In defense of CAP, CBPP, etc., isn’t it an alternative interpretation of why they write those pieces to say that they’re trying to make the exact point you are? That they’re trying to convince their progressive readers to back class-based race-neutral policies even when racial equality is those readers’ priority?
I think, to help win Georgia, Biden needs to announce, soon, some legislative plans that everyone but cranky doctrinaire Conservatives and the US Senate leadership will love. In other words, Joe should set (some of) the terms of the Georgia election debate, and really make the Georgia Republicans sweat. How about a Make American Families Great Again bill, that raises the federal minimum wage, gives a tax credit for daycare spending, forgives some student debt and does a few other things that less-well-off Georgians can easily calculate will benefit their bottom lines immediately. Things that help the average white, non-urban Republican-voting family but also at the same time every other less-well-off family. With zero racial or cultural angle. I am a total believer in the society that left-leaning Democrats want. But left-leaning Democrats have got to stop imagining they can achieve that society by making other people think like them. Meet your future allies where they live, on their terms.
After spending some time engaging in open-minded conversation with conservative colleagues on the topic of race, I came to a huge but in retrospect, obvious, realization: Most Americans actually have very reasonable, consistent and even common views on what is best for society, but polarization drives us to distrust messages from the other side and assume negative intent., Progressives have a huge blind spot: For as much as we advocate racial equality and condemn racism and racial biases, we are blinded by our own anti-conservative, pro-‘elite’ biases. Every discussion of conservative views begins from the assumption they are racist, when studies show (as Matt has pointed out recently on Twitter) that the traditional measures of racial resentment are more effectively measures of the conservative attitude that everyone should work hard to get ahead, not that Blacks need to or are failing to any more than Whites. Conservatives support minimum wage hikes because it rewards hard work. When we hear “hard work” and assume racism or judgement, we miss their important point that for a society to flourish, there does indeed need to be some motivation for people to contribute to it. Money is a good motivator. Therefore they are extremely skeptical of ideas like UBI or anything else that can be construed as socialist, Marxist, etc. Most conservatives are not heartless or racist- they do object to being caricatured, judged, or excluded from places of power like academia, urban governments, mainstream media, and DEI efforts. (“Over-representation in the Senate” is far too abstract to influence their “lived experience” of oppression.) “Working class Whites” don’t resent ascendant minority power so much as they resent being blamed for things beyond their control and being left out of an evolving economy, with more judgement than empathy coming from those of us who benefit most: the multi-cultural college-educated ‘elite’ who have built a coalition with only the non-White portion of the working class. If we progressives cannot see the ways in which they are right, they will continued to feel justified in their distrust and opposition to our policies, which can often clearly be seen as hypocritical from their perspective, affirmative action being the clearest example. (For anyone who would like to say “but they started it!”, I would like to counter that an attitude like that results in zero progress and a continuation of status quo, which by default means they “win.”) A focus on class first, race second could more productively be considered a corrective effort to reduce the hypocrisy of our message and address the most significant systemic factor in modern power disparities, as opposed to an attempt to side-step White “racial resentment.”
I agree that race neutral framing is better politically. But these are your examples? C'mon. You're citing think tank blogs and papers that make perfectly sound points. Is any research paper or any piece of popular writing that breaks down racial impacts of redistribution now a political problem?
There was an interesting interplay between progressive activist triggering low income whites, Trump triggering progressives, and Florida passing $15/hr minimum wage. Well, don't have to worry about that as much going forward!
I'd agree that facially "race-neutral" progressive economic issues are broadly appealing. On the other hand, one of the biggest criticisms of the 2016 Bernie campaign was it's refusal to talk about race. I do not think it's good politics to ignore race. Biden winning in Georgia didn't come from avoiding race-conscious messaging, but rather it was years of race-conscious grassroots organizing that built a strong coalition that centered the identity of Black, Latino, AAPI, and non-white voters in general. Stacey Abrams nearly won the Goverenorship in 2018 this way. I don't think the lesson should be to run away from discussing race, but to say "Yes, AND..."
If we want to talk about state-level changes that are race-conscious, why not address the recent removal of confederate symbols from the state flag in Mississippi?
Also, we should note that "the Squad" all got re-elected, and new progressive candidates who center issues of racial justice won primaries against powerful incumbents and now will hold Congressional seats - Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in particular.
