"By continuing to emphasize race in the public forum, liberals deepen our national divisions and thus play into the hands of the monied class."

                                           Herbert Rothschild, Oregon Peace Activist

Herb Rothschild

Today a guest post by Herb Rothschild.

Steve Bannon, a political strategist to Donald Trump, famously said "The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Democrats have been reluctant to take that advice from the Rothschild quote above and to avoid the bait that Trump puts out. Trump trolls on race and gender and Democrats respond because they feel they must. Democratic messages focused on identity, not economics. Democrats following the Third Way path of the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton made peace with corporate America. It seemed to work for them. They stopped being badly outspent on television ads. They began winning national elections. It was socially liberal and inclusive; it was economically centrist. There was visible prosperity, especially for people who embraced education and who moved to increasingly prosperous cities.

Plus they got votes and the polls looked great. All good, supposedly.

The places where they weren't popular had names like "rustbelt" and "flyover" and "Appalachia." Things weren't working well for those people but liberals who were doing fine could conclude it was substantially their fault. They had poor lifestyles. They didn't move to where the jobs were. They dropped out of school. They worked in dying industries. They used meth and opioids. The states sorted themselves out. In West Virginia 28% of women smoked during pregnancy compared to 5% in California. West Virginia had coal; California had Silicon Valley. 

Democrats made what they thought was the politically sound and moral choice, to embrace the future, embrace education, embrace diversity, embrace globalism. Everyone can be prosperous. Everyone can be a coastal success story.

There was a deep flaw in Democratic thinking: there are a great many "West Virginia" people hiding out within all parts of America. Some of it was visible on the political map, with prosperous people living in coastal cities. The Third Way worked for college graduates, but not for a vast swath of Americans. On election night of 2016 Americans saw those forgotten Americans were there all along, feeling neglected by Democrats.

Herb Rothschild grew up in deepest part of the old South which practiced both legal and day to day practical racial segregation. His perspective is that Democrats can re-establish sound policy and political success by refocusing their attention back on economic opportunity, and he writes openly about that idea which makes Americans uncomfortable: class. 

Working people--white and black, male and female--have a common interest. This Guest Post contains excerpts from an article he wrote in the Ashland Daily Tidings in March, 2018.

Guest Comment by Herb Rothschild.

A Class Act

Cornel West often says that, in the U.S., we look at class through the lens of race. Despite assertions I’ve heard here, it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about race as long as we don’t sound racist. What’s not acceptable is to talk about class. In many situations you won’t object if I tell you I’m white, but I can’t imagine a situation in which you wouldn’t be offended if I claimed to be upper class. Not so upper class or lower class. In the U.S. we can’t identify ourselves as the former because by mutual consent it doesn’t exist.

One rubric under which we now talk about race in places like Ashland is White Privilege. I doubt that such discussions are occurring in Youngstown, Ohio or Huntington, West Virginia. Not many white people in the Rust Belt or Appalachia feel privileged.  Nor would it cheer them up to be told that the average African American is struggling more than they are struggling. Would we want it to?

A poll released last October by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR and Harvard reported that 55% of U.S. whites feel discriminated against by race. 

Even though they are mistaken, it’s worse than useless to try to convince them otherwise. By continuing to emphasize race in the public forum, liberals deepen our national divisions and thus play into the hands of the monied class. 

Only by emphasizing economic inequality can progressives redirect to its proper cause the sense of victimization that now cuts across race and ethnicity, and forge the solidarity that can change U.S. politics. That was the vision of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, but not the Democratic Party of the last 50 years.

Beyond political practicality, realizing the role of class would amend our analysis of the role of race, because the two are interrelated in complex ways. For example, Ashland is overwhelmingly white not because it has remnants of its racist past (though it helps to take cognizance of those), but because lower income folks simply cannot afford to live here. If we want to promote racial and ethnic diversity, we must promote class diversity, which means building affordable housing.