Summary
Democrats must reclaim their identity as the party of the working class to regain electoral strength.
Despite pro-labor policies under Biden, working-class voters feel disconnected, seeing Democrats as defenders of a failing system.
The party’s decline traces back to NAFTA and neoliberal economic policies that favored corporations over workers.
A generational effort to prioritize labor rights, fair wages, and economic security while addressing working-class frustrations are needed.
Without serious reform, Democrats will continue losing ground to populist alternatives.
I don’t know why these articles keep coming up, because the party at large already was. One or two turds in the punchbowl do kind of ruin ones appetite I suppose, but when you’re up against a fascist ideology completely based on lies and bullshit social posturing as issues, you can’t rely on something like being the “worker party” to combat.
Democrats need to fucking smarter and more nimble at turning the tables on lies and misinformation. That’s what we need. They’re fucking failing at that right now.
Unfortunately, the GOP has enemy nations helping them with their campaigns/propaganda.
Theres a massive problem with propaganda in this country to the point where Unions, public school Educators, Farmers, Poor folk just barely managing to survive until their next paycheck would all rather vote for the guy who wants to make unionizing Illegal, who wants to dismantle the Department of Education and public schools, who wants to take away farmer subsidies so that small time farmers collapse in on themselves, and who wants to take away the very federal programs that help poor Americans survive. As opposed to a candidate who wanted to support more unionization across the country and support workers right to strike, who wanted the department of Education to remain in existence and had a teacher as her VP who talked about how teachers needed raises, who talked about going after big time corporations who also happen to be massive farmers and force the small time farmers to sell to them so that the small timers now make no or actually lose money while the corporation gets their subsidy, and who talked about raising the minimum wage to 15 an hour “at least” and supported legislation that would allow for said poor folk to get more benefits and be lifted out of poverty.
Democrats are and were pro worker, even if not perfect. But the workers abandoned them because at least the Republicans say they’ll fix everything right away. And hey if they don’t, these things take time. But if a Democrat is elected and says they’ll fix everything right away, that they’ll change the country and they don’t do it immediately, well that’s just because Democrats are incompetent.
Many many workers are voting for Republicans knowing it’s against their interests because of hatred and bigotry. The Democrats need to do better, the need to be reshaped into a more progressive party, and they need better messaging and marketing, but to say they aren’t already the pro worker party is fucking disingenuous at best and outright spreading far right propaganda at worst.
Democrats never lifted a finger for me. Every time I hear them doing something it’s somehow not helping me again. My wages have stagnated while their donors got richer. Obama bailed out companies that closed production anyway. Dems handled this election so poorly it’s barely believable. I genuinely don’t know if they’re actually opposition. They seem like they’re on the same team as the other guys from where I’m sitting.
Where I live, it has looked the same for the last 18 years of my life. Most of the changes are from state laws, even then it’s hard to get the companies to respect them without threat of a legal action I can’t do from being broke.
Dems handled this election so poorly it’s barely believable. I genuinely don’t know if they’re actually opposition. They seem like they’re on the same team as the other guys from where I’m sitting.
Have been since at least 2016.
As a non American, I’ve been told by an American colleagues that the Republicans are traditionally the worker’s party. Could someone please clarify?
Additionally, my opinion is that the entire system needs to be abolished to allow representation from more than two parties to represent how diverse America is.
So a long time ago, you could argue the Republicans were the worker’s party. Abolionist-focused, was comfortable with immigrants more than other parties at the time, and Lincoln even exchanged letters with Karl Marx, but indrectly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_of_the_International_Working_Men’s_Association_to_Abraham_Lincoln
Republicans in the 1800s stood for minimum wage, pushed for suffrage of women, and other generally good ideas like “Maybe we should listen to the unionists who are willing to die for an 8 hour work week.”
But over the centuries since, the lines blurred. In the 1930s a Democrat pushed for expansions of the social net due to the great depression. In the 1950s, a Republican advocated for billions to spent on the interstate highway system, that has never once made a dime back over the last decades.
Then the southern strategy happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy Republicans marketed themselves towards the white South as a way to say “Hey we back what you stand for, whatever it is” and that’s when South started to vote for Republicans, and Nixon took advantage of this.
But the Republicans today don’t even care about the white workers, they don’t about any workers, they only care about the rich. Have been since at least the 1980s from Ronald Reagan. Democrats lately tend to protect the workers more, but it varies from state to federal, but generally wages are up with Democrats, and we’ve had more expansions of workers rights with them.
I would really like to know why your American colleagues think that.
Probably briefly remembering high school talking about Republicans doing good things, and then thinking Fox News is accurate reporting.
