A Connecticut Yankee in Western North Carolina
Or: how I stopped worrying and learned to love Dark Brandon
Chris Murphy, as a friend of mine put it recently on Twitter, is a senator who votes like a generic liberal and tweets like a Jacobin columnist. Formerly known mostly for his vociferous support of the Iran Deal and gun control, he has within the last year began speaking of neoliberalism with a zeal normally reserved for teenagers on Twitter. He has adopted the idea that Democratic losses in 2016 and, more generally, slippage among the white working-class is because of the party’s embrace of free trade. He has also blamed neoliberalism for the loneliness epidemic and the increase of white nationalism. He’s been tweeting about trying to grow the party’s coalition by expanding its appeals to voters who are economically populist but may be less socially liberal than the average Democrat, and journeyed to Boone, North Carolina in a sort of listening tour to that end. In short, Murphy has been posting some rather bizarre things for a Senate Democrat – he is indeed talking like a leftist while his voting record remains solidly in the middle of the party.
Murphy’s comments about Boone were particularly interesting to me, as someone who lived in Western North Carolina for a while and interned at a non-profit which sought to educate people about the region’s history. Murphy described it as the “heart of Southern Appalachia,” which shows to me that he remains a damn Yankee – Boone is a liberal college town located in one of two counties west of Charlotte to vote for Clinton and Biden.1 Liberal college towns, especially ones with a well-developed tourism industry, are the sort of places which have quite benefitted from neoliberalism. Might I suggest to the senator that if he wishes to come to the Blue Ridge to view the tolls of neoliberalism and broaden our coalition, he should instead go to somewhere like Canton, NC, where a paper mill which employed 1,200 people and had operated for over a century just shut down?
It is easy, at least for me, to mock him as merely a Democratic J.D. Vance, a privileged man dabbling in amateur ethnography. (Vance is from Middletown, Ohio, which is decidedly not Appalachian, yet became an expert on hillbillies somehow; Murphy is the son of a high-powered Connecticut lawyer). But it is a chance for me to write about the various persistent myths about the current Democratic coalition, as well as the state of the vaunted white working-class. So let’s give Senator Murphy more good faith than he really deserves, and dig in.
Miserere Mei
Most people, to put it mildly, did not expect Hillary Clinton to lose the 2016 election. Ever since that shock, Democrats and the larger pundit class have spilled oceans of ink about how and why Clinton lost the Upper Midwest, why the white working-class had shifted to Trump, and generally why the Democratic Party was now a party of rich woke elites who didn’t give a damn about the common man.2 Among journalists, this manifested as the endless safaris to Trump Country and opinion columns where mostly Ivy League-educated writers attempted to distill the complex mix of racial resentment and the broader long-term trends of education polarization, occurring in every Western democracy, into their pet issue. Among Democrats, from Senators to lowly former organizers like myself to the average politically-engaged liberal, this prompted a series of self-flagellating attempts to figure out, in the words of Hillary Clinton, what happened.
This is how we got our Michael Avenattis and David Shors and J.D. Vances – what had previously seemed to be a hegemonic electoral coalition had suffered an immense upset from a candidate no one, not even himself, took seriously, and Democrats were left in sackcloth and ashes to poke around for a way out of the mire.3 It was a loss which was all the more heartbreaking because of the sheer contingency of it all – less than 80,000 votes in three states, out of nearly 130 million cast, would have made the difference – and because we had won the moral victory of the popular vote by nearly 2% anyways. We sought a prophet who could lead us out of the wilderness of opposition and into the Promised Land of 270 electoral votes, 218 House seats and 51 Senators. It is something we are well-suited to, as Democrats – our reaction to the failure of the New Deal coalition and the conservative turn of the 1970s and 1980s was a similar period of self-flagellation about how we had lost trust with the working class and needed to return to the center. Thankfully, our time in the Presidential wilderness, and the general ideological shift to the right, haven’t lasted quite as long this time.
The search for answers among journalists and Democrats led to the creation or amplification of several myths and narratives about the Democratic Party and its relationship to the white working-class. The foremost among them is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because neoliberal policies which she and the Democratic Party supported hollowed out the communities of the white working-class. Even setting aside the inherent difficulty of drawing any larger trend from one election which was very narrowly decided, Clinton won a majority of voters making under $50,000 a year, something which has never seemed to stop the bloviating human centipede that is the pundit class from claiming that wokeness or drag queens or whatever are why Democrats lose elections. The dissonance between the empirical data on this subject and the preoccupation of the sniveling opinion writers of the world is striking. They pretend as if the working-class in this country is solely white guys who like NASCAR and lament the closing of the steel mill, instead of what it is – mostly people of color, many of whom work not in manufacturing but in retail and service and other industries.
