Burying the White Working Class, by Connor Kilpatrick.
Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won the 93.7 percent white state of West Virginia with ease, beating Clinton among men and women, young and old. … West Virginia [is] one of the poorest and whitest states in the country.
The media takeaway was clear: somehow, someway, West Virginia’s vote for a Jewish socialist Brooklyn native was a vote for racism.
The working class in the US is mainly white. Rather than say they are anti-working class, the PC are saying the working class is “racist” — and the PC, of course, oppose “racists.” And it just happens to be in the economic interests of the PC people to have a system that rewards them at the expense of the working class.
[T]oday’s Democratic elite… has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves … for all they care. … “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.” …
Somehow liberal pundits have gotten it into their heads that white workers … are just an aggrieved, pissed off, outnumbered minority. But their particular disgust is just a stand-in for a more generalized anti-working-class politics. No matter how you slice it, the working class … is really damn white.
Within the Democrats there is a struggle between the economic interests of the working class and those of the PC elite:
The Sanders program is a recognizably working-class one: higher minimum wage, free college for all, labor unionism, and a re-regulation of finance with steep taxes on the one percent.
The Clinton program — which is the kind of politics that’s defined the Democratic Party and American liberalism for decades — is also a class program … but … it’s a politics that few would recognize as a working-class one. Despite off-the-charts wealth inequality, Democratic Party liberals have been concerned … with inclusion: bringing different “interest groups” into the professional class while managing everyone else’s expectations downward. … [T]he chance at climbing one of a tiny handful of rickety ladders to the top is the only economic program the Democratic Party mainstream is selling to those not already in the upper tiers.
But where Clinton lowers expectations for this demographic, Bernie raises them. While a shockingly aggrieved Clinton angrily declares that health insurance as a right will “never, ever come to pass,” Bernie runs on a platform of Medicare for all.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
