What Will the DINOs Do Now?
Image by Red Dot.
In the splurge of reactions to why Harris lost the election, her failure to distance herself from Biden was surely one of the most significant. She responded famously in one interview when questioned about what she would do different from her boss on the issues, that she couldn’t think of anything. As a result, she bore the brunt of Biden’s negative approval ratings, some of the worst in history.
The Biden administration’s exclusion of low-income and working-class voices continued through her speeches by their absence. Building the middle class was her constant refrain in pushing an “opportunity society,” a state she only defined through cliches and platitudes. And toward the end it seemed she was more interested in getting a bounce from Beyonce and a prayer from Oprah instead of stopping the bleeding, according to polls, from low-income Blacks and Latinos who were abandoning the party. Recruiting Obama to divert attention away from this dilemma, telling young Black males they were sexist for doing this, was a loser message, one blind to the disastrous consequences for the low-income population in the Biden-Harris economy.
Did they really believe these spectacles could reverse the damage? Did they really believe a host of educated elites could keep these victims in the fold with the persistent rhetoric about the threat of Trump to democracy while practicing a flawed form of it?
Democracy was hardly served by the Democrats’ decision to nominate Harris instead of pushing for an open primary and convention, as even Nancy Pelosi has acknowledged. It’s interesting that several exit polls revealed that the threat to democracy, one of the Democrats’ principal issues, was one of the main reasons why people voted the way they did. But many in these locations claimed the threat was coming from the Democrats. Many more, of course, placed the threat with the Republicans.
Biden’s remark, responding to the embarrassing, tasteless remarks about Puerto Ricans at the Madison Square Garden event, that Trump’s supporters were “garbage,” predictably backfired. It further enraged the rural, red state, low-income legions—not exclusively MAGA. This is hardly surprising since they had announced some months ago that they would not be targeting the working class for this election. What is surprising is that since the onset of the Biden administration in the aftermath of the 2020 spike in woke consciousness, the Democrats vowed to represent the marginalized and especially racial and ethnic minorities. Apparently, the working class is not included in this group.
The Democratic Party has gradually shifted its focus away from the working class since the mid-1970s, according to Walter Benn Michaels, among many others. We witnessed this in the last two national elections, 2020 and 2022, where Trump and the Republicans gained voters from the working class—more broadly, those making under $50,000 per year—relative to the Democrats. And recent polls show that significant numbers of working-class Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics migrated away from the Democratic Party, becoming independents, embracing the Republicans, or simply dropping out.
These migrants haven’t necessarily joined MAGA. The Republican Party is not synonymous with MAGA. The estimate by the Monmouth poll is that one-third of the party are traditional Republicans. And just how many of the MAGA two-thirds are from the working class is open to debate. Steve Bannon contends the number is significant. The Republican Party is split, he claims, between the elite, corporate, financial globalists and workers, both groups finding a home in MAGA. In a recent book, however, the authors dispute the large presence of workers, claiming that MAGA is mainly composed of small and medium-sized business owners. Data does show, nonetheless, that just over fifty percent of MAGA members earn less than $50,000 per year. Whether workers or business owners, the 2008 financial crisis impoverished many who flipped their affiliation.
It’s revealing that these recent migrants—the bulk of which are racial and ethnic minorities—lack college degrees. MAGA is by no means an exclusively rural formation. A significant number reside in urban areas. But the deficits of rural-red America with respect to economic productivity, and especially education, are relevant here as the Democrats cater more and more to the educated elite and the Republicans—who already do their share of catering to the elite!—the lesser-educated rural masses. This split was strikingly evident from the election results and exit polls. The Democrats left a void for the Republicans.
Biden’s policies over the past three years, celebrated as liberal successes, help explain this turn. He weighed in with support for the UAW—the high end of the labor movement—during the strike, but his support for non-unionized labor—the overwhelming number of workers yet to gain representation—has been weak. The slate of legislation passed by the Democrats in the past three years, hailed by many progressives as benefiting the working class, had yet to appreciably filter down its alleged fruits. Hence the continued gap between the administration’s badgering about a great economy and what most people knew from their bank accounts. It took the pandemic and the inflation crisis that ensued to embolden workers and foment the strike activity that produced significant wage gains for certain sectors of the work force.
But credit card debt has been soaring, and savings accounts have been depleted in efforts to survive greedflation (Biden cared for the worker but wouldn’t pressure CEOs to stop raising prices!). According to William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, sixty percent of working Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.
The diminishing of the working class’s already low-level of capital resources from these cost-of-living pressures wiped out wage gains for many. Affordable access to housing, and especially home ownership, could’ve helped restore some of these resources, but the Biden administration was deficient here as well. In fact, foreclosures increased, especially for seniors on fixed incomes, mainly due to the skyrocketing interest rates that were artificially pumped up by greedflation. Corporations extracted more wealth for their shareholders through price increases, giving the Fed the opportunity to raise the rates which resulted in more extraction of wealth from those struggling to make a living. Those at the bottom of the income ladder were unable to pass on high prices or the effects of increased interest rates. And the Biden administration made no effort to modify or reverse Dodd-Frank, the 2012 legislation that made it more difficult for the working and middle classes to purchase and refinance homes.
