Working-class anger and the problem of progressive politics

David Coates  - Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University, North Carolina

The problem with progressive politicians seeking votes by simply adding constituencies together in this manner is that the entire strategy fails to concede that, as American capitalism is currently organized, the interests of the various groups of the American poor and near-poor do not in fact easily add together in that fashion. On the contrary, to a terrifying degree, many of the immediate interests of disadvantaged groups of Americans stand in direct tension with each other. So, for example, historically, the precarious hold of white working-class voters on employment and wages co-existed with (and relied upon) the systematic exclusion of African-Americans from any similar hold on work and wages. Policies of affirmative action developed in response to that exclusion did not create a greater number of jobs or better wages that everyone could then share. Instead, such policies simply redistributed existing levels of employment and pay towards African-Americans and away from their white equivalents, thereby stoking the very white racism they were attempting to remove. Likewise, the post-1980s arrival of large numbers of unskilled Hispanic labourers into the United States helped native-born workers rise up the wage ladder when the economy was booming, but only weakened the bargaining position of their native-born equivalents when, as now, the economy grew more slowly, if at all.

In short, in an economy lacking enough good paying jobs, there is nothing natural and automatic about a fusion of interests between poor whites, poor blacks and newly arrived Hispanics. If that fusion is wanted, it has to be created by political effort.

This should, of course, not come as a shock to Democratic Party strategists, because American capitalism has for years played one group off against another; and because to this day right-wing populism – of which Donald Trump’s is merely the latest example – finds it both easy and electorally advantageous to stoke the flames of the racial divisions that are so deeply structured into the way the American economy treats workers and American society organises everything from housing and education to healthcare and leisure. Indeed, given the depth of these divisions between its various potential constituencies, it hardly requires a Ph.D. in political science to recognise that the Democratic Party will never pull its entire potential base together if it insists on pursuing electoral strategies that disregard the potency of the division of interests between key groups within that base. The Party will in fact only ever pull its entire potential base together by designing and advocating a new social settlement in the United States that combines social justice for all with renewed economic prosperity for everybody – a settlement that at long last would enable each group of the American poor to prosper without relying on the system to hold its neighbours down.

What candidates like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton need to do in 2016, therefore, if they are successfully to deflate the Trump bubble, is deliberately and regularly to offer their potential voters a key strategic choice: either to sustain a politics that focuses on specific group goals alone, thereby allowing one group off to be played off against another; or to call all the disadvantaged groups in US society into a common campaign for a fundamentally reformed America. What’s more, at the core of that progressive call for fundamental reform has to be a new and a more radical economics. The Democratic Party needs to put at the heart of its campaign for the White House in 2016 an economic strategy that will raise the wages of all sections of the American poor by distributing wealth and income downwards and at the same time use the purchasing power redistributed downwards in that fashion to grow the US economy from the bottom up, and at a more rapid pace. Put differently, it will have to put at the core of its message a far more radical economic programme than the one it will inherit from the Obama administration.

If such a more radical strategy is not developed and articulated – if, in other words, leading Democratic candidates simply move from issue-group to issue-group addressing group concerns alone – then right-wing populism in the United States will surely continue to rob the democratic left of the strong class base which it needs to build and sustain successful progressive politics. Progressive politics cannot triangulate with the likes of Donald Trump. It has to defeat him at his own game by responding to the economic issues and widespread anger into which he has tapped with a superior and genuinely progressive response of its own.

Ultimately, the only effective answer to right-wing populism is the creation and deployment of a superior left-wing equivalent. And that’s true not just of the United States, but of the United Kingdom also!