If Donald J. Trump’s base is the white working class, then it raises the question, how did it come to pass that the candidate of the Democratic Party, once known as the Party of the working man, fumbled?
The well-funded Mrs. Clinton claims that misogyny in tandem with James Comey’s interventions determined her fate in 2016, and perhaps those were to an unknowable extent operative, but we must ask if labor unions solved the problems of industrial society as old time pols insist? (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_trade_unions. )
Recall that the period following the Civil War was also a period of extensive immigration to fill the burgeoning labor demand, and that Democrats were a Party that had persisted in a period characterized by westward expansion and urbanization (while Republicans had been the voice of Big Business and agrarian nativism.) Workers were raising hell, as students of the late 19th century (e.g., Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order) will acknowledge, and (leftist) historians will mark the Progressive movement as responding to strikes and immigration (even as some condemn these WASPs for racism. e.g., https://clarespark.com/2010/03/10/jonah-goldbergs-liberal-fascism-part-one/).
Democrats did not solve the problem of nativism (exacerbated by necessary immigration to develop the continent—also the predictable opposition of displaced Indians and Mexicans); instead they catered to the ethnic preferences of the new Americans, leaving us with the New Deal “innovation” of multiculturalism as a mode by which elites could micromanage group conflict (https://clarespark.com/2011/06/16/the-antiquated-melting-pot/), pretty much as labor unions would fare, strengthened in the New Deal, ostensibly to ameliorate worker suffering in future depressions and to advance “cooperation” over (Darwinist) “competition.” And so FDR and his supporters maintained their class position, though the consequences for “labor” were not what “cooperation” had promised.
But don’t expect the very “Green” Democratic Party to raise the question of the effectiveness of labor unions in solving the deeper problems of industrial society—namely the mind-numbing nature of de-skilled “labor” and worker health and safety. Without a qualm bleeding hearts condemn their (inferior) fellow human beings to a life blessed at best by gross material satisfactions, for the redder Democratic Party hearts crave equality of condition, not equality of opportunity to scale the heights of human possibility.
The Clare Spark Blog 