Privilege

Jamie McLeod Skinner says more unites us than divides us.

Politics is policy. Politics is culture. Politics is socio-economic class.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner held a wine and cheese fundraiser in Medford, Oregon on Monday. 

It was a success.

Most of the invited guests were "active seniors", i.e. people in the 70s and 80s, and residents of a large local retirement community. 

It was a classic wine-and-cheese event, with the standard features of such an event: wine, cheese, crackers, fruit. There was a PA system, so the 80 or so attendees could hear well. There was a host who welcomed people, and thanked the volunteers who put things together. Then Jamie McLeod-Skinner spoke and answered questions for 45 minutes. Then someone "did the ask," i.e. suggested people give even more.

The event raised something over $100 per person. This is genuine grass roots democracy. It raises what I consider good clean money--money without strings, money without any expectation beyond the candidate being who she is, a progressive Democrat. Democratic politics is nearly impossible without events of this kind, and the support of people willing and able to write campaign checks like these. 

Donors at events like these are part of the Democratic, progressive coalition. Perhaps they identify as feminists, as reproductive rights advocates, as political liberals, as anti-racists, as Democrats, but they have one other attribute. They are prosperous enough to attend a wine and cheese fundraiser and chip in.

But such events are now controversial within the left. They embed a political statement: that a Democrat can and should solicit the support of the "donor class," i.e. the people comfortable enough to donate a few hundred dollars to a candidate. The attendees are donating from their abundance. These are not the struggling working class, living paycheck to paycheck. The attendees may know such people and likely have political and personal empathy for those people, but they are not themselves those people. At least not anymore. Many were poor once, but things worked out for them.

The "donor class" divides the left. Some progressives consider the prosperous,white upper middle class to be part of the problem, holding back truly progressive politics. They have privilege. White privilege. Male privilege. Wealth privilege. They are oppressors per se, because they see things from that position of privilege and are reluctant to change. The status quo worked for them. They got an education, they had interesting well-paid careers, they had employee health care, they saved money. They are thought not to see racism clearly, nor misogamy clearly, because they didn't experience it, or at least weren't crushed by it. 

People on the left perceive donors to be making micro-aggressions constantly and are clueless to the damage they do.  Especially men. They cannot help themselves. They aren't "woke" enough. They have had it easy, and don't realize it.

McLeod-Skinner was well received. She did not speak of a zero-sum world, nor of the frustrated "we" against the oppressive "they. Quite the opposite. She spoke of growing and sharing the abundance. Expanding health care access. Expanding education access. She posited divisions in America, but not a structural division between poor and rich or men and women. Rather the divisions were between rural and urban and conservative and progressive, and that even these divisions were illusions, she said.

We all want the same thing, she said. Jamie McLeod-Skinner is a unifier. 

Trump posits a divide between the good people of white native born America versus uncontrolled immigration, foreign threats, criminals. Some on the progressive left see a different divide, between the privileged people versus the people struggling to re-write the rules to end endemic racism, misogyny and rape culture, economic monopolies, cycles of debt, and class privilege.

McLeod-Skinner unified by what she didn't say, and what she did. She did not say we needed to re-make the economic system.  We are in this together. The divisions among people were cultural and could be chuckled over. She got good laughs with a reliable quip that she had less trouble telling people in rural eastern Oregon that she was gay than she had in Ashland telling people she liked country music.  It is a good useful joke. It makes light of cultural norms. It communicates that she is comfortable in two cultural worlds.

The very fact of the fundraiser communicated an additional unity: that she is comfortable in the presence of people prosperous enough to fund her campaign. She isn't trying to destroy the prosperous. She is advancing policies that will allow more people a shot at being prosperous themselves.