For most of American history, the holy grail of liberal politics and activism has been to find a way to overcome such divisions, a way to show the poor and working class of every race that Their fates and interests are interrelated.
But race, then as it is now, remains a powerful tool for dividing the working class. This is not to say that an alliance cannot be built or has never been built. During the New Deal reorganization in the 1930s, Democrats built a coalition that supported the working class, at least to some extent, regardless of race. Of course, it wasn’t perfect because it still contained racist Southern Democrats, but it was a coalition.
That union began to disintegrate in the 1960s with the success of the civil rights movement. Since that time, Black leaders have struggled to reshape the union, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People Campaign. in the late 1960s, to Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition, founded in the 1980s, to Pastor William Barber’s focus on “unifying alliances” stemming from the Religious Monday campaign His campaign began in 2013 to protest North Carolina’s hardline legislative turn.
Liberal politicians have developed another method for coalition-building, one that sometimes works: culturally bilingual trying to speak to the white working class and those who do not. educated liberals separately, in their own way and in their own language.
But as the forces of intellectualism and what we call “diversity” came to play with growing power in the Democratic Party, white voters without a college education fled. Like Nate Cohn shown In this article in 2021, after Joe Biden’s victory: “When Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy nearly won the presidency in 1960, he won white voters without degrees but lost voters. whites graduated from college by a two-to-one margin. The numbers are almost the exact opposite for Mr. Biden, who lost to uneducated white voters 2 to 1 while winning white college graduates.
Similarly, according to an analysis by Politico, in 2020, Donald Trump won a staggering 96% in counties where 70% of people are white or more and less than 30% have a college degree.
This abstention partisan divide is known as the “degree split,” but it is much more than that. It also often represents a basic knowledge gap, encourages hostility to the truth, facilitates peddling conspiracy, sows hatred, extremism, and attacks. terrorism.
