Politico: Obama will have no mandate because he will lose white men!

[All Along The Watchtower]

People of both parties are racist and classist, albeit for different reasons.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Well who cares about rural white men anyway?

Obama and the Democrats owe them nothing. They've done nothing for this country but stoke race and class resentment at home and serve as cannon fodder for unnecessary wars abroad. They hate minorities, gays, pretty much anyone who isn't like them.

Romney and the Republicans don't owe them anything either. Guys like Romney would just as soon replace them with robots. Or if you can't get a robot, get some little Chinaman to do the same job for a tenth the cost. Cap their SSI benefits. Make it impossible for them to afford to retire and next to impossible for their kids to go to college. They'll still vote for the "working man's" party (even if most of them are laid off).

And they'll go on living in their alternate reality where they think the rest of us are mooching off them and that they're always being cheated and put upon. They always point their pitchforks at the wrong people. Schoolteachers. Black single moms. Do they really think they're to blame for the fact that a high school education doesn't get you into the middle class anymore? They ought to pick on somebody their own size for a change. Like their fellow white men - the ones who laid them off, for example.

^This post is the embodiment of out of touch, arrogant, smug dickishness. Attitudes like yours are the main reason why more and more working-class white people are voting Republican, or at least, not voting Democratic (often not even voting, period). How can you have a Party of the People when the party leaders and activists mock, sneer at, or worse, actively endorse policies that all working people suffer from?

Hate to break it to you, buddy, but the Democratic Party's emphasis on "Third Way" policies of vague "social progressivism", combined with accommodation and deference to the Reaganite program on the most foundational economic issues, insure that the vast majority of Americans of all colors, creeds, sexual orientation, genders, ethnicities, and ages will have their standard of living decline.

Yeah, social issues are important, but they must be tied to economics at their core-otherwise, you will have growing inequality, a country of haves and have nots. But hey, if one half-black man can become President, and if gays can marry in a few states, and if the Fortune 400 includes a few more highly educated white women, and if your party pays lip service to "social justice" in its rhetoric, while taking the positions of 90s Republicans in practice-the right-wing neo-liberal economic policies are worth that trade-off, eh?

The point is, a lot of poor and working-class white people feel forgotten by the Democratic Party, and rightly so. Yeah, there's racism and cultural ignorance among segments of the population there, but you can just as easily say that for "educated"  middle and upper class white counterparts (who, I'd argue, are better at hiding their racism, not that they have less of it).  

So why pick on poor whites-in particular, poor rural whites? Because they vote Republican? Or maybe it's something else entirely; maybe their voting Republican is an indicator of the Democratic Party's abandonment of economic, bread-and-butter issues, in favor of a harsh "meritocracy" that a token number of non-whites would participate in, but would not fundamentally alter power relations.

[All Along The Watchtower]

I don't understand why Democrats are afraid to talk about class.

Seriously? Seriously?

[All Along The Watchtower]

The left, the forces of progressive/populist reform, don't have the politics of grassroots anger anymore.

People follow anger when they're given a reason to hate something, when they're given a target. Democrats didn't get out there in the Meigs County Ohios of the world and tell us that we should be angry at the businesses and pursue left-wing economic policy to fix it. But Republicans did get out here among us and they told us it was because of the San Francisco Democrat and the Chicago Black Man who were running the big bad government. The Tea Party should have been us. My grandparents adore programs like Social Security and Medicare, but they never vote for the party that would create such programs.

Nailed it. The Democratic Party doesn't care for economic populism anymore; and I'd argue that this is a reflection of the party's increasingly urban bourgeois constituency, in both votes and in $$$ donations.

The Republicans control the present-day narrative in many of these white, rural, ancestrally Democratic working-class areas. That narrative is exploiting deeply held conservative views on social and cultural issues, but it is also exploiting overwhelming cynicism and anger towards not only Wall Street, but also the federal government that enabled Wall Street and Corporate America in general to hollow out the poor, working, and lower middle classes.

When the two parties are dominated by wealthy, educated types who basically agree on the neo-liberal program, working-class and poor people will drop out of the electorate. Those who remain will be more motivated to vote by provincial cultural biases, not economic need. And since the Republicans are experts at picking up on and stoking the resentments of lower-class and rural whites..well, that is what the Democrats get for abandoning economic populism.

You can't call poor whites who vote Republican "racist, ignorant, uneducated fools" and then wonder "Why don't they vote for us?? We are in their economic self-interest!", especially when the actual differences between the Democrats and the Republicans on economic issues are often trivial at best.

[All Along The Watchtower]

It is not classist to point out that overt racists come from a certain background. Not to say racism doesn't exist in the upper classes, but of course that is more or less classism. The bigotry of SOME working class whites is of a different quality.

So some rednecks who use the N-word and blame the Mexicans and gays for "what is wrong with this country", or who even (God forbid!) vote Republican, are somehow worse than the upper-class, educated, mostly white (and male) executives and professionals who actually control public policy, in Washington, the state capitols, and in the city governments-not to mention the "enlightened", highly educated mega-capitalists of Wall Street and Silicon Valley?

Is the low-educated truck driver who listens to Glenn Beck and screams at the government really a threat to the poor, or to gay people, or to immigrants, or to women? Or is this merely an unfortunate symptom of a society that has abandoned said truck driver, and others like him,, a society that literally does not need him, does not give a sh*t about him?

At least the Republican Party tells him he's special.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yes, he is. I come from a pretty bourgeois background. I know well-to-do Democrats and well-to-do Republicans. And the "country club Republicans" that were my parents' friends and my friends' parents have no problem with letting gays get married (who do you think does their hair and redecorates their vacation house?) and giving amnesty to illegal aliens ("I could never let them deport Rosa. She's like family to us!").

In other words, rich educated people are enlightened because they have some gay/illegal alien friends. Uh huh.

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What if they are victims? What if the American social hierarchy (which, might I add, generously benefits the people, Republicans and Democrats, who you grew up with) places the rednecks and hard-headed working-class whites into doing the grunt work of the upper classes?

Here's a history lesson for you; racism as we know it was largely invented in colonial Virginia to provide a wall of separation ("the color line") between poor whites and black slaves. This system of divide and conquer benefits the ruling economic elites (most of whom are still white, FWIW) to this very day, because the greatest fear of the US elites is a united working class in America. Elites, like those well-to-do country-club Republicans you mentioned previously.

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You honestly think that most poor whites have that attitude? Why don't you say the same thing about poor blacks or Latinos or Asians or Native Americans who supposedly don't value education, while you're at it?

And just to let you know, Rick Santorum and many others like him are not and have never been "working class."

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Obama did win, and many of his supporters were white, rural, and/or working-class. Not as many as would have been nice, but with attitudes like yours on the Democratic side, perhaps it's not such a mystery why white-working class and rural support for the Democrats has eroded.

And just for the record; The Tea Party movement  is NOT working-class in background, by and large, although many certainly have delusions of working-class credentials.