For a while now, center left parties across the US and Europe have been losing white voters in non metro areas, particular those without advanced degrees. That's accelerated recently in the US and UK among other places.
When this trend first began to bite last decade, Thomas Frank wrote a hit book, What's The Matter with Kansas that proposed a thesis: that the New Labour/New Dem neo-liberal turn away from populist economics had left these voters with no gripping economic program to vote for.
And like loose electrons, they were easy to draw into the orbit of the Right, which was using culture war and identity politics to bind them to a conservative governing coalition. This has proven pretty prescient. Recently, we've seen right wing parties futher embrace this...
by turning hard against the neo-liberal trade consensus (Trump and TPP/Nafta, the Tories embracing Brexit) and also railing against immigration.
Now, the theory of counter-attack that comes out of this analysis is that center-left parties have to re-embrace their roots.
Now, the theory of counter-attack that comes out of this analysis is that center-left parties have to re-embrace their roots.
That is: center economic populism, stand up for workers, rail against the captains of industry, and give people a solid, concrete economic agenda to vote *for.* And there's some good evidence this can be effective. In fact, the reason Obama won re-election in 2012 was...
largely due to his strong performance in the industrial midwest, based on the auto-rescue and a campaign against Romney that successfully painted him as vulture capitalist. Sherrod Brown has found success in Ohio with a strong, worker-first message and record.
But as the politics of identity grow more powerful, amidst massive global migration flows, there are real limitations here as well. You can't just offer alternate policies, you need to offer an altnerate *identity* for people to vote for, and I'm not sure campaigns can do that.
For decades, that's what the labor movement has done. Organizing isn't just about forming a union and fighting for better wages/working conditions, it's also about building a consciousness and an indentity.
For decades, western center-left parties have been, in a literal sense, the parties of "labor." Built on the backs of organized, mass institutions of working class power. But labor has been mercilessly attacked and gutted, and we're seeing the result.
No matter how mobilized and organized a political campaign or movement is, it's going to have severe limitations in doing the kind of identity-building that labor movements do over the long-term.
But the other, even trickier part of this, is a question of what that counter-identity *is.* In the US, the Trump coalition is comparatively homogenous. The non-Trump coalition is diverse & hetergenous, across lines of class, race and geography. What's the identity that binds it?
I don't have any answers here, but part of the broader point, I guess, is that we are asking *campaigns* to do a lot of political work that is both necessary and vital, but not sufficent. Not a novel insight, but probably good to consider as campaign season ramps up.