Also, more Democrats should listen to Chuck Rocha.
I agree with the general concept, but I think the real reason a lot of the "How the Affordable Care Act Has Narrowed Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Access to Health Care", etc articles exist is trying to focus the wing of the Democratic party that cares strongly about advancing anti-racism on the important of "non-racial" issues like the ACA, minimum wage, etc. Like, it takes real effort to convince a group of well-intentioned liberals that if we care about racism, we should focus on broad economic issues and not advancing the usage of the terms LatinX and intersectionality. So I think the presence of a lot of those arguments is not so much evidence of a flawed campaign message to the median voter, but rather a critical message to an important segment of the Democratic party.
I have never understood why we don't have affirmative action by "zip+4" rather than by "race". I think this would be popular, play better to sane conservatives (assuming there are any that still exist). And besides, somebody who does reasonable well coming from a poor zip code is probably more talented than someone with somewhat higher test scores coming from a rich zip code who benefited from tutoring, SAT prep classes etc etc. And having affirmative action by "zip +4" it would accomplish what affirmative action by race mostly wants to do.
A $15/hour minimum wage still won't cut it. I am old enough to remember that 1966 raise in the minimum wage - all the way up to $1.25/hour. Working 25 hours a week while pursuing "what I really wanted to do" and being paid that minimum wage, I could afford a 1-BR apartment in West Hollywood, a car, a dinner out and a movie date once a week, and a good diet there at home. With some money left over at the end of the month.
A couple years ago, I found myself on that same street in West Hollywood, and saw a "for rent" sign in front of that building. I stopped and checked it out. Not much had been done in the way of improvements in plumbing, stoves, refrigerators, etc. in 50 years, but the rent had gone from $40/month to $2,000/month.
If one were to work full time, 160 hours per month, at a minimum wage of $15/hour, one would be paid $2,400/month, before taxes, OASDI, etc. In other words, one might afford that apartment, but the car, the weekly dinner/movie, food on the table, etc. - Fuggedaboutit.
Back in 1967, that $1.25/hour WAS a Living Wage. Forget arguing about a minimum wage. A Living Wage is what progressives need to be arguing about, and pointing out that nowadays the average CEO makes 400x what the average wage of employees in his company is. Back in the days of an actual Living Wage, that CEO made at most 50x the average wage of employees in the company. And back then the State of California had the resources to create a state higher education system in which a working class kid (me) could graduate with three degrees and no debt, paying all expenses associated with that through the GI Bill. I think both the State of California and society in general has benefited from that "public investment" in me. And in my fellow students then - even if too many of them became selfish yuppiescum as a result.
While reading this post I kept thinking back to the beginning of the primary in 2019 and the reparations discussion. There was pressure on the candidates to support reparations, and Cory Booker's solution was to say that his Baby Bonds plan was reparations adjacent which I think was a good middle ground at the time, appeasing activists without having to adopt an unpopular proposal. Had Booker become the nominee, he would have had to redefine this proposal, emphasizing its race-blindness. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see this play out, but I'm not completely sure that switching his messaging on the policy to appeal to the broader electorate would have been an impossible task. Basically I'm wondering if having a bifurcated messaging is at all plausible -- it seems like it should be!
I've always thought cash reparations was a bit like "defund the police" in that it faces obvious, overwhelming practical difficulties that advocates don't want to talk about. The government would have to decide who is a Descendent of Slaves (*or* who is Black, depending on what we are making reparations for). Does everybody have to go to ancestry.com? Do you use a one-drop rule? There's no fair way to do it.
You can say that there ought to have been reparations during the Reconstruction or that there is a moral obligation to provide reparations in a larger sense, to try to remove the moral stain on our nation by pursuing anti-racist politics. But cash reparations are so impractical that it misdirects energy to talk about them in concrete terms (which is why Dem politicians have decided to say they are all for reparations when reparations = setting up a committee to study the issue and report back some day).
Interesting comment ! Seems similar to the "if they're going to call us socialists whatever we do, we might as well actually be socialists!" theory.
What you hear from some liberals is that even modest redistribution from rich to poor get tagged as de facto racial redistribution by conservatives (probably at least partly true) - in which case since the conservative backlash is already assured, why not lean into the claim and try to drum up extra enthusiasm among partisan social liberals and ethnic minorities- I think such a theory spells disaster for any meaningful social democratic politics, but Booker would have been the perfect test case.
