Dana Milbank, pictured above, is a columnist for The Washington Post. On December 1, 2024, my hometown newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, published one of Milbank's commentaries. The Sentinel gave Milbank's column the following title: "America has a working-class problem, not Democrats." Click that link to read the column in its entirety (assuming that no paywall will prevent you - which I definitely cannot guarantee).
Given the potential paywall problem, let me quickly summarize Milbank's basic message by providing this excerpt from his column, in which Milbank is citing to Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics:
The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side.” ... Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote, because they emphasized the class conflict. But in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity (emphasis added).
I assume that most people reading this will agree with Milbank and Podhorzer that "both parties" are now "dominated by billionaires and corporations." If that's the way most people see it, that helps explain how Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk were able to convince so many working-class voters that they (as two mega-billionaires) were the voters' best shot for dealing with the working class problems that the voters care about. After all, the billionaires and corporations backing the Democrats weren't solving the problems of most concern to the working-class. Given that, why not give the other guys a shot?
Many will agree, I think, that "normalizing" what Musk and Trump and this past election have been offering does not, really, provide a very good solution to the problems that Milbank and Podhorzer identify as the top priorities of the working-class. Because that's true, The Civil Liberties Defense Center has suggested "resistance" as the logical next step, and it has advanced some rather specific proposals by way of a Facebook post I recently saw. Click right here if you'd like to see what they're talking about, which definitely includes mass demonstrations on the streets:
My own thought is that whatever else the voters may do, we need never to forget that our ideas about "self-government" mean that we, ordinary citizens, should be determining what the government does. In practice, this means that we need to be able to make sure that our elected officials actually "represent" us, as they make the decisions that determine how our government operates, and for whose benefit it operates.
It actually is possible for voters who live within a Congressional District to organize, within that District, and to make themselve so politically powerful that the elected representative from that District will vote the way the majority of those whom they officially "represent" want them to vote.
Note, however, that his takes a lot of effort (and thus time). It's why I always say that "we can't have self-government unless we get involved in government ourselves."
How much do we actually care that our government will be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" - that ideal that Abraham Lincoln talked about?
The nice thing about that election this past November is that it is going to give us all a chance to find out!
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