Love, Hate and the Left: Why Democrats May Never Regain ‘Poor White’ Voters

The Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media are angry with lower-income white voters for voting for Donald Trump. Charges of racism and ignorance are flying among editorialists and their allies in what’s left of the Democratic Caucus.

Yet, at the same moment, the leaders of the Democratic Party and the head-scratching intelligentsia who make a career of vindicating such leaders’ ineptitude are trying desperately to figure out how to gain the votes of these same racist and ignorant voters. This deserves a bit of probing.

First, befuddled commentators of the Left continue to ponder why those they love so much — America’s “working men and women” — would turn on their benefactors, benign sages like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden.

“Trump voters aren’t stupid,” writes a charitable Andrew McGill in The Atlantic. “I have a hard time believing that simply obtaining a college degree would convince a voter to view Trump as a charlatan and not a champion.”

“With Trump win comes a test for angry, white voters,” warns Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune. “Presumably not all of those Trump voters were motivated by race — or racism — but it would be naïve to suppose that none were. Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, after all.”

Sure, Don. And since Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the head of the Communist Party USA, I’ll not suggest you’re a Marxist. I mean, after all.

Workers with Grease on Their Hands and an Eye for Character

It is a safe surmise that I would not be writing for The Stream were I not a pretty bona fide conservative. And I’ve worn a proverbial white collar for more than 30 years, to boot (I even have friends who have lobbied for the banking industry!). Yet for roughly seven years — during high school and then throughout theological seminary and a while thereafter — I belonged to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, not usually regarded as a force of Right Wing reaction.

My union jobs were manual, semi-skilled, physically demanding and often quite dirty. Many days I’d have to scrub hard to get the caked-on grease off my hands. Working in cold food lockers for hours on end had a way of tempering this young man’s hurriedness.

I got to know people very different from those in the middle-income cul-de-sac on which I was raised. They didn’t have much formal education, and frequently were limited not by intelligence or diligence but by circumstances that prevented them from rising to higher advantage. In most cases, they were also limited by what they didn’t know about the opportunities for education and technical training they might have had.

They were also almost uniformly cheerful. They loved to laugh and tell silly (and often coarse) jokes, read paperback best-sellers, and poured their coffee from Coleman thermoses. They were shrewd judges of character, generally disdained racism, couldn’t stand a phony and were loyal to a tee. I was thankful to call many of my colleagues friends.

I suspect that were I to talk with many of their children, they would be Trump voters. Trump might be a billionaire but he talks like them, using ordinary expressions and repeating himself for emphasis and expressing emotion much less guardedly that She Who Wears Pantsuits.

Trump tapped into some of their resentments and frustrations, surely, just as Bernie Sanders tapped into the resentments and frustrations of his supporters. Of course, evidently it’s OK to be an angry voter on the Left, since such anger is grounded in a more highly educated rage — at least, that seems to be the most recent narrative of the liberal commentariat, and they’re always so wise.

But Trump’s less educated but savvy supporters “got” him in a way his liberal critics never did. As another Atlantic writer, Salena Zito, has observed perceptively, “The press takes (Trump) literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Trump supporters who are lower to lower-middle income understand that when the President-elect talked about immigration, trade, lost jobs, making America great again and so forth, he was — however crudely, in some instances — expressing their legitimate grievances with liberal policies that have led the nation into dangerous waters. Many of these same people are men and women of faith and find Trump’s notorious comments about women, his seeming discomfort with Latinos and African-Americans, his obscenities and so forth as repugnant as his most vociferous critics. Yet they also felt that Trump’s patriotism and willingness to fight made him their champion.

The Democratic Dilemma: Winning Back Those They Disdain

Are some conservative lower-income whites racists? Sure. So are some upper-income white liberals. Having worked in downtown D.C. for many years, I’ve met a lot of “compassionate” white liberals who seem never to have had a serious conversation with a black person in their lives. Or, at least, that conversation has never developed into a friendship.

Tim Ryan, the professional Ohio politician (he’s held elective office since he was 26) who ran against Nancy Pelosi for leadership of the House Democrats, said a few days ago that his party has to “talk to those people who take a shower after work, not those who just take a shower before work.”

That’s a pithy description but one wonders what Mr. Ryan would say to such people: “We know you hate our big government policies and meddling in your lives … you’re sick of having our insistent cultural liberalism rammed-down your throats … you’re tired of being told to shut up and eat your spinach … But, hey, are we your friends or what?!”

Even more, why would the Democratic Party want to curry the support of such self-apparently racist people, anyway? As Bill Moyers, a man who has built a career articulating his contempt for the country that has made him rich, wrote shortly after the election, “This Wasn’t a Working-Class Revolt. It Was a White Revolt.”

Democrats grasping for the votes of uneducated white racists: Now, there’s a political strategy for the ages.

You cannot claim to love that which you disdain. You cannot persuade through condemnation. You cannot want sincerely to help those you regard as disgusting, even “deplorable.”

Yet this is the conceit of the Democratic Party.

Good luck, friends on the Left. Good luck.