It's funny because I'm quite opposed to the "might as well actually be socialists" theory and I would tend to agree that leaning into racial messaging on redistribution would be a disaster politically, but I think that you can make a meaningful effort to offer separate messaging to different groups, mostly by stratifying it by engagement level. Basically I'm proposing that Booker's strategy of leaning into it a bit in the primary could have worked had he leaned away from it pretty emphatically in the general.
I think you're right about a lot of the flaws with this argument, and I'm not necessarily advocating for it, I was just playing with the Booker as nominee counterfactual and this came to mind. Cory Booker would often put forth this plan in response to being asked about reparations, saying that this would help to close the racial wealth gap (although he does also support establishing a commission to study reparations). I don't think that emphasizing that a plan would help to close the racial wealth gap in the primary and then pivoting to emphasizing that it's race neutral in the general really assumes that voters are stupid, nor does it make for that compelling of a gotcha clip.
A good example of this from higher education is the race-neutral but need-based/first in family scholarship, like the Florida Opportunity Scholars: https://opportunity.ufl.edu/about/faq/ It is open to anyone who is first in their family to go to college and has family income under $40K. The effect is that many minority students receive the scholarship (full tuition plus living expenses and mentoring/support) but low income white and Asian students do too. Very popular program and achieves lefty goals without needing to be explicit.
Good piece, but I'm not sure about the contention that given high minimum wages are popular, that Democrats more vocally emphasising their support of such measures would make Democrats more popular. Once closely associated with the Dem brand I think it's just as likely that negative polarisation would kick in, the policy would be associated with loose and wasteful spend, transferring money to 'undeserving' constituencies and the like and the policy could actually become less popular!
1st post. Last paragraph has my specific thoughts.
Hey everyone. I’m just subscribed. Ive followed Matt for about 10 years I think. Part of it hate following. But, I paid money for this… Good work Matty for convincing me you would be worth it. So I want to be respectful.
Might as well do a quick bio. Raised in New Zealand and Los Angeles. 22 years in the Air Force. Deployed many times. Im a swing voter. I’d like to think of myself as a reasoned moderate.
I have five kids, I live in Idaho, I work in the power industry, in a skilled blue-collar field, traveling all over the United States (not glamorous places) and Latin America. 220 days a year. I work side-by-side with a diverse set of people. But a lot of flyover country Union Millwrights, welders, laborers. I hear firsthand every day what these people care about. I should add, that my wife’s family is in the restaurant business as well. Small business owners.
Now to get to the point. I think the positions that target white non-college educated voters, are also going to be very appealing to Hispanic non-college educated voters. I think Matt is absolutely right, on trying to target these concrete things to help the poor/working class.
Unfortunately because of tribalism, white non college educated voters have resisted things that would be good for them, because of the associated social views that go with them. But as I travel around the country, I’m starting to notice that the white and Hispanic non-college educated voters are starting to merge culturally. Especially as Hispanics have penetrated in to fly over land.
I think there’s a good chance that this is going to open an avenue for more of this demographic to open up to the things they actually need.
The secret is can Democrats appeal to these people. Gridlock in Congress makes it hard to do anything concrete. The Republicans don’t really offer them anything, except for resentment. Some of this resentment is made easier by the perception that many Democrats have gone to this bourgeois social elite partial socialism view. I think with many in this new persuadable demographic need is respect. But not in a token way. Imagine being a welder or an auto mechanic… You work hard to support your family. You feel like you contribute to society. But in the back of your mind, you know that all the people on TV, and violence in ministration, admonish their kids to get good grades and go to a good college, so they can be anything except an auto mechanic or a welder. We can only have so many marketing consultants, or coders, or social workers. The simple fact is, not everyone can go to college. I just don’t think the Democrats have done a good job of connecting with these people.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Change in small increments maybe.
Last comment. Blanket student loan forgiveness will backfire unless it is partnered with other policies.
I’m dictating on my iPhone. Forgive any grammatical mistakes.