Furthermore, shifts among white voters without a college degree towards Trump are much better predicted by racial resentment than economic situation. The white backlash to Obama’s election certainly radicalized the Tea Party and the GOP in general (it is not an accident that Trump began his career in politics with birtherism), and I believe that it had a meaningful effect on 2016 as well. Compared to 2012, race and immigration were much more prominent issues in 2016 due to Trump’s general odiousness. Whereas Obama managed to credibly portray Romney as a vulture capitalist who make his money outsourcing jobs, Trump had an unabashedly racist approach to politics which heightened the salience of these issues. The beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson brought police brutality and race into the national conversation in a way it had not been previously as well. In 2008, Sean Quinn wrote an article about Western Pennsylvania voters in which he quotes the following interaction:
So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the [n-word]!”
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the [n-word].”
Without the pressures of the Great Recession and the outsider appeal of Obama, Clinton floundered among these voters. Donald Trump, with his brash racism and prejudice, was a much better fit for this type of voter than Romney.
In Every Right-populist a Particle of Hitler
A part of Murphy’s blindness is the idea, normally reserved for classical economists, that people only see their interests in economic terms. A member of the white working-class and a white rural Southerner both have much more economically to gain from the party that wishes to raise the minimum wage and the welfare state than the party which enjoys gutting Medicaid for fun. If you are think of politics in terms of material conditions and class struggle (which is generally a good instinct) one can be mislead into thinking that this should explain every voter’s behavior. This leads to a fairly common line of thinking, which is that the average Southerner or Midwesterner is actually economically leftist, they’re just misled by Republicans and suppressed by gerrymandering or voter suppression.
Now, far be it from me to downplay those very real issues. But what this view fails to take into account is that racial status and religion are interests in and of themselves which can often be much more powerful than mere class interest. The simple reason for why white Southerners, in the most anti-abortion region in the country, vote for the Republican Party in overwhelming numbers is that they are against abortion. They vote for Republicans because, especially in the Deep South, they are the party of white people and Democrats are the party of Black people4. I am reminded of a quote from Georgia Governor Joseph Brown on a speaking tour to convince non-slaveholding white Southerners to vote for secession in 1861:
“Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. . . . He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.”5
Or consider this more modern version, a now-famous quote from LBJ:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."6
Race and religion are powerful interests, often more powerful than economics or class, as the history of the South has proven over and over. So too, among the white working-class - one merely has to look at the history of desegregation to see that.
In Murphy’s words, there are “a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies” and that these people are willing to vote Democratic under certain circumstances. Murphy got roundly mocked for this tweet, as well as a more recent one in which he said that progressives should listen to “Rich Men North of Richmond” because “it shows the path of realignment.” A similar but interrelated myth to the idea of the socially conservative populist is the idea that one’s ideas on social and economic policy are entirely orthogonal.
This fails to realize several things: first, that populism is a rhetorical strategy and is not an actual coherent set of beliefs. A populist is merely anyone who claims to speak for the people against elites of some sort. Movements outside the political establishment tend towards populism even more than those within it – many drew idiotic equivalences between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on this basis in 2016. An “economic populist” could mean anything from someone who thinks the minimum wage and universal healthcare are great ideas to someone who thinks that Jewish international finance capital is strangling the American worker.
Secondly, as “Rich Men North of Richmond” itself reveals, one’s social and economic views are not orthogonal. I do not believe the title referencing Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, is an accident, nor do I believe that the singer just means Henrico County, Virginia by “Rich Men North of Richmond.” I think he means Jewish bankers in New York, given that he thinks 9/11 was done by the Jews. The singer talks about the soullessness of work and how much his boss sucks, yes. He also talks about how obese people on welfare don’t deserve it – they are parasites who, just like the bankers, suck the blood of the American worker.
I suppose the song is economically populist in the same way that me bitching about my job is economically populist. It only ever mentions welfare as another drag on the American worker, who deserves to be the real elite yet is held back by undeserving welfare queens and the bankers. Needless to say, it is ludicrous to suggest that this man would vote for us, and it is ludicrous to suggest that we should attempt to get his vote. Many on the right-wing might be economically populist, but it is always the white Christian American who they think is oppressed by people of color, queer people and the globalists controlling it all. There are those who are economically populist and base that populism on class and support for actually redistributive policies, regardless of race – they’re our strongest voters.
I would also like to take a moment to suggest to anyone arguing that we need to stop talking about social issues to win back the Upper Midwest that they should identify which issues they mean. Contrary to decades of internalized shame, Democrats don’t actually talk about rights for disabled trans airline pilots of color or whatever boogeyman the right is talking about now. The social issues we do talk about are beneficial for us. Aside from the morality of a suggestion, I would like any discussion of this in the future to include a specific issue. Should we abandon abortion rights? Now, when the biggest reason the red wave fizzled last year was anger over the overturn of Roe? Critical race theory, when Black people are our strongest demographic and book bans are unpopular? Trans issues, when the GOP’s transphobia doesn’t get them any new voters and makes them look deranged? Defund the police, which no Democrat other than Cori Bush ever supported anyways? I could go on and on.
