937-1938 and beyond. In 1937 Democratic Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina issued a Conservative Manifesto that a number of Republicans and Southern Democrats signed onto. In 1938 the Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and mostly Midwestern Republicans began its dominance over Congress, in which they blocked all further New Deal legislation, and rolled back programs like the Federal Writers’ Project and Federal Theatre Project. The Democratic majority in the House fell from 246 seats after the 1936 elections to just 13 after 1942.
Historian Alan Brinkley, in The End of Reform, explained the shift in attitudes after 1938:
The erosion of congressional support for liberal measures did not, of course, occur in a vacuum. It reflected a broad growing popular impatience with the New Deal – and with the taxes, deficits, and expansion of bureaucracy that many voters associated with it...Opinion polls recorded rising opposition to New Deal relief agencies and support for their abolition; deepening hostility to the conduct (although not the fact) of labor unions and their leaders, and increasing sentiment for laws to forbid strikes; growing resentment of government regulation and support for the prerogatives of business. (Brinkley, The End of Reform, 142-43)
In a startling indication of how much the political terrain had changed, a 1939 Gallup poll found that 55% of Americans preferred the ideas of Big Business to that of the Roosevelt Administration, 63% thought the Roosevelt Administration’s attitude toward business was hindering recovery, and 50% believed the economy would be better under a Republican President. A Gallup poll two months before the 1940 election found that if there was no war in Europe, Americans would’ve preferred Wendell Willkie over FDR by 53-47% (The Gallup Poll, Public Opinion, 1935-1971).
In 1946, just 10 years after the wipeout of 1936 when the GOP had just 88 House seats and 16 Senate seats, the Republicans retook control of Congress. In 1947 Congress, with the votes of numerous Democrats particularly from the South, passed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto. From 1945-1957 the minimum wage was raised just once. Despite having solid Democratic majorities between 1949-53, Truman’s Fair Deal, which included a national health care program, went down to defeat.
Control of Congress bounced back and forth between 1946-1958, but the Conservative Coalition was really in charge during this period, and this continued even as Democrats regained their stranglehold over Congress (which they controlled from 1958 through 1980). For JFK’s three years in office, despite having sizable Democratic majorities, his agenda was dead in the water. Only the confluence of three earth-shaking factors — the public’s desire to fulfill JFK’s agenda in the wake of his assassination, the once in a lifetime legislative talents of LBJ, and the people power of the Civil Rights Movement — broke the dam built by the Conservative Coalition. And the dam was only broken for three years between 1964-66.
The country's conservative turn was also evident in the way politicians and certain states and regions shifted. In the South, New Dealers like Richard Russell, James Byrnes, Tom Connally, and Lyndon Johnson shifted rightward along with their constituents. In Louisiana Huey Long’s Senate seat was eventually filled by his brother Russell Long, who became known as fiscal conservative, friend of his state’s powerful interests, and proponent of business tax breaks.
But it was not just a southern phenomenon. The Progressive Party of Wisconsin, led by the La Follette brothers Phillip and Robert, Jr., won the governor’s mansion and 7 of the state’s 10 congressional seats in 1934. But just 12 years later the Progressive Party had been dissolved, and in the GOP Senate primary Robert, Jr. lost his seat to a red-baiting, far right-wing upstart named Joseph McCarthy.
In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964, in the essay titled "What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?", historian Richard Hofstadter offered this observation on how the political mood had shifted:
"it is very difficult for anyone who reads widely in the political literature of the period 1890-1914 to believe that public concern today over big business has anything like the sense of urgency that it had then."
He continued, citing a poll taken by the University of Michigan in 1951:
"In fact, big business power was ranked third among five forces - behind national government and labor unions and ahead of state governments and smaller business. Stronger feeling was shown against labor unions than against big business. There was a fraction of the public that saw big business as more powerful than labor unions and would have liked to see the situation reversed; but there was a fraction almost twice as large that saw unions as more powerful and would have preferred to see the situation reversed."