Chuck Rocha - a self described Latino “red neck farm boy from East Texas” preaches this message constantly. Latino and non-HIspanic white working class people have a lot in common in some parts of the country. What counts is talking to people early and often. Rocha has talked about how well the Harry Reid had done in Nevada by forming deep relationships with the Culinary Union. Heck, Stacey Abrams went to every county in Georgia during her 2018 gubernertorial campaign - urban, suburban, and rural areas.
I'm recently leaning more into this idea that we are overproducing elites (or wannabe elites at least). Working in the trades can provide a really good quality of life, often better than those of us in so-called "elite" fields.
I also agree that student loan forgiveness would backfire so hard that democrats would get wiped out (and they probably should if they prioritize something that only benefits the top fraction of their base).
Some historical background on the federal role in social/economic/education programs that address inequality without an explicitly race-based construction.
The argument about people carrying forward their campus politics makes a lot of sense to me. I work at a large DC non-profit that's currently going through a diversity, equity, and inclusion review. I tried to introduce the concern that we tend to exclusively hire interns and entry level staff from private (expensive) universities, which has led to a pretty uniformly wealthy staff (at least among the Americans. We have a lot of foreign born staff to which this does not apply). These staff from expensive universities in turn bring their race/gender-focused politics to the organization and perpetuate the cycle. My concern was not not taken up by the DEI committee. To be clear, I think there are very legitimate race and gender concerns, but the unequivocal dismissal of my class concern was telling.
"Internships" (i.e., "free labor") are inherently a bad thing if one wants to promote any sort of a work force that will be good. Unpaid work is immediately limited to those with another source of income, which cuts off those not from the upper middle/upper classes. I'll give an example from the business I know - Hollywood. I'm a proud graduate of the "Roger Corman Film School." Back when I was attending, the running joke was whether one's crappy car down in the parking lot was going to get them home that night. People there got paid. Not much, and you had to work fast and get it right the first time if you were to get enough work to get enough income to survive. A list of the "graduates" from that "school" back in those days contains many of the Great Names of Hollywood (I'm not on that list). Then in the 90s, as the studios got gobbled up by the intergalactic lords of widgetmaking, the "born on third base" types with their trust funds started going to fillum skool where the failures who worked as perfessers (anyone with talent is making way too much money to be a fillum skool perfesser - I personally have more produced credits than all the fillum skool perfessers combined at UCLA) taught them how to parrot-back successfully. Then they came to Hollywood and took jobs as "interns" while they paid the rent with the trust fund, and all of a sudden all the people with the crappy cars weren't there. I had cause in the mid-90s to see Roget at his office. Drove in and immediately noticed that all the cars were Volvos or BMW 323s or Mercedes 190s. Upstairs all the people, other than the department heads, were "interns." I asked Roger, "So, who's the next James Cameron out there" to which he replied "Beats me." Back about 8 years ago, I went to Roger's last public birthday party. One of those "Great Names of Hollywood" showed up. We were talking at the bar and he commented that he was glad he had come to Hollywood when he did. "I don't see how you can make it in this business anymore if all you have is talent."
That's right out of Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" as to what has happened to opportunity in America.
Not to mention the fact that the "upwardly mobile" graduates of the state colleges and universities generally tend to be more capable and competent than the "born on third base" kids (read Chris Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" to see what the system promotes).
Well plus it doesn't work mathematically! One DC non-profit can increase its racial diversity while continuing to recruit exclusively from the rich kid graduates of a handful of selective universities. But if *every* major institution tries to do this they will find that there are simply not enough candidates to go around. The Black and Latino population is disproportionately working class and lower income so it's not conceptually coherent to try to do the uplift exclusively along ethnic lines without addressing the class composition.
This is a giant problem at prestigious law firms. *So* much DEI talk, but zero willingness to consider the thing that might actually improve DEI across the board (and I'd argue the only thing that *law firms* can realistically do at all): putting in the time and effort to recruit outside the "top 14."
In defense of CAP, CBPP, etc., isn’t it an alternative interpretation of why they write those pieces to say that they’re trying to make the exact point you are? That they’re trying to convince their progressive readers to back class-based race-neutral policies even when racial equality is those readers’ priority?
In reading this I am reminded of your Conversation with John McWhorter.
