Can't Message Your Way Out of It

I know Marcus H. Johnson isn't the first person to make the point that Democrats have been hemorrhaging white working class voters since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. Among many others, Heather McGhee in her book The Sum of Us went on to describe what she calls "drained pool politics" — white people who would rather drain the pool than have to share it with Black people.

But Johnson's recent Twitter thread about this topic is particularly expansive, pointing out that it's not a problem with Democratic messaging that's at fault, or neoliberalism.

It was because

The Democratic Party decided the founders were wrong, that America’s social system from its earliest days was actually bad, and the groups who materially benefited from that unequal authoritarian system are mad that it changed. That’s it. Can’t message your way out of that!

The drained-pool politics described by McGhee brought many white voters to oppose policies they had previously supported:

Letting non-whites participate in society caused a massive, dramatic conservative backlash, especially among the white working class, that led to Republicans winning the next 5 or6 presidential elections post-Civil Rights Movement (1968/72/80/84/88).

This white working class backlash to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and new immigration laws, increased economic/political competition with non-whites destroyed the new deal coalition and pushed the country’s social welfare policy rightward.

This, along with increased global economic competition (americans can't have the immediate post ww2 econ/manufacturing conditions forever), reduced living standards, especially for lower skill americans, and made social mobility harder.

Johnson argues that Democrats have to deal with this reality in their actual coalition instead of pretending they can magically somehow recreate the old one, without damaging the values of equality that are said to be at the party's core.

Now we have a Republican Party (and a Supreme Court) that are nakedly advocating a return to an unequal, authoritarian system — so the choice between the parties should be clearer than ever, if people are able to pay attention in the midst of all the metaphorical burning buildings that surround us every day. And if they are free to vote and have their votes fairly counted.

So many ifs.