We Are All Keynesians Now
The thing which bothers me about this incessant discourse is that the popularists and those preaching against neoliberalism got what they wanted. Democrats nominated a staid, moderate Irish white guy who has kept Trump’s tariffs and plowed hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit spending into industrial policy. During the campaign, he condemned violence at the BLM protests and focused mostly on Covid and the economy. His main communications push, as I publish this article now, is about “Bidenomics,” which he extols in very populist terms as opposing trickle-down economics, supporting labor and making things in America. The idea that Democrats are losing economically populist voters because of anything this president isn’t doing is nonsensical. Every social issue which we featured in campaigns last year – abortion being the most obvious – is a beneficial one for us.
Democrats have spent decades internalizing the idea that we are out-of-touch liberals who don’t understand “real America.” Every time we are in the political wilderness, even for a single election cycle, we kneel and cross ourselves and pray “Behold, I was shapen in wokeness; and in political correctness did my mother conceive me.” I think that focusing on a relentlessly economically populist message is good politics, and I think that the Biden Presidency has gotten us some good policy out of it even if what’s left of the neoliberal in me dislikes his tariff policy. Biden stopped much of the bleeding in the white working-class for a reason, and it wasn’t just that he’s a white Irish Catholic.
By talking about abortion (and hammering Republicans for election denial) we are also managing to peel off countless suburban voters who formerly voted Republican. Trends work in both ways, of course, and we have benefited immensely from suburban shifts which have occurred slowly for decades before rapidly speeding up after the nomination of Donald Trump. These shifts, have earned us dozens of House seats, not to mention our Senate majority (Georgia, Arizona, Colorado) and returning the Rust Belt to our column. Biden stopped the bleeding in Flint and Saginaw, yes, but the reason why he won the upper Rust Belt was that the suburbs flipped or put up even larger margins for him – one merely has to look at his relatively stagnant performances in Philadelphia and Milwaukee compared to Madison, the Philadelphia collar counties, and the Detroit suburbs.
The reason why the workers of Mahoning County have not formed the vanguard of Biden’s reelection is that realignment is a hell of a lot deeper than the very limited things an individual party or politician can control. Coalitional shifts such as the migration of college-educated whites into the Democratic column and the white working class becoming even more Republican are caused by much broader economic and cultural factors. This is not to say that candidates do not matter and that messaging does not matter, but merely that many people7 have a very outsized notion of what individuals and organizations can do in the face of much larger, much more powerful trends. Candidates and messaging do matter because the world is not solely governed by these trends, and the elections that matter are so very often a matter of mere thousands or even hundreds of votes.
If I have a theory of electoral politics, it is similar to my theory of history: men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. (This is an original thought, please do not steal it). What a given party does during a given election has a surprisingly low amount of impact on the actual results of it, in a hyper-polarized environment like modern American politics. Consider that in an average election we have maybe 30 competitive House seats, and I can count the number of competitive Senate races on one hand most cycles. Things are more fluid in state-level elections, but they too are increasingly predictable and polarized. There is no period in American history where elections have been so predictable as the parties have ideologically polarized to an extent never before seen. Every year, the number of legislators who represent districts which voted for the other party for President decreases.
It is my genuine contention, after years of stewing in and participating in this discourse, that the Democratic Party has done a decently good job of retooling its messaging and coalition for American politics as they are today. This is surprising even to me at times that I think this, but I am generally positive about the messaging of the Democratic Party. I think that much of the criticism from the left and from the center is based off of faulty ideas of what politics and the party are actually. I have and will continue to criticize the party on a lot of things – a timidity about power, as seen with the filibuster, blue slips and the lack of subpoenas for the current Supreme Court corruption8, the funneling of money to rather ineffective TV ads and consultants instead of building an actual party apparatus and the contempt many higher-ups have shown towards attempts to unionize. But if you want Democrats to run against neoliberalism, and to run in a way that manages a very large coalition full of people who don’t totally agree with the party on everything – well, look no further than Dark Brandon himself.
And, as for Chris Murphy, he should find better ways of trying to run for President in 2028 than suggesting we bring people he has labeled “fascist” into the coalition.
The other is Buncombe County (Asheville).
I feel this tendency is well-known enough that I don’t need to include specific links, but there is an excellent sampler in the beginning of this article.
It’s all rather eerily familiar to me as someone who was raised on Augustine, John Calvin and Romans 8 for theology.
Even in Georgia, which voted for a Democratic senator last term, has many Yankee transplants and many college-educated voters, whites voted Republican 70-30 while Black people voted Democratic 90-10. In Mississippi it often approaches 85-15 and 95-5 respectively.
Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, pg. 243.
Bill Moyers, “What a Real President Was Like,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1988.
Including many leftists who you would hope might have a more materialist understanding of politics, who seem to think that the President can give a speech and wave his hand and institute socialism. The left-NIMBY suffers from a similar problem – they think the housing crisis is not the result of laws passed by homeowners to protect their investment by restricting supply, but instead the personal actions of a few hedge funds or “gentrifiers.”
In fairness this one is just Dick Durbin being a moron.
it seems like there's *so* much self hatred happening about not being "real Americans" or whatever with a lot of these metropolitan/affluent suburban people who tweet like Jacobins-and so much of it coexisting so awkwardly with contempt for the working class! It's very strange.
One thing I would add is that a lot of this has to do with the decline of labor unions.