I think, to help win Georgia, Biden needs to announce, soon, some legislative plans that everyone but cranky doctrinaire Conservatives and the US Senate leadership will love. In other words, Joe should set (some of) the terms of the Georgia election debate, and really make the Georgia Republicans sweat. How about a Make American Families Great Again bill, that raises the federal minimum wage, gives a tax credit for daycare spending, forgives some student debt and does a few other things that less-well-off Georgians can easily calculate will benefit their bottom lines immediately. Things that help the average white, non-urban Republican-voting family but also at the same time every other less-well-off family. With zero racial or cultural angle. I am a total believer in the society that left-leaning Democrats want. But left-leaning Democrats have got to stop imagining they can achieve that society by making other people think like them. Meet your future allies where they live, on their terms.
After spending some time engaging in open-minded conversation with conservative colleagues on the topic of race, I came to a huge but in retrospect, obvious, realization: Most Americans actually have very reasonable, consistent and even common views on what is best for society, but polarization drives us to distrust messages from the other side and assume negative intent., Progressives have a huge blind spot: For as much as we advocate racial equality and condemn racism and racial biases, we are blinded by our own anti-conservative, pro-‘elite’ biases. Every discussion of conservative views begins from the assumption they are racist, when studies show (as Matt has pointed out recently on Twitter) that the traditional measures of racial resentment are more effectively measures of the conservative attitude that everyone should work hard to get ahead, not that Blacks need to or are failing to any more than Whites. Conservatives support minimum wage hikes because it rewards hard work. When we hear “hard work” and assume racism or judgement, we miss their important point that for a society to flourish, there does indeed need to be some motivation for people to contribute to it. Money is a good motivator. Therefore they are extremely skeptical of ideas like UBI or anything else that can be construed as socialist, Marxist, etc. Most conservatives are not heartless or racist- they do object to being caricatured, judged, or excluded from places of power like academia, urban governments, mainstream media, and DEI efforts. (“Over-representation in the Senate” is far too abstract to influence their “lived experience” of oppression.) “Working class Whites” don’t resent ascendant minority power so much as they resent being blamed for things beyond their control and being left out of an evolving economy, with more judgement than empathy coming from those of us who benefit most: the multi-cultural college-educated ‘elite’ who have built a coalition with only the non-White portion of the working class. If we progressives cannot see the ways in which they are right, they will continued to feel justified in their distrust and opposition to our policies, which can often clearly be seen as hypocritical from their perspective, affirmative action being the clearest example. (For anyone who would like to say “but they started it!”, I would like to counter that an attitude like that results in zero progress and a continuation of status quo, which by default means they “win.”) A focus on class first, race second could more productively be considered a corrective effort to reduce the hypocrisy of our message and address the most significant systemic factor in modern power disparities, as opposed to an attempt to side-step White “racial resentment.”
I agree that race neutral framing is better politically. But these are your examples? C'mon. You're citing think tank blogs and papers that make perfectly sound points. Is any research paper or any piece of popular writing that breaks down racial impacts of redistribution now a political problem?
There was an interesting interplay between progressive activist triggering low income whites, Trump triggering progressives, and Florida passing $15/hr minimum wage. Well, don't have to worry about that as much going forward!
I'd agree that facially "race-neutral" progressive economic issues are broadly appealing. On the other hand, one of the biggest criticisms of the 2016 Bernie campaign was it's refusal to talk about race. I do not think it's good politics to ignore race. Biden winning in Georgia didn't come from avoiding race-conscious messaging, but rather it was years of race-conscious grassroots organizing that built a strong coalition that centered the identity of Black, Latino, AAPI, and non-white voters in general. Stacey Abrams nearly won the Goverenorship in 2018 this way. I don't think the lesson should be to run away from discussing race, but to say "Yes, AND..."
If we want to talk about state-level changes that are race-conscious, why not address the recent removal of confederate symbols from the state flag in Mississippi?
Also, we should note that "the Squad" all got re-elected, and new progressive candidates who center issues of racial justice won primaries against powerful incumbents and now will hold Congressional seats - Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in particular.
Also, more Democrats should listen to Chuck Rocha.