The inequality gap widened during the Biden term. And we slipped to 43rd internationally in how long we live, thanks to our deficient heath care system which has taken its toll on the working class, especially the non-unionized segment whose jobs often lack benefits. Discussions about how to correct this system were virtually absent during his term, and they were non-existent during Harris’s campaign.
This has indeed been a crisis, given the Democratic Party’s historical connection to workers and the lower classes.
One reason why the Biden Democratic Party abandoned workers is its belief that they’re reactionary with respect to cultural issues, those that now saturate the mediascape and its agenda. More pointedly, it believes they—the whites almost exclusively, that is—are racists. The rhetoric of material improvement for all has continued, but cultural liberalism and diversity drives the Democratic Party. These issues sync with the interests of the elite—its ever-increasing constituency—that are relatively privileged economically. This support helps the party avoid addressing issues of economic diversity, the priority for the “garbage” culture who’ve yet to access the system’s spoils.
Many claim these allegations have put workers, especially white ones, on the defensive. They’ve tended to resent Affirmative Action policies since their skin color disqualifies them from assistance (a casualty of the fact that Affirmative Action is not drawn more broadly to include issues of class), and for many their economic conditions have remained stagnant from generation to generation. More broadly, they view the Biden Administration’s anti-racist policies as overly rigid, especially in their dependence on identity politics, seeing how they’ve taken root in bureaucracies, particularly the DEI programs in colleges and universities, and wonder why they can’t access the benefits of education for their children, especially given the aggressive recruitment of students from other countries that’s been taking place since the pandemic. The Trump campaign surely capitalized on these sentiments.
The extent to which this anti-racist narrative has taken root in the mainstream mediascape and elsewhere is revealed in a recently published book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. The authors claim that white rural voters are a threat to democracy, primarily because of their racism, homophobia, violent tendencies, and vulnerability to authoritarianism. In other words, the book validates the common sense circulating for some time, especially since the spike in woke consciousness in 2020. The problem, however, is that in the weeks after it became a bestseller there have been numerous reviews accusing the authors of “academic malpractice,” according to Tyler Austin Harper. The gist of their allegations is that they used “shoddy methodologies, misinterpreted data, and distorted studies to substantiate their allegations.” Harper also consulted several reputable scholars who agreed that the book was “poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.” He concludes:
“White Rural Rage illustrates how willing many members of the U.S. media and the public are to believe, and ultimately launder, abusive accusations against an economically disadvantaged group of people that would provoke sympathy if its members had different skin color and voting habits. That this book was able to make it to print—and onto the best-seller list—before anyone noticed that it has significant errors is a testament to how little powerful people think of white rural Americans…I was so frustrated by its indulgence of familiar stereotypes that I aired several intemperate critiques of the book and its authors on social media. But when I dug deeper, I found that the problems with White Rural Rage extend beyond its anti-rural prejudice. As an academic and a writer, I find Schaller and Waldman’s misuse of other scholars’ research indefensible.”
According to Les Leopold, one of the critics of this book who writes for Scheerpost, this reaction to rural white people first surfaced with Hillary Clinton’s comments after her defeat in the 2016 election, labeling “half the Trump voters as racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic.” And since then, they’ve spread through the mediascape like prairie fire, becoming dogma and neutralizing potential debates. He contends these claims are false. The white working class is not as illiberal as Hillary Clinton and others have asserted since over the past three decades their attitudes have changed. They’ve become ever more tolerant on issues of race, gay rights, immigration, and other issues, to the point where they can no longer be characterized as “illiberal.” This doesn’t mean racism is non-existent. “Not as illiberal” can be read as simply checking the alleged excesses of the rhetoric that saturated the Biden administration.
The main reason why they’ve abandoned the Democratic Party, he claims, is the lack of job security, particularly the mass layoffs—more than 30 million since 1996—that have become virtually epidemic since 1980. These have been mandated by the onset of stock buybacks, leveraged buyouts, and government trade deals, all of which reward Wall Street and punish workers. In other words, workers—especially rural white ones—are not threatened by being replaced as cultural liberals claim, but resentful for not yet achieving secure placement in the economic order.
Since an all-out appeal to workers by the Democrats in the months leading up to the election would have markedly improved their chances, why this official break? The party that celebrates inclusion has become partially exclusive, proof positive how the identity of the party has changed. It pays lip service occasionally to those at the bottom of the socio-economic order but waffles when it comes to taking concrete action, likely believing they’re not genuine victims. The party is still married to Wall Steet and the neoliberal order and in this sense more like the Republican Party than different from it: The “free” market with its filter down mechanisms, monetarism versus fiscal policy, the manipulation of the money supply to benefit the possessors of resources in the absence of policies for those wrongfully denied it, etc.
It’s not that surprising that Harris gained votes from only two sectors, the affluent and white voters, mainly males. After all, she courted Jamie Dimon’s support, and her candidacy generally was propped up by billionaires. She was the perfect fit for the DINOs, Democrats in name only, the party of dinosaurs, extinct creatures out of touch with today’s issues.
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