Why Are Democrats Concerned About White People All of a Sudden?
Democrats Look Down on Trump Supporters, but Want Their Vote
"Cultural liberalism is not enough," he wrote. "Without a plan that offers the hope of a better life for Americans born to fewer advantages, populism, not progressivism, could capture the future."
Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, has a new book that will be published next July, The End of White Christian America, about the anxieties of white Christians.
And in a Dec. 22 op-ed for Politico, Issac Bailey, author of Proud. Black. Southern. (But I Still Don't Eat Watermelon in front of White People), argues that Obama should go on a "listening tour" along the Applachian Trial to reach out to the disaffected white voters supporting Trump.
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The conversation about the plight of working class Americans started before Trump and would be continuing even if Trump were not running for president.
In early November, a study by married Princeton economists Angus Deaton, who won a Nobel prize, and Anne Case, found an alarming rise in the death rates of white middle-aged, middle-class Americans since 1999. The study prompted in-depth reports by a number of left-leaning news sites, such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. (For a CP op-ed on the study, see here.)
Last Spring, Havard political scientist Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis was published, detailing the devastations preventing the children of lower class families from achieving the American dream. That book drew many comparisons to, and had many of the same conclusion's as, libertarian Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, published in 2012.
And in April 2014, Dionne and Galston wrote a Brookings report arguing that liberals need a "Religious Left" movement, using data from Jones' PRRI. Religous liberals don't agree on much, the report found. But one area of agreement ripe for coalition building is advocacy for the poor, they argued.
The Bailey/Dionne/Galston argument, that Democrats needs to pay more attention to the plight of the working class, has a conservative corollary.
In 2008, Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat authored Grand New Party: How Republicans can Win the Working Class and Save The American Dream, arguing that Republicans need to pay more attention to the plight of the working class. Other conservatives, such as American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, and columnists Timothy Carney and Ben Domenech, have been making similar arguments for many years. (You can read a CP analysis from 2013 on this phenomenon here and here.)
None of these thinkers, of the right or left, are Trump-ish, however. Rather than xenophobic and bigoted appeals, they have argued for changes to government programs and the tax code to help the working class achieve a better life.
While Trump creates challenges for Republicans, he creates challenges for Democrats as well, if they are to follow the Bailey/Dionne/Galston advice. As Galston pointed out, cultural liberalism won't be the answer.