I agree with the general concept, but I think the real reason a lot of the "How the Affordable Care Act Has Narrowed Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Access to Health Care", etc articles exist is trying to focus the wing of the Democratic party that cares strongly about advancing anti-racism on the important of "non-racial" issues like the ACA, minimum wage, etc. Like, it takes real effort to convince a group of well-intentioned liberals that if we care about racism, we should focus on broad economic issues and not advancing the usage of the terms LatinX and intersectionality. So I think the presence of a lot of those arguments is not so much evidence of a flawed campaign message to the median voter, but rather a critical message to an important segment of the Democratic party.
I have never understood why we don't have affirmative action by "zip+4" rather than by "race". I think this would be popular, play better to sane conservatives (assuming there are any that still exist). And besides, somebody who does reasonable well coming from a poor zip code is probably more talented than someone with somewhat higher test scores coming from a rich zip code who benefited from tutoring, SAT prep classes etc etc. And having affirmative action by "zip +4" it would accomplish what affirmative action by race mostly wants to do.
A $15/hour minimum wage still won't cut it. I am old enough to remember that 1966 raise in the minimum wage - all the way up to $1.25/hour. Working 25 hours a week while pursuing "what I really wanted to do" and being paid that minimum wage, I could afford a 1-BR apartment in West Hollywood, a car, a dinner out and a movie date once a week, and a good diet there at home. With some money left over at the end of the month.
A couple years ago, I found myself on that same street in West Hollywood, and saw a "for rent" sign in front of that building. I stopped and checked it out. Not much had been done in the way of improvements in plumbing, stoves, refrigerators, etc. in 50 years, but the rent had gone from $40/month to $2,000/month.
If one were to work full time, 160 hours per month, at a minimum wage of $15/hour, one would be paid $2,400/month, before taxes, OASDI, etc. In other words, one might afford that apartment, but the car, the weekly dinner/movie, food on the table, etc. - Fuggedaboutit.
Back in 1967, that $1.25/hour WAS a Living Wage. Forget arguing about a minimum wage. A Living Wage is what progressives need to be arguing about, and pointing out that nowadays the average CEO makes 400x what the average wage of employees in his company is. Back in the days of an actual Living Wage, that CEO made at most 50x the average wage of employees in the company. And back then the State of California had the resources to create a state higher education system in which a working class kid (me) could graduate with three degrees and no debt, paying all expenses associated with that through the GI Bill. I think both the State of California and society in general has benefited from that "public investment" in me. And in my fellow students then - even if too many of them became selfish yuppiescum as a result.
Assuming one wishes to live in hell, er, I mean Phoenix (BT/DT) :-)
While reading this post I kept thinking back to the beginning of the primary in 2019 and the reparations discussion. There was pressure on the candidates to support reparations, and Cory Booker's solution was to say that his Baby Bonds plan was reparations adjacent which I think was a good middle ground at the time, appeasing activists without having to adopt an unpopular proposal. Had Booker become the nominee, he would have had to redefine this proposal, emphasizing its race-blindness. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see this play out, but I'm not completely sure that switching his messaging on the policy to appeal to the broader electorate would have been an impossible task. Basically I'm wondering if having a bifurcated messaging is at all plausible -- it seems like it should be!
I've always thought cash reparations was a bit like "defund the police" in that it faces obvious, overwhelming practical difficulties that advocates don't want to talk about. The government would have to decide who is a Descendent of Slaves (*or* who is Black, depending on what we are making reparations for). Does everybody have to go to ancestry.com? Do you use a one-drop rule? There's no fair way to do it.
You can say that there ought to have been reparations during the Reconstruction or that there is a moral obligation to provide reparations in a larger sense, to try to remove the moral stain on our nation by pursuing anti-racist politics. But cash reparations are so impractical that it misdirects energy to talk about them in concrete terms (which is why Dem politicians have decided to say they are all for reparations when reparations = setting up a committee to study the issue and report back some day).
Interesting comment ! Seems similar to the "if they're going to call us socialists whatever we do, we might as well actually be socialists!" theory.
What you hear from some liberals is that even modest redistribution from rich to poor get tagged as de facto racial redistribution by conservatives (probably at least partly true) - in which case since the conservative backlash is already assured, why not lean into the claim and try to drum up extra enthusiasm among partisan social liberals and ethnic minorities- I think such a theory spells disaster for any meaningful social democratic politics, but Booker would have been the perfect test case.
