How Dems Lost Touch With Their Working Class Base

After Tuesday's rather convincing Democratic defeat on nearly all levels, it's time for my party to look within at where it's gone wrong. I believe it started with Bill Clinton. No, this has nothing to do with his sexual indiscretions. It has everything to do with international trade. This might seem like a dry topic until you realize that our policies eliminated millions of good jobs. 

NAFTA was actually first proposed by Ronald Reagan. American oligarchs loved it. But there was no way that Reagan or George Bush could persuade Democrats to go along. Then came Bill Clinton, the charismatic Arkansas Governor who would excel at taking Republican ideas and running with them.

In the 1992 Presidential race, Clinton said he'd support NAFTA. under which American companies would be able to move to Mexico and use cheap labor to pay for what it had been making here. That brought Ross Perot into the fray. He was very much like Trump, but without the deep character flaws. He was a plain-spoken billionaire who once hired a commando team to rescue two of his employees taken hostage by Iran after US government efforts to free them failed. 

Perot, like most of the American public and Democrats in Congress, was strongly opposed to NAFTA. At a Presidential debate, he said "[i]t's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals." 

Perot lost the race, but garnered 19% of the vote, including mine. It was the most votes an independent candidate for President, aside from Teddy Roosevelt, ever received

Clinton was able to shepherd NAFTA through Congress, persuading just enough Democrats to go along. He had the help of a mainstream media that thought it would produce jobs. 

That giant sucking sound predicted by Perot became reality. Some economists argue that overall, the American economy benefitted. But not those who worked in jobs that were sent to Mexico. Counties that depended on industry affected by NAFTA saw 600,000 jobs go away over two decades. Those counties, once blue, are now red. 

In "How NAFTA Broke American Politics," Dan Kaufman describes this in detail. 

"The passage of NAFTA — along with other Clinton-era measures like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that regulated banks, and the granting of permanent most-favored-nation status for China, which allowed China to enter the World Trade Organization and ultimately cost the United States nearly four million jobs — signaled the Democratic Party’s move away from its working-class, New Deal roots. This decoupling was worsened by the damage to unions from NAFTA. In 1996, Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at Cornell University, conducted a study for the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation, which found that after the passage of NAFTA, nearly 50 percent of unionization drives were met with threats to relocate abroad, and that the rate at which factories shut down after a union was successfully certified tripled."

Democratic leaders were perfectly willing to abandon the very people who were loyal to them for decades. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer bragged, "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,”

Basically, Democratic leaders have forgotten who got them where they are. Republicans, and Donald Trump in particular, have stepped in to support them on the campaign trail. But once ensconced in office, they listen to corporate lobbyists. Unfortunately, so do Democrats. 

You can argue that Dems are too woke or weak or whatever. To me, it's important to stand up for the voiceless and ostracized minorities. That even includes people whose sexual orientation sometimes baffles me. And we are certainly far from weak. We are not the ones running from Ukraine and who want to bury our heads in the sand. But our primary focus should always be our working and middle class. We need to get them back and that starts with listening to them.