“Trust” Me On This One
The middle class are out of touch with the working class. This is so true that it hurts. We can fix it, but first, let me outline what I think the problem is and then what the solution must be.
Yes, there’s racism and sexism in this country, and yes that played a role in the election. Damn right it did. But what kind of role did it play? Look hard at the numbers, and then look at the number of female governors we’ve had in the United States history. Then examine the number of black governors we’ve had in United States history. Now…take a second…and count on your hands the number of black female governors we’ve had in the United States history. That is, 50 states, over 200 years, serving mostly 4 year terms. Doing the math, that’s 2500 opportunities for a qualified black woman to advance to the lead a government position as the head of state. Nope. Never happened. So there’s that. So yeah, racism and sexism account for some part of liberals not showing up. Don’t clutch your pearls too hard at that. In your heart, you knew it.
Then there’s the purity vote, which is literally the bane of human existence. People who protested the war of Isreal invading Gaza and who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris because they simply couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Also a problem, and because of them, any hope for a peaceful solution where the Palestinians have a home evaporated. You thought it was genocide before? Yeah, so that’s done. Congrats purity voters.
And finally, there’s the weird anti-trans campaign, playing on repeat that mis-represented Kamala Harris’ stance on the topics. She basically said that she would enforce the law if the law indicated that people should be allowed transitional surgery in prisons. Not a super-strong endorsement of trans-rights. In fact, barely a whisper. But that was playing on repeat in many outlets. Don’t get me wrong, trans rights under Democrats is a world above what Republicans offer, but it’s hardly a cornerstone of their campaign.
What’s the underlying thread here? Trust. The trust between the middle class, mostly Democrats, and the working class has atrophied to such a point that they were susceptible to the messaging that the upper class looped at them. The trust is how we build it up. How? Biden was doing it. He was going to where the workers are, and talking to them. Waltz and Harris were doing it too, but they didn’t have nearly long enough to make an impact. The endorsements of labor meant that the trust was starting to take root, imo. But it took literal decades to lose that trust. What’s the expression?
Trust is hard-earned, easily lost, and difficult to re-establish.
It wasn’t Biden who lost that trust. It wasn’t Kamala Harris who burned those bridges. And let’s be clear, the animosity toward Barack Obama implied a lack of trust so insurmountable that the Republicans used that to keep them in power when by all rights they should have been relegated to the dustbins of history by now. So when I say decades, I mean decades. Why?
I’ve been talking to people in my family and from Texas, and I had a sobering moment a while ago. People often feel like I’m talking down to them. Why? Because I have the receipts and I’m not afraid to use them. What I mean is I call it like it is, and I have a stack of books that I’ve read that support my arguments, densely-worded essays and research papers that support me as well, studies that have been done, etc. Oh, my arguments are sound. And when I’m corrected with good, solid, irrefutable evidence, I change my views. But let’s think about this for a minute.
Those studies I share? Nobody’s going to read them. Why? Because it took me years of college to get the vocabulary to read them in the first place. Seriously, have you ever tried to really explain the normal curve to someone who has no idea what a probability is? And let’s be honest about something else too, while we’re at it. Even those who do have the vocabulary are working 2 or 3 jobs. Are they going to take the time to parse through the data I’m sending them? What time? This is a weird kind of bias that I don’t know the name for. I assume that people 1) understand the terminology I’m using, and 2) have time to truly parse it through. Neither of these are true. If you’re reading this at all, you probably have a college degree or at least some college under your belt.
After a while, then, people kind of tune that out. It’s easier to nod along and smile and then go on believing whatever it was they were believing in the first place. All they hear from me is a bunch of words, but what’s really informing their decision-making process isn’t high-minded concepts like liberalism, and they don’t really care what socialism means. What they want to know is how are they going to make it to the next meal. In that position, telling them how great the economy is doing feels like a slap in the face. Obviously (and all of us on the left know this), the economy isn’t a measure of how the working class are doing. The economy is a measure of how the shrinking middle class, but mostly the upper class, are doing. My 401k, up until Trump started with his bullshit cabinet picks, ticked up 14% this year alone. How’s yours?
You know who doesn’t have a 401k?
Exactly.
Why would they trust me if I don’t connect to their pain? Not intentionally the “liberal elite”…but the liberal elite.
We’ve got one shot at this folks. The midterms, if we make it that far before the recession kicks in and before Putin annexes Ukraine and uses the territory as a stranglehold on the world, are our one shot. Between now and then, we need to do about a thousand times better. We need to reach out, build our networks, and step back into the ring in places like X (ugh) and other areas where we’ve ceded ground. We need to get involved locally and regionally IRL to actually pass some things that will help the working class. And for fuck’s sake, if we’re going to bandy a metric about, it’s got to be something that accurately reflects life for the working class and the middle class.
I’m being blunt here: If we can’t find solidarity with the working class, all of our high-minded concepts, however true, and however good, will never see the light of day again, tossed out as fascism spreads like a cancer through our country. The good news is that it’s not too late, and individuals like you and me do have agency, and we can make a difference. The bad news? We’ve got basically one more shot. Here’s why:
Donald Trump is picking the worst qualified people in his cabinet positions. Rachel Maddow will tell you that it’s because he wants to centralize power and become an autocrat. That’s probably true. But it doesn’t matter why. What matters is the effect. We’re now staring down a 75% probability of a recession. Our military is busy trying to do pre-emptive damage control when they should be hyper-focused on our international conflicts (of which there is always something brewing in the world somewhere). And…tariffs. I could go on, but you see the problem, right? When all of this chaos lands, things are going to get really bad. It takes a while for that to happen though, and I’m sure Biden and Harris are doing what they can to put up roadblocks along the way. But when the proverbial shit hits the fan, if we’re not aligned with the working class by then, and their lot keeps getting worse, and Trump keeps being successful at painting the middle class (think engineers, scientists, doctors,educators) as the bad guys, where do you think that rage is going to be directed?
It won’t be at Trump. You’re lying to yourself if you think that.
Start building those bridges. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we have to start thinking of the information space as physical territory. Stop ceding it to the extremists. We need to (ugh) get back into the social media mudfight too, to where the people are. Some of us are already doing it. You should get into reddit and have a look at how visciously Trump voters are getting trolled in some areas. We need to make sure that everything bad that happens sticks to Trump. We need to make sure that we show up where the workers are with real solutions, and where possible, show…not tell…what those solutions can do for them.