It's funny because I'm quite opposed to the "might as well actually be socialists" theory and I would tend to agree that leaning into racial messaging on redistribution would be a disaster politically, but I think that you can make a meaningful effort to offer separate messaging to different groups, mostly by stratifying it by engagement level. Basically I'm proposing that Booker's strategy of leaning into it a bit in the primary could have worked had he leaned away from it pretty emphatically in the general.
Yeah my comment wasn't all that well-worded - I didn't take it that you were endorsing the "might as well make explicit racial appeals" view!
I think you're right about a lot of the flaws with this argument, and I'm not necessarily advocating for it, I was just playing with the Booker as nominee counterfactual and this came to mind. Cory Booker would often put forth this plan in response to being asked about reparations, saying that this would help to close the racial wealth gap (although he does also support establishing a commission to study reparations). I don't think that emphasizing that a plan would help to close the racial wealth gap in the primary and then pivoting to emphasizing that it's race neutral in the general really assumes that voters are stupid, nor does it make for that compelling of a gotcha clip.
A good example of this from higher education is the race-neutral but need-based/first in family scholarship, like the Florida Opportunity Scholars: https://opportunity.ufl.edu/about/faq/ It is open to anyone who is first in their family to go to college and has family income under $40K. The effect is that many minority students receive the scholarship (full tuition plus living expenses and mentoring/support) but low income white and Asian students do too. Very popular program and achieves lefty goals without needing to be explicit.
Good piece, but I'm not sure about the contention that given high minimum wages are popular, that Democrats more vocally emphasising their support of such measures would make Democrats more popular. Once closely associated with the Dem brand I think it's just as likely that negative polarisation would kick in, the policy would be associated with loose and wasteful spend, transferring money to 'undeserving' constituencies and the like and the policy could actually become less popular!
1st post. Last paragraph has my specific thoughts.
Hey everyone. I’m just subscribed. Ive followed Matt for about 10 years I think. Part of it hate following. But, I paid money for this… Good work Matty for convincing me you would be worth it. So I want to be respectful.
Might as well do a quick bio. Raised in New Zealand and Los Angeles. 22 years in the Air Force. Deployed many times. Im a swing voter. I’d like to think of myself as a reasoned moderate.
I have five kids, I live in Idaho, I work in the power industry, in a skilled blue-collar field, traveling all over the United States (not glamorous places) and Latin America. 220 days a year. I work side-by-side with a diverse set of people. But a lot of flyover country Union Millwrights, welders, laborers. I hear firsthand every day what these people care about. I should add, that my wife’s family is in the restaurant business as well. Small business owners.
Now to get to the point. I think the positions that target white non-college educated voters, are also going to be very appealing to Hispanic non-college educated voters. I think Matt is absolutely right, on trying to target these concrete things to help the poor/working class.
Unfortunately because of tribalism, white non college educated voters have resisted things that would be good for them, because of the associated social views that go with them. But as I travel around the country, I’m starting to notice that the white and Hispanic non-college educated voters are starting to merge culturally. Especially as Hispanics have penetrated in to fly over land.
I think there’s a good chance that this is going to open an avenue for more of this demographic to open up to the things they actually need.
Minimum wage. Labor Unions. Child care. Quality schools. Healthcare. Unemployment Benefits, etc...
The secret is can Democrats appeal to these people. Gridlock in Congress makes it hard to do anything concrete. The Republicans don’t really offer them anything, except for resentment. Some of this resentment is made easier by the perception that many Democrats have gone to this bourgeois social elite partial socialism view. I think with many in this new persuadable demographic need is respect. But not in a token way. Imagine being a welder or an auto mechanic… You work hard to support your family. You feel like you contribute to society. But in the back of your mind, you know that all the people on TV, and violence in ministration, admonish their kids to get good grades and go to a good college, so they can be anything except an auto mechanic or a welder. We can only have so many marketing consultants, or coders, or social workers. The simple fact is, not everyone can go to college. I just don’t think the Democrats have done a good job of connecting with these people.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Change in small increments maybe.
Last comment. Blanket student loan forgiveness will backfire unless it is partnered with other policies.
I’m dictating on my iPhone. Forgive any grammatical mistakes.
