I’m at odds and ends tonight, as I have no blinding inspiration driving this diary. However, in the week that Conor Lamb won a special Congressional election in a district that Trump won by 20 points, and where hundreds of thousands of school students walked out of their schools to honor the 17 people shot dead in Parkland, Florida a month ago, it occurs to me that a good topic to bring up concerns the demographics and constituencies that are ultimately going to save our nation, assuming Trump doesn’t completely destroy it first.
Surely, the post-millennials have already demonstrated how ready they are to end the way politics is currently carried out in this country, even more than the millennials. They have shamed my generation by their effective activism, and it has been effective. After years of ever looser gun laws in Florida, the state passed a law restricting purchases of semiautomatic weapons to persons under the age of 21, to the consternation of the NRA. Indeed, even the NRA is beginning to make concessions, announcing that it supports “risk protection orders” designed to prevent those who should not have access to guns from getting them. In the past the NRA has vehemently opposed such orders. Teenagers are kicking their butts.
But there is another demographic that is bringing about change: middle-class college educated white women between the ages of 30 and 70. Since the election of 2016, this demographic, more than any other, has shouldered the wheel to undo the damage that the Democrats’ neglect of politics at the state and local levels has caused. It is they who are forming political groups. It is they who are running for offices unchallenged by Democrats for many years. And it is they who are winning.
My attention was drawn to this by an article by Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol published in Democracy and highlighted by Greg Dworkin in his APR last Monday. Their point:
The new upsurge is not centered in the progressive urban enclaves where most national pundits live; nor is it to be found among the grizzled men in coal country diners where journalists escape to get out of the bubble. Neither of those poles looks much like most of America anyway. About half the country lives in the suburbs, twice the number who live in either fully urban or rural settings. More than half of Americans are also women— and of those, half are in their thirties to sixties. It is in this Middle America, and among these Middle Americans, that political developments since the November 2016 election have moved fastest and farthest.
Coauthor Putnam is a history professor at Pitt, and she has observed this up-close first-hand. So have I, for that matter, a hundred miles north of Putnam’s base of operations. The groups that popped up immediately after the election, or which have been in existence beforehand, but whose membership has experienced an upswing, are dominated by such women: various Indivisible and Huddle groups, Keystone Progress, the local ACLU, etc. And anyone who argues that these activists are a “tea party of the left” doesn’t know what they’re talking about:
The protagonists of the trends we report on are mainly college-educated suburban white women. We tell their stories not because college-educated white women are the most Democratic slice of the electorate (they aren’t) or because they are the most progressive voices within the Democratic Party (they aren’t) or because they have a special claim to lead the left moving forward (they don’t: nor do they pretend to). Rather, what we report here is that it is among these college-educated, middle-aged women in the suburbs that political practices have most changed under Trump. If your question is how the panorama of political possibility has shifted since November 2016, your story needs to begin here.
Yes, a majority of white women voted for Trump, but also a majority of white women voted for Democratic candidates in the Virginia elections, where the GOP nearly lost control of the Assembly. Enough of these women are changing their minds to make a difference, and those who care about preserving our democracy are getting deeply involved in politics as they never have before.
Let me not count out traditional Democratic constituencies, such as African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT people and the like. However, we need some white allies, and middle-class white women appear to have taken that role.
So there you have it. Our greatest hope lies with teens and their mothers and grandmothers.
In other news, on Monday, the New York Times published a story regarding an issue local to the City of Erie, that is the fate of the McBride Viaduct, about which I’ve written two diaries (here and here). The Times is much more elegant that I could be, but reporter Michael Kimmelman sets out the facts pretty much as I did.
So now let’s turn to the comments, below the fold. But first, a word from our sponsor:
Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Top Comments (March 15, 2018):
From ScottyUrb:
A Michigan Libertarian wants to give every homeless person a gun.- and that prompts a back-and-forth between soisialach daonlathach and MetroGnome.
Highlighted by G2geek:
This arch comment by kovie. Beware: it’s French.
Highlighted by roadbear:
This comment by DyedInTheWool.
Top Mojo (March 14, 2018):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (March 14, 2018):
Tonight’s picture quilt is courtesy of jotter!