Liberal elite, it’s time to strike a deal with the working class – The Guardian

To build a coalition, everyone has to give a little. Photograph: AZP Worldwide/Alamy

Abortion rights are central to my identity. As an ambitious teenager, I wanted to have both a vital career and a vibrant intellectual life, and I felt that having a baby at the wrong time would doom me. I went on to a both a full career and motherhood. It all worked out for me, but only because I could control my fertility.

My life has centered around what the sociologist Mary Blair-Loy calls call the norm of work devotion. Work has provided me with joy, social status, dignity, and financial stability. To me, the image of the stay-at-home mom epitomized oppression and thwarted self-fulfillment. Abortion rights are crucial to the logic of lives like mine, which is why I and about two-thirds of college grads support them.

But only about half of Americans without college degrees do. The logic of their lives is different. They fault white-collar professionals for unhealthy work worship and a failure to understand that family comes first. Elites think they are so high and mighty, but its we who keep the world in moral order, the working class believes.

Republicans have top-to-bottom control in 24 states Democrats in only six. Purity may feel good but its not working

The demise of blue-collar jobs means that many families face a daily scramble between two not-very-fulfilling or well-paid jobs, with Mom working one shift and Dad working a different shift, and with each parent caring for the kids while the other is at work.

Tag-team families are under such pressure, and these parents see each other so rarely, that they have three to six times the national divorce rate. In the light of this harsh reality, its no wonder they look back with yearning at the breadwinner-homemaker family, supported by the husbands blue-collar job.

This helps explain why abortion rights look different to those with good jobs and education and those who are struggling. To women like myself, they are the bare minimum of human rights. To working-class women, who often see motherhood, not work, as the key source of social honor, obsession with abortion rights among well-off women is selfish, exemplifying lack of an adequate devotion to family. Seen in this light, opposition to abortion rights becomes, for high-school educated women, a way of claiming social honor.

Thats why research since the 1980s has found class differences in the levels of support for abortion rights. The fight over abortion becomes a fight over what it means to be a good person. Thats why things get ugly really fast. When elites dismiss abortion opponents as mindless misogynists and non-elites dismiss abortion rights advocates as selfish careerists, class conflict becomes acute.

Debates over guns and gun control are similarly visceral, again because identities are at risk. To me, the ready availability of guns is associated with killings among young black men without a future, struggling to find dignity in a society that offers them precious little. Guns mean Sandy Hook and other horrors, and living in a country where mentally unstable kids regularly murder their classmates.

But even as I feel so strongly, I understand how other Americans feel differently. If the abortion debate involves ideals of femininity, guns involve ideals of masculinity. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of women but less than half (43%) of men support stricter guns laws.

Theres also a dramatic class gap: 57% of people with post-graduate education say gun ownership endangers safety; only 35% of those with high school education or less agree. Where I come from, said John Edwards in 2004, guns are about a lot more than guns themselves. They are about independence independence that intertwines with masculinity.

Studies of white working-class men depict the role of hunting in mens lives. Joseph Howell recounts setting off on a hunting trip with Barry Shackelsford, the hard-living, alcoholic, good-hearted hero of Howells Hard Living on Clay Street. Barry does not cling to his guns. Hunting provides him with a way of relating to nature and indulging his love of the countryside; it is a bonding experience he enjoys sharing with close friends and his son.

Jennifer Sherman, in a book written about 40 years later, recounts how men in rural California many on disability due to the lack of jobs often hunt to supplement their families income. These rural white men, in a very different way from inner-city men, use their relationship to guns to claim a full measure of masculine dignity. To them, guns represent pleasure, power, and providing key ingredients of the masculine role. One reason some people hated Hillary Clinton so much is that she wants to take our guns away. Not too subtle, whats going on there.

No one gets their way all the time: thats called a coalition

Look, I wish masculinity worked differently. But whether youre poor or privileged, being a man is something that has to be earned, over and over again. Working-class mens relationship to guns is similar to attitudes in the supposedly enlightened Silicon Valley, where work is a masculinity contest and harassing women is just one way of keeping score. Too often, critiques of manliness deride blue-collar men but are silent about educated mens chosen ways of enacting masculinity.

This is the relevant context for the debate over whether Democrats should make abortion and guns into litmus tests: whether the national party will support candidates who are opposed to abortion rights and strict gun laws. These issues highlight the way the Democratic party has taken sides in the culture clash between the sincerely held truths of folks like me and the sincerely held beliefs of non-college grads, fueling class conflict that leads to Republican victories.