As for why Whites, and particularly working class Whites, became more conservative in the postwar years, perhaps the most important reason was that more of them were becoming middle class and thus began having different economic priorities. As Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz pointed out in their study, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class:
Using a broad income-based definition of the white working class, 86 percent of American families in 1947 were white families with less than $60,000 in income (2005 dollars). With rising affluence—especially rapid in the period from 1947 to 1973—and the decline in the white population, that percentage had declined to 33 percent by 2005.
But if the political mood had become more conservative, at least at the presidential level Democrats were still mostly winning working class Whites, especially in the South. Adlai Stevenson, a northern intellectual, still won big in the Deep South in his two presidential runs. In 1960 and 1964, JFK and LBJ won an average of 55% of working class Whites. I
That all changed in 1966.
As Rick Perlstein described the bloodbath that Democrats and liberalism took in the 1966 midterms in his book Nixonland:
Twenty-seven of Johnson's forty-eight Democratic freshmen were swept out – the class that had brought America the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, federal aid to education…Nine of ten new governors were Republican, twelve of thirteen Western state legislatures. Republicans now controlled statehouses representing 293 out of the 535 electoral votes. (Perlstein, Nixonland, 163)
As for what caused this electoral bloodbath, matters of race were at the forefront, and it was a northern phenomenon as much as a southern one. Regarding the defeat that year of the great liberal Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois:
A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas's 80 percent decline in the city vote since 1960. He had won Cicero that year. This time he didn't even get 25 percent there. (165)
Perlstein noted that among working class Whites voting in Ohio,
urban Poles decreased their support for Democrats by 45 percent. Thirty-six House incumbents with ratings from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education of seventy-five or higher were defeated – especially traumatic since Republicans had filibustered labor's fondest legislative wish: a repeal of the right-to-work provision of the 1947 Taft-Harley Act. Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights. (165)
White House aide Ted Van Dyk reported on the observations of a visiting group of British parliamentarians:
"They believe that backlash was far important than it might appear to be. In district after district, and city after city, they found an undercurrent of resentment concerning civil order and gains made by the Negro population." (165)
Governor Pat Brown of California, who lost his office to Ronald Reagan, commented on his defeat:
"Whether we like it or not, the people want separation of the races. Maybe they feel Lyndon Johnson has given them too much. People can only accept so much then they regurgitate." (165)
A particularly illustrative example about the extent of the White backlash can be found in Martin Luther King’s attempt to integrate working and middle class White enclaves in Cicero, Illinois. As the Chicago Tribune described it, King and other activists “called for a massive investment in the city's poorest neighborhoods. King urged peaceful protests, but demonstrators often were met with violence.”
"Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds," he later wrote. "Our marchers were met by a hailstorm of bricks, bottles, and firecrackers … I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago."
www.chicagotribune.com/...
The flight of working class Whites from the Democratic Party acutely manifested itself at the presidential in 1968 and 1972, when just 35% of working class Whites voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, a stunning drop-off from the 55% that Kennedy and Johnson won (Teixeira/Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, 9-10).
Nixon aide Kevin Phillips explained the cause of this phenomenon in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority:
The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it. Democratic "Great Society" programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation. The South, the West, and the Catholic sidewalks of New York were the focus points of conservative opposition to the welfare liberalism of the federal government; however, the general opposition ... came in large part from prospering Democrats who objected to Washington dissipating their tax dollars on programs which did them no good.
Carter broke the pattern momentarily in 1976 when he nearly broke even among Whites, boosted by strong Southern support for a favorite son. But in 1980 working class Whites swung dramatically back to the right, voting overwhelmingly for Reagan, an ardent free trader who opposed unions, advocated massive tax cuts for the rich, and proposed cuts in government program helping poor and working people. Even after Reagan made good on his program of cutting rich people’s taxes and busting unions, working class Whites voted in even greater numbers to re-elect him.
Since then working class Whites continued to vote overwhelmingly for free-trading, anti-tax, pro-big business conservatives in Bush II, John McCain, and Romney. Only this year did they break the trend by voting for an anti-trade populist in Trump.
Notably the only exception during this period was when a plurality of working class Whites twice voted for the centrist Democrat Bill Clinton, who mimicked the Republicans by running on issues like welfare reform, support of free trade, deregulation, and ending the era of big government.
