More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic Divide – Talking Points Memo

There is a well embedded meme that the way for the Democrats to win is to go back to "Black and white unite and fight" - that is appeal to working class solidarity.  That hasn't worked out so well in the past.  And it's even harder with increased atomization of the workforce and deeply embedded clashing universes of discourse.

There are many divides in the country besides race - religion, gender, class, etc.  I think it is plain that the driving force in the election of Trump was race.  He did put it at the center of his campaign from the first moment, didn't he? Therefore I conclude that the Sanders campaign is wrong: economic appeals will not overcome the deep divides.  It's going to take more fine grained appeals than that - to recover those white Obama voters who turned to Trump in 2016,  - gwc
More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic Divide – Talking Points Memo
by Josh Marshall

A big chunk of the left of the Democratic party – a lot of labor liberals, a lot of people who supported Bernie Sanders say you re-polarize the electorate around class and economic issues and gain back some of those Trump voters that way. In its crudest form (and there are less crude forms) this is the ‘ditch the identity politics and focus on unifying class issues’ argument. There are numerous problems with this argument, both moral and strategic.

For starters, I think it greatly overstates the appeal of social democratic economic policy to big chunks of the electorate. It also tells half the party’s voters that critical issues to them need to take a back seat to economic and class politics, with the implicit message that those are the ones that really matter. Enough of ‘identity politics’, let’s focus on the real stuff.

What it all comes down to is that once you get beyond Trump’s hardcore racist revanchist base, there are a lot of voters who supported Trump.