If the Democrats lose to Trump, here are a few reasons why

Sam Smith - While the media and public follow political changes in our society, cultural changes take a back seat. This is unfortunate because often political change is the result of things happening in  our culture.

For example, when I started covering Washington in the late 1950s, over half the reporters in the country only had a high school degree. How did this fact affect journalism in general? A more natural relationship to lower working class Americans and their concerns.

Last year the Washington Times ran a story that showed another cultural shift:

According to a Pew Research Center poll released this week, Democrats are now the party of college graduates, especially those with post-graduate work. Meanwhile, people with a high-school degree or less, by far the larger group, slightly lean toward Republicans.

According to Pew, 54 percent of college graduates either identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared to 39 percent who identified or leaned Republican. One-third of Americans have a college degree.Just 25 years ago, those numbers were perfectly reversed in the Pew survey, with the GOP holding a 54-39 advantage among people with college degrees

 In other words, an increasingly well educated Democratic Party had lost the support of a class of people that helped to define it during the New Deal and Great Society. It is small surprise that the last truly liberal administration - the Johnson years - started over a half century ago.

Key to this sihft - and hardly mentioned today - was the decline of labor unions. Aside from being an organizing tool, these unions were also importnat educational institutions. If we had strong unions today, the Trump con would have a much harder time being believed by working class Americans.

In 1960 about 30% of workers belonged to unions. By 2012 that was down to 11.3% (0r 6.6.% for private sector workers). In other words almost two thirds of union workers had lost their labor mentors. The now much better educated Democrats have paid little attention to this and the Republican right filled the gap.

Of course, it's quite possible for the well educated to work with high school grads, but it has to be seen as desirable by both and in a climate of increasing class distinction becomes less likely. One result: the common assessment of liberals as "elitists."

As a Harvard graduate who was introduced to politics in Philadelphia as a 12 year old stuffing envelopes around union guys, and who later was involved in the civil rights movement and edited a newspaper in a poorer part of town, I know this is not a matter of politics or ideology. It is the result of experience, culture and inclination. You just have to care what people who aren't like you worry about.

This tendency has weakened in no small part due to cultural reasons, one of the classic ones being that the Internet has encouraged us to deal primarily with those like ourselves.  This limited approach can also be seen in identity culture which ignores the possibility that one's own identity can be strengthened by building natural alliances with people not like you. As one of six children I learned early that others were different from me and from each other. and if you were only one-sixth of the total you needed some friends and allies.

And what brings us together: common interests and common causes.About a decade ago I described in an interview one way I had been involved in doing this back in the 1990s:

.We had a conference here in Washington, in which we invited members of, I think it was something like fifteen third parties, state or local or national. We had Libertarians there and we had Perot people there.  I think 120 people come to this conference from all over the country, and here's what our game was.  We were going to try to find consensus on a bunch of issues.   

Now mind you, we had a group that ran from the old leftist from the 1930s, all the way to the Libertarians and the Perot people.  We came up with seventeen points of agreement, using some very, very simple principles.  One was that we were in that room not to talk about the things we disagreed with each other on, but to find the things we agreed upon.  One of the Libertarians came up to me and said. "You know, we're going to have to fight you on healthcare, so maybe you don't want us here any more." I said, "No stick around, we'll find some things to agree about."

We sat around at different tables that each took different issue areas.  And the way we did it, we had a board on which we would list the ideas people proposed. And then you each had three stickers, and you'd get up and you'd put your three stickers with your nameon it all on one, or one on three, or two on one and one on another, and it was sort of fun because everybody got out of the normal political mode.

If you got all through this and you had,say, ten or twelve issues that had a lot of stickers on them; there were also  some that only had one. You could go up and you could get your sticker from the one that only had one on it and move it to some place else.  At every table we came up pretty much with a consensus on a number of issues.

We also had a fishbowl negotiation.  Where there was a problem, these ten tables would appoint someone to go bea  negotiator.  And then we would sit behind the person who was our negotiator, and if we didn't like what that person did we'd call a timeout and then we'd negotiate with our negotiator. 

 I'd never seen anything like this.  This wasn't my idea.  This was all new to me.  I came up with the sticker idea; that was my only contribution to the thing.  At the end of the day we came up with seventeen points of agreement.  

What if blacks, latinos, women, labor union members and others came together and discovered what they agreed upon and put it out as a political declaration of a new coalition?  It wouldn't damage their identities in the slightest, but would create a major force of common interest. And that coalition, far more than anything that is happening now, could change the course of the election as well as improving its relations with each other. .

The Democrats have a fine collection of candidates but this isn't a political Apprentice show,. It's about creating a forceful projection of what would happen no matter who was elected. It's about changing the lives of millions of Americans. And convincing them, as the Democrats have been so often unable to do this past half ceenury, that they have the force and support to do it. 



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