The Democrats have become a regional party, confined to blue coasts and blue-dot islands, leaving an ocean of Republican rural and rust belt red in between. This outcome has not helped abortion rights. Republicans now control so many state legislatures that 87% of American counties have no abortion provider and Roe v Wade may well be overturned. We already have a situation where access to abortion depends on where you live which is what the Roe v Wade decision sought to avoid.

Gun control has not fared any better. Some advocates for a litmus test act as if Democrats just wanted gun control a little more, it would happen. If only that were true. Though polls continually suggest broad support for specific gun control policies the NRA wins time and time again. Clearly, the polling data is not giving us the full picture, noted one writer in Politico.

Whether its the influence of the NRA, that gun control opponents are more likely to vote on single issues than proponents, or both, or neither, who knows? The result is the same.

For Democrats to make progress in that sea of Republican red, we need to be willing to address whats fueling economic populism: economics. When Montanas governor, Steve Bullock, asked Trump supporters what Democrats needed to do to win their votes, a 27-year-old apprentice in a metal shop answered: Get us good jobs. Plain and simple. Seems like I got to work my butt off, and I barely get by.

This sounds like an accurate description to me, as a labor rights advocate. The pollster Stanley Greenberg found the same thing in focus groups of Trump voters who also voted for Obama: Hes trying to create jobs, trying to keep jobs in the United States. Counties that swung for Trump tended to have high levels of white non-college voters dependent on low-skilled jobs and vulnerable to structural economic change.

Democrats need to prioritize good jobs for non-college grads affected by or alarmed about the hollowing out of the middle class ahead of some issues that matter more to me personally, notably abortion rights and gun control.

That strikes me as appropriate for tactical reasons, because now what we have is geographically limited access to abortion, no serious gun control, and a Republican president, Senate, House, and Republican control of 68 out of 99 partisan legislative chambers. Republicans have top-to-bottom control in 27 states; Democrats in only eight. Purity may feel good but its not working.

But we need to prioritize good jobs for low-income and poor people not just for tactical but also for ethical reasons. Americans without college degrees of all races are falling further and further behind economically because we havent cared enough to provide good jobs for them.

For those who say thats impossible in a globalized world, I have a one-word response: Germany. Germany has retained large numbers of blue-collar jobs for a simple reason. The 1930s taught its people just what were learning now. This is vital for social peace.

People who are in low-paying jobs or are unemployed just want what most college-educated people have already: jobs that yield their vision of a solid middle-class life. Providing those jobs, to me, is a pressing progressive priority. Thats why the Democrats Better Deal is an important first step in the right direction.

Democrats need to thread a necklace that includes four overlapping groups: the liberal-to-moderate college-educated elite, the white working class, communities of color, and the progressives and millennials who flocked to Bernie Sanders. Good jobs hold deep appeal for both communities of color and the white working class. College-educated liberals and moderates will vote Democratic regardless.

Sorely needed is something concrete to inspire the millennials who flocked to Sanders. I support single-payer health insurance but thats counterproductive as a campaign issue: it just sets us up for defeat again as Big Government Liberals. Why not focus on college debt relief?

Thats the maw millennials see gobbling up their future, and the current trajectory of college debt is unsustainable anyway. We dont need to design a program: people dont vote on policy details. People vote because, as Kamala Harris once pointed out, youve connected with what keeps them up at night. Economic issues do that.

To build a coalition, everyone has to give a little. But saying abortion should not be a litmus test is very different from saying the party is backing off support for reproductive rights. Democratic leaders last spring failed to articulate this distinction clearly, given Nancy Pelosis statement that abortion rights are kind of fading as an issue and loose talk by Bernie Sanders, too. Great lets give up what matters very deeply to progressive women but not so much to progressive men. Thats what many heard.

What litmus tests should mean is that we wont hold candidates in red districts to progressive purity. Whose issue should we trade off? Trade-offs should be balanced and situational. Announcing that you are always going to abandon the most cherished priority of a single group is a recipe for discord.

The Democratic National Committee should make a considered assessment of who the most viable candidates are in a given district, and make trade-offs about whom to run so that no one groups ox gets gored consistently.

No one gets their way all the time: thats called a coalition. And its coalitions that win, folks. If you want purity, become a priest. Politics is for people not afraid of the messy business of living peaceably with people whose most fundamental truths clash with your own.

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Liberal elite, it's time to strike a deal with the working class - The Guardian