A panicky abandonment of their core commitments is the last thing Democrats need ... An effort to reach out to the white working class cannot be seen as a strategy for abandoning people of color, Muslims or immigrants, or for stepping back from commitments to gender equality, or for withdrawing support for long-excluded groups.
On the other hand, he asks:
... whether it’s time for “the end of identity liberalism."
And says:
... liberalism needs to root its devotion to [the principle of] inclusion in larger principles and should not allow itself to be cast (or parodied) as simply about the summing up of group claims ... Democrats, who gave us the New Deal and empowered the labor movement, should be alarmed by the flight of the white working class.
Dionne quotes New York Times opinion writer Mark Lilla:
“If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded.”
At stake here for us Democrats is our self-definition going forward — nothing less. It's not going to be easy to re-establish our onetime rapport with the white working class while not seeming to abandon people of color, immigrants, women, gays, and so forth.
Not only would many in those long-excluded groups be offended, many Democrats who have made group rights Job Number One can be expected to push back quite vigorously.
*****
I myself am torn. I feel a kinship with the white working class, though I am not of that class.They have been left out of the economic and political equation. As a simple matter of justice, they ought to have their needs attended to.
Trump has played to their needs. Hillary Clinton did not. I don't think she tried hard enough to show the white working class why Trump's agenda won't really help them economically. She didn't find a way to bridge between traditional Democratic identity politics and an economic approach that would ease the white working class's wounds. She failed to adequately address their "identity anger."
Yet it's extremely hard to find either a rhetorical or a policy approach that can put the Democrats back on top. It may be like putting Humpty Dumpty together again ...
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recently ("The View From Trump Tower") that we need a third party:
The job for the rest of us is to rebind the fabric of society, community by community, and to construct a political movement for the post-Trump era. I suspect the coming political movements will be identified on two axes: open and closed and individual and social.
Those who believe in open trade, relatively open immigration, an active foreign policy and racial integration. Those who believe in closed believe in protective trade, closed borders, a withdrawn foreign policy and ethnic separatism.
Those who favor individual believe in individual initiative, designing programs to incentivize enterprise and removing regulatory barriers. Those who believe in social believe that social mobility happens within rich communities — that people can undertake daring adventures when they have a secure social and emotional base.
Donald Trump is probably going to make the G.O.P. the party of individual/closed. He’s going to start with the traditional Republican agenda of getting government out of the way, and he’s going to add walls, protectionism and xenophobia. That will leave people isolated in the face of the challenges of the information age economy, and it will close off the dynamism and diversity that always marked this crossroads of the nation.
The Democrats are probably going to be the party of social/closed. The coming Sanders-Warren party will advocate proposals that help communities with early education programs and the like, but that party will close off trade, withdraw from the world, close off integration with hyper-race-conscious categories and close off debate with political correctness.
Which is why I’ve been thinking we need a third party that is social/open.
I believe in "social." And in "open" — as it applies to relations among people and to relations (including trade relations) among nations. When Brooks says, "... close off integration with hyper-race-conscious categories and close off debate with political correctness," I'm with him. The "hyper-race-conscious categories" he refers to are "identity politics" by another name. Political correctness and limiting debate on university campuses offend my 1960s ideals of what college is for in the first place.
So is a third party a good idea? I'm not sure. It might backfire by helping Trump ...
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