CHAPTER 13
Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values
and Allies?
“SHOULD THE PARTY continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and
nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted
effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?” asked The New York
Times.^254 In anxious emails with my friends, the most common fears are that all the talk
about the white working class will come at the expense of groups who have been at the
center of the progressive imagination: people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants,
women. A class migrant who made a career as a partner in a large law firm wrote that
after Trump’s election, her younger brother and others were “thrilled that they do not
need to be PC in public anymore.” When she got “very upset,” her brother said, “boy,
you really do live in a very different world.”
My strongest message is this: business-as-usual isn’t working. Is the LGBTQ community
better off with Jeff Sessions as attorney general, who as a senator received a 0% rating
from the Human Rights Campaign?^255 Are people of color better off with a president
who was endorsed by the official newspaper of the KKK?^256 Are immigrants better off
with a president who has described them as criminals and rapists? Are women better off
in a world with a president that sexually assaults women and brags about it?
This is where class cluelessness has brought us.
It’s inaccurate to assume that connecting with working-class whites necessarily entails
abandoning progressives’ traditional allies. Take people of color. In the 2016 election,
communities of color split. Only 8% of African-Americans voted for Trump, but 29% of
Latinos did,^257 and the Hispanic voting bloc keeps expanding.^258 Why did almost a third
of Latinos vote for Trump, more than voted for Romney in 2012?
Many Latinos are “values voters,” offended by the shock-the-bourgeois avant-garde
element of elite culture. “For many Hispanic Americans, the cultural changes of the past
15 years have been very hard. Trump, for many, is a return to the mother’s womb,” said
Roberto Rodríguez Tejera, who runs a Spanish-language talk show in South Florida. Some
Latino citizens fear that undocumented immigrants will take their jobs; roughly a quarter
of Latinos favor Trump’s wall. Polls show that Latino voters care about many of the
issues the white working class cares about, notably jobs and terrorism.^259 Learning how
- Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values and Allies?
