'Who Lost the White Working Class?'

Robert Reich:

Who Lost the White Working Class: Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is that Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens” (Ronald Reagan popularized the term), being soft on black crime (George W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads in 1988), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”  

But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. ...

In part, it was because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determined electoral outcomes.

Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. ...

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos.

This would give them the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliative programs papering over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.  

But to do this they’d have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? If not, a third party might emerge that does it instead.