Rooting For The Wrong Team: Dumb, racist, Bible-thumping, gun-loving, working-class white males living in the American South began voting for the Republican Party when the Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Bill into law in 1965. The Republican Right has been playing them like a fiddle ever since. If he's to become President, Bernie Sanders is going to have to persuade these good ole boys to vote the same way as their black brothers.
IF BERNIE SANDERS is to win the US Presidential Election
he’ll have to win the support of two crucial demographics. The first group to
win over are working-class blacks. The second, and arguably the more important,
are working-class whites. Because, right now, the Sanders campaign is a
paradox: it offers America a left-wing programme, but the voters who have , so
far, responded most enthusiastically are not the black, white and Latino
working-class Americans who would benefit most from its content, but the young,
well-educated children of America’s white professional middle-class – and some
of their parents.
As the primaries head South and South-West into South
Carolina and Nevada the Sanders campaign must find a way to counter Hillary
Clinton’s popularity among African-American voters and Latinos. If he does not
find some way of detaching a significant number of black support from the
Clinton juggernaut in South Carolina, he risks getting what Barack Obama calls
a “shellacking”. Being beaten by 40-50 percentage points in the Palmetto State
would damage the Sander’s campaign very seriously. A narrow loss (10-15 points)
on the other hand, would indicate that he just might come out the other side of
“Super Tuesday” with enough delegates to keep on fighting.
[The phrase “Super Tuesday” refers to the Tuesday in February or March of a presidential election year
when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates
to national conventions at which each party’s presidential candidates are
officially nominated. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on
any other single day of the primary calendar; accordingly, candidates seeking
the presidency traditionally must do well on this day to secure their party’s
nomination. States participating in this year’s “Super Tuesday” (1 March 2016)
are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma,
Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. – Wikipedia]
Sander’s position in Nevada is of less concern than his
situation in South Carolina. The Nevada polls put him within striking distance
of Clinton, which suggests that, whoever wins there, the margin will be
relatively narrow. If it’s not, and Clinton racks up a big Nevada win, then the
Sanders campaign will find itself holed below the waterline.
In Sander’s favour, however, is the endorsement he has
received from the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This mostly young activist
group has broken ranks with the ageing veterans of the 1950s and 60s civil
rights leadership – nearly all of whom have come out strongly for Clinton.
Black youth, who have grown up in the post-civil rights activism era, are drawn
to Sander’s unequivocal condemnation of Police racism, and are as enthusiastic
as white youth about his promises of free tertiary education and universal,
publicly funded and provided health care.
If Sanders attracts the support of young black working-class voters
across the South (where most of the Super Tuesday primaries will be taking place)
then Clinton campaign’s progress will be severely impeded.
But, even if he heads off Hillary to claim the Democratic
Party’s nomination, Sanders cannot become President of the United States
without re-claiming for the Democratic Party a significant chunk of the white
working-class’s current support for the Republicans.
In the states of the old Confederacy, and especially among
voters with only a high-school education, the formerly rock-solid grip of the
Democratic Party was broken as long ago as the late 1960s. The poor,
ill-educated, deeply religious working-class white males of the Old South never
forgave President Johnson (a Texan goddammit!) for passing the Voting Rights Act
in 1965. It made them easy meat for the Alabama Governor, George Wallace, in
1968; Richard Nixon, in 1972; and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
By skilfully practising the dark art of “wedge politics” the
Republicans have by-and-large held on to these angry and alienated “good ole
boys”. Culturally impoverished, Fox News watching, minimum wage workers
comprise the core of evangelical Christianity in America; hold deeply
conservative views on most social issues; love their guns, their families and
their flag; and have precious little that’s good to say about Blacks (welfare
scroungers!) Latinos (illegal immigrants!) Muslims (terrorists!) or “Big
Government”.
Can Sanders – a socialist Jewish-American – win back these
good ole boys? That depends upon how forthright and uncompromising he is
willing to be in sheeting home the blame for working-class America’s woes to
where it properly belongs. Deep down these voters know that they’ve been
suckered by the country-club set, and that, as Sanders declares over and over
again, the game in America is rigged against the ordinary working stiff – no matter
what colour or creed he may be.
Only if he is able to convince both the black and the white
working-class that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote to break
through to the surface and once again breathe free American air, can Bernie
Sanders hope to become the 45th President of the United States.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
and Bowalley Road of Saturday, 20 February 2016.