While the shift of working class Whites to Republicans at the presidential level happened suddenly and en masse, they shifted at a slower rate at the congressional level, mainly because of the South’s longstanding attachment to the Democratic Party. But while the Congresses in the three decades after the passage of civil rights legislation were mostly controlled by the Democrats (the exception being the Republicans’ control of the Senate between 1981-87), policy-wise this period was decidedly conservative. Despite having majorities considerably larger than what Obama had in 2009-2011, Carter was unable to pass even the most mildly progressive legislation. By contrast a heavily Democratic House of Representatives helped to pass both of Reagan's big tax cuts in 1981 and 1986.
But the shift of working class Whites and White middle America to the Republicans at the presidential level finally caught up at the congressional level in 1994, when the South finally terminated its longtime marriage with the Democratic Party. That year the Republicans seized control of Congress and have maintained full control of Congress in most of the 2 years since.
As a NY Times piece in the aftermath of the 1994 midterms explained this shift:
The turnover in the South reflects both the South's rejection of its native son Bill Clinton and the currents of culture and race now rushing toward the Republicans as they once rushed toward the Democrats. Prominent among those currents is Congressional redistricting, which opened the door to black representation in the Democratic Party but also helped to re-create the Republicans as the party of the white South, as the Democrats once were.
To be fair, the White backlash was not driven entirely by opposition to civil rights legislation, in fact opinion polls showed that Whites had overwhelmingly supported such legislation at the time of passage. The fact is that the era between 1965-1995 saw an upsurge in crime, a swelling of welfare rolls, and an increase in out-of-wedlock births that were primarily concentrated in minority communities. That along with periodic urban rioting and breakdown in traditional cultural mores on matters like gender roles, sexuality, and drug use contributed to Whites’ increasing fears of social chaos.
Economic considerations also figured into why working class Whites spurned the New Deal Democratic Party. As Paul Starr wrote in Remedy and Reaction, his book about the struggle for health care reform in America, explaining why health care reform stalled out after the passage of Medicare and Medicaid:
the slow growth and high inflation of the mid-1970s — “stagflation” people called it — proved to be a major turning point for American society and politics.
In retrospect the mid-1970s marked the end of liberal era of shared prosperity. Since the 1940s, economic growth had been strong, income inequalities had fallen and remained low, and the middle class had expanded...But beginning in the mid-1970s, economic inequalities increased sharply, many Americans saw real declines in their incomes, and conservative anti-government and anti-tax sentiment spread. Much of the hostility focused on welfare, but the discontent affected general attitudes toward government, and in several states, notably California in 1978, voters passed referenda capping or rolling back taxes. (Starr, Remedy and Reaction, 59)
In his book Chain Reaction, Thomas Edsall explained exactly how the economic decline of the 1970s affected the Democrats’ political fortunes:
Unemployment by 1980 had risen to 7.1 percent; inflation had climbed as high as 13.5 percent; regular gasoline, in the midst of spiraling energy costs and a second OPEC oil shock, had reached $1.19 a gallon up from .35 a gallon in 1970, and interest rates had reached an extraordinary 21.5 percent. In the elections of 1978 and 1980, Democrats lost a combined total of fifteen Senate seats, fifty House seats, and the presidency. (Edsall, Chain Reaction, 17)
So obviously it was not entirely a racially and culturally-driven phenomenon.
But as I have laid out earlier in my diary, there is also no doubt that the White backlash was driven primarily by the implementation of civil rights legislation and expansion of government programs to help poor minorities, through policies like affirmative action, integration of communities and schools, the latter of which manifested itself most controversially in forced school busing.
And there is also no doubt that the turn of working class Whites away from the New Deal party and toward an alliance with small government conservatives, big business, and the wealthy, borne out of shared antipathy toward government, has had profound economic consequences for working class Whites and all of us.
