Reply #76: This isn't a matter of Right or Left--This is a matter of Up or Down

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Working class Americans are angry and frightened, and with good reason. Their standard of living peaked in 1979 and has fallen since then. However, thanks to America's anti-intellectualism and locally controlled schools, they don't understand WHY they're in such desperate circumstances.

Along come the right wing media to tell them that it's all the fault of the liberals, the feminists, the people of color, the immigrants, and the gays.

The left-wing media has been AWOL for thirty years. There is no left-wing Fox News, no left-wing Reader's Digest, no left-wing Rush Limbaugh, nothing that explains the facts about society in terms that working class people will accept.

The left wing is sitting around talking to themselves, often including slams at "stupid" working class people. They use big words and sophisticated analyses, but like the position papers on Candidate Kerry's website in 2004, these carefully wrought analyses never seem to get translated into simple language for public consumption. Instead of coming up with simple, easily understood sound bites that offer specifics and relate to where people are (struggling), they mumble generalities or latch onto unimportant issues. (My own senator Amy Klobuchar is a prime example of this approach, with her propensity to advocate earnestly for all trivial issues and write non-committal gobbledygook about important issues.)

Now the right-wing media are tools of the elite, but they always talk as if they're on the side of the family that has two full-time workers and is still falling behind. They talk as if they understand the working class person's struggles. They subtly play on people's prejudices.

Well, the right wing had gone too far by 2008, and all but the dumbest or most nakedly greedy of the Republican voters could see that Bush was a disaster. So they voted for something DIFFERENT. They voted for a candidate who pretended to be a Huey Long populist.

What did they get?

Someone who not only continued almost all of Bush's policies but appears to lack the courage of his own convictions. Someone who has changed masks overnight and no longer seems to know or care about ordinary Americans. (At the time of the bank bailouts, I was astonished at how unanimous opinions on my local paper's website were. The usual leftist suspects like me and the usual wingnut suspects were ALL opposed to bailing out the banks without requiring them to clean up their act. They hated it when Bush did it, and they hated it when Obama did it.) Someone who talks about health care for all Americans and then silently allows all the good parts of the bill to be bargained away. Someone who seems unconcerned and unable to do anything about the worst job market since the Great Depression. Someone who lacks the leadership skills to tell the Blue Dogs to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. Someone who seems to be waiting for his next cue from the DLC. Someone who doesn't have a clue.

If you're a working class American, you have seen NO DIFFERENCE between the Bush and Obama administrations.

We may rant about how "stupid" the working class is (Way to win friends and influence people there!) and wonder why they're voting against their own interests, but the way they see it, NEITHER party has their economic interests at heart.
Oh sure, the yuppie Dems wonder why voters choose candidates who are against abortion and gay rights and feminism, but the fact is that working class people ARE socially conservative and are rewarding the party that pretends to share at least their social principles.

The Dems could get away with violating these social principles if the voters could see a tangible economic benefit to voting Democratic.

They haven't even see any moves in directions that will help the working class, and they are no longer confident that the Democrats have either the will or the skill to get anything done.

The Democrats appear to be serving the same moneyed elites that the Republicans serve.

If the Dems were not corrupted by the same moneyed interests as the Republicans, they could win over working class voters by

1. Making it extremely difficult for companies to export jobs or import low-wage workers
2. Either instituting single payer or expanding the public health clinics so well that everyone was in easy reach of one
3. Putting blue collar Americans to work building new infrastructure (experts were complaining about our deteriorating infrastructure in the 1970s) and affordable housing.

These measures would make a real difference in the lives of working class Americans and ensure a Democratic majority for the next generation or two, just as FDR did.

But no, both the Republicanites and the Dems are addicted to corporate bribes. They're both on the side of the Ups, not the Downs.