Will Democrats Learn All the Wrong Lessons about the Working Class?

The post Will Democrats Learn All the Wrong Lessons about the Working Class? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Books trying to explain Red America are flying off the shelves, particularly to shell-shocked Democrats. As we hear in the opening sound bites of this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, JFK (and later Lyndon B. Johnson and Bobby Kennedy) made the personal and policy connection to working-class white America. So how did the party lose touch?

Journalist Sarah Jones tells Jeff Schechtman that she is afraid that Democrats and others may be learning the wrong lessons. While people like J.D. Vance argue that the answer is to promote conservative culture and respond to the “crisis of masculinity” and Horatio Alger mythology, the problem is that taking the cultural perspective may be playing directly into the liberal elitist view of a region of “deplorables.”

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Full Text Transcript: 

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy, I’m Jeff Schechtman.

There are billions of dollars of contracts being led on all occasions but there are very few of them being sent to those areas where the eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve percent of the population is unemployed. I think federal aid to education, I think the passage of the [?] Bill which provides medical assistance to those over 65, is an effective minimum wage bill which I’m now sponsoring in the senate, federal minimum standards for the payment of unemployment compensation. I think vigorous action by the federal government can make a great difference to West Virginia. In the final analysis, what happens in this state depends in part on the vigor of the citizens but I must say we can do far better than we have done in last year by this administration, which has vetoed and held back all the action which is needed if West Virginia is going to move ahead.

That was John F. Kennedy campaigning in the West Virginia primary in 1960. It’s amazing how many of those same ideas and issues are still haunting us today. Then it was the Republicans who didn’t seem to understand the plight of Appalachia and of working America. Democrats, in the person of JFK, and later Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, made the personal and policy connection. So what happened? How did their party lose touch with that part of America? The answers are complicated and probably best left to historians. However, how the party reconnects is a very contemporary political issue. Books are flying off the shelf trying to explain flyover country to Democrats. Books like Arlie Russell Hochchild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class, and most notably J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But is it possible that some of these books, particularly Vance‘s, teach the wrong lesson. That, just like 1960, the lesson is not one of promulgating conservative culture and Horatio Alger attitudes, but of the failure of government to do the right thing? Take a listen to Bobby Kennedy campaigning in Kentucky in 1968.

People are still having a very, very difficult time. There is considerable hunger in this part of the country. There’s no real hope for the future amongst many of these people who worked hard in the coal mines. And now that the coal mines shut down, they have no place to go. There is no hope for the future, there is no industry moving in. The men are trained in government programs. There’s no jobs at the end of the training program because of the cut back, because of the demands on the federal budget in Washington. People are being cut off and they have no place to turn, and so they’re desperate, and filled with despair. It seems to me that this country’s wealth, as wealthy as we are, that this is an intolerable condition. It reflects on all of us. We can do things all over the rest of the world, but I think we should do something for our people here in our own country.

To talk about and to examine all of this, I am joined by Sarah Jones, who’s the social media editor at The New Republic and whose article, “J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America,” appears in The New Republic. It is my pleasure to welcome Sarah Jones Sarah. Thanks so much for joining us.

Sarah Jones: Thanks for having me.

Jeff: It is so remarkable that given the history of the Democratic Party in understanding these issues, of working-class America and Appalachia, and listening to those clips from Bobby Kennedy and JFK, that the party at the moment seems so desperate to try and understand that part of the country.

Sarah: I agree and I think it’s the result of years of neglect, moving away from progressive populism, and neglecting politics at the state level which is really a good way to reach out to these people.

Jeff: And talk a little bit about as you look at it, what you were beginning to see as you set about writing this article and looking at Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy the way in which that desperation is really creating the wrong message, the wrong ideas that seem to be filtering into the party. 

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