As Edsall writes in Chain Reaction:
The fracturing of the Democrats’ “bottom-up” coalition permitted, in turn, those at the top of the “top-down” conservative coalition to encourage and to nurture, in the 1980s, what may well have been the most accelerated upwards redistribution of income in the nation’s history – a redistribution fed by the tax, spending, and regulatory policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. (Edsall, Chain Reaction, 6)
And as Edsall points out, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition couldn’t have come at a worse time. Because the turn of the White working class toward conservative economic policies coincided with the period of economic upheaval we’ve seen since the mid-1970s, “inadequate recognition was given...to issues of structural unemployment, low wage scales, and the global transformations that were reshaping American industry.” (Edsall, Chain Reaction, 16)
I understand there is a school of argument championed most notably by Thomas Frank that believes it was the Democrats who abandoned the White working class by shifting to the right on economic matters since the late 1960s.
But let’s not ignore that this shift didn't happen in a vacuum. The Democrats didn't wake up one day and decide to start moving right just because they felt like it. The Democrats lost 4 of 5 presidential elections between 1968-1988, all of basically by landslide margins — in 1968 Humphrey got just 42% of the popular vote with the two conservative candidates, Nixon and Wallace, getting a combined 58%.
The reason the Dems lost those election was the wholesale defection of working class Whites to the Republicans. Meanwhile, as I noted earlier, the only Democrat since 1964 to win a plurality of working class Whites was none other than the Third Way prophet of neoliberalism himself, Bill Clinton. The point is that Democrats took this rightward course precisely in an attempt to win back working class Whites who abandoned the New Deal Coalition. And with Bill Clinton's successes in the 1990s, most notably among working class Whites, that approach seemed justified.
While the concepts of fierce individualism and self-reliance have along been deeply held traits in White middle America, it is also the case that the priorities of White middle America have changed over the decades. Liberals often long for the days of FDR when liberalism was in its heyday, but what they often fail to recognize that the America of FDR’s day, and specifically White middle America, was quite different then.
The best way I can put it is by relating a famous story of a White North Carolina textile mill worker, who when asked why he supported FDR, replied “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch.”
By comparison in this election the descendants of that mill worker overwhelmingly voted for a billionaire who poops on a golden toilet, has a long record of screwing over employees and contractors, and whose most famous utterance is “You're fired”.
In FDR’s day White middle America fueled the movements that called for higher taxes on the rich and called for cracking down on the abuses of big business.
Today White middle America votes overwhelmingly for someone who seeks to pass huge tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, who seeks to do away with inheritance taxes, who seeks to free big business and Wall Street of regulations, and whose cabinet is stacked with billionaire CEOs and bankers.
To put it yet another way, just look at Pew’s recent findings on public support for a $15 minimum wage.
Or look at what Pew found on what Americans think explains why people are poor:
Or check out this Quinnipiac poll from December 2012, at the time of the fiscal cliff standoff when the political debate was embroiled over matters like raising taxes on the rich and possibly increasing the retirement age for Medicare. On every issue Whites were considerably more conservative than Nonwhites — with Whites without a college degree being among the most conservative. For example on the question of whether to increase the capital gains tax, 56% of Blacks and 50% of Latinos supported it, but just 44% of Whites — and only 40% of Whites without a college degree.
To be absolutely clear, I believe strongly in the need to make gains among people in White middle America, out of political necessity and because I want what's best for them and all Americans. I'm tired of them voting against their own interests and ours. I believe Democrats have been too friendly with the rich and powerful, which has often dulled the contrast with Republicans.
So no one should take this diary as a justification for writing off working class Whites as irredeemable, which is as deeply illiberal as it is politically foolish.
But let there be no doubt that the political culture of White middle America has changed greatly since the days of the New Deal. Somewhere along the way they lost touch with the political faith of their fathers and grandfathers, which focused its fire on monopoly, the trusts, and concentrated wealth, and traded it in for an anti-government, anti-tax populism that allied them with the very people and interests they once vilified.
So long as they continue to identify more with the billionaire and the CEO than with the down and out, they will continue to see their economic situation deteriorate and will mostly have themselves to blame. And I believe it is our duty as liberals and Democrats to try to make them snap out of it. Even as we harbor deep frustration and resentment at their poor political choices.