Chuck Rocha - a self described Latino “red neck farm boy from East Texas” preaches this message constantly. Latino and non-HIspanic white working class people have a lot in common in some parts of the country. What counts is talking to people early and often. Rocha has talked about how well the Harry Reid had done in Nevada by forming deep relationships with the Culinary Union. Heck, Stacey Abrams went to every county in Georgia during her 2018 gubernertorial campaign - urban, suburban, and rural areas.
I'm recently leaning more into this idea that we are overproducing elites (or wannabe elites at least). Working in the trades can provide a really good quality of life, often better than those of us in so-called "elite" fields.
I also agree that student loan forgiveness would backfire so hard that democrats would get wiped out (and they probably should if they prioritize something that only benefits the top fraction of their base).
Some historical background on the federal role in social/economic/education programs that address inequality without an explicitly race-based construction.
Can you say "Head Start?" (https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ohs/about/history-of-head-start) Note how the history is told in a race neutral way, but does mention "disadvantaged communities."
The history of Sesame Street is interesting too. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unmistakable-black-roots-sesame-street-180973490/) and for white children living in white suburbs may have been their introduction to "people who don't look like me living in neighborhoods that don't look like mine."
But it took social security 20 years to evolve away from implicitly race-based eligibility (https://www.naacp.org/latest/viewing-social-security-civil-rights-lens/).
The argument about people carrying forward their campus politics makes a lot of sense to me. I work at a large DC non-profit that's currently going through a diversity, equity, and inclusion review. I tried to introduce the concern that we tend to exclusively hire interns and entry level staff from private (expensive) universities, which has led to a pretty uniformly wealthy staff (at least among the Americans. We have a lot of foreign born staff to which this does not apply). These staff from expensive universities in turn bring their race/gender-focused politics to the organization and perpetuate the cycle. My concern was not not taken up by the DEI committee. To be clear, I think there are very legitimate race and gender concerns, but the unequivocal dismissal of my class concern was telling.
"Internships" (i.e., "free labor") are inherently a bad thing if one wants to promote any sort of a work force that will be good. Unpaid work is immediately limited to those with another source of income, which cuts off those not from the upper middle/upper classes. I'll give an example from the business I know - Hollywood. I'm a proud graduate of the "Roger Corman Film School." Back when I was attending, the running joke was whether one's crappy car down in the parking lot was going to get them home that night. People there got paid. Not much, and you had to work fast and get it right the first time if you were to get enough work to get enough income to survive. A list of the "graduates" from that "school" back in those days contains many of the Great Names of Hollywood (I'm not on that list). Then in the 90s, as the studios got gobbled up by the intergalactic lords of widgetmaking, the "born on third base" types with their trust funds started going to fillum skool where the failures who worked as perfessers (anyone with talent is making way too much money to be a fillum skool perfesser - I personally have more produced credits than all the fillum skool perfessers combined at UCLA) taught them how to parrot-back successfully. Then they came to Hollywood and took jobs as "interns" while they paid the rent with the trust fund, and all of a sudden all the people with the crappy cars weren't there. I had cause in the mid-90s to see Roget at his office. Drove in and immediately noticed that all the cars were Volvos or BMW 323s or Mercedes 190s. Upstairs all the people, other than the department heads, were "interns." I asked Roger, "So, who's the next James Cameron out there" to which he replied "Beats me." Back about 8 years ago, I went to Roger's last public birthday party. One of those "Great Names of Hollywood" showed up. We were talking at the bar and he commented that he was glad he had come to Hollywood when he did. "I don't see how you can make it in this business anymore if all you have is talent."
That's right out of Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" as to what has happened to opportunity in America.
Not to mention the fact that the "upwardly mobile" graduates of the state colleges and universities generally tend to be more capable and competent than the "born on third base" kids (read Chris Hayes' "Twilight of the Elites" to see what the system promotes).
Well plus it doesn't work mathematically! One DC non-profit can increase its racial diversity while continuing to recruit exclusively from the rich kid graduates of a handful of selective universities. But if *every* major institution tries to do this they will find that there are simply not enough candidates to go around. The Black and Latino population is disproportionately working class and lower income so it's not conceptually coherent to try to do the uplift exclusively along ethnic lines without addressing the class composition.
This is a giant problem at prestigious law firms. *So* much DEI talk, but zero willingness to consider the thing that might actually improve DEI across the board (and I'd argue the only thing that *law firms* can realistically do at all): putting in the time and effort to recruit outside the "top 14."