In the past two days, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the opening paragraph to W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
The Civil War was not a metamorphosis of American race relations. Post-Reconstruction, civil rights advocates found themselves at the bottom of a long ladder—and they’re still climbing. I have no doubt that the color line remains today, dark and ugly, scorched into interstate highways, civil courts, redlined mortgages, school zoning laws, and public housing projects. But there’s another line too, staring up at me every time I see a $6 carton of eggs.
If the problem of the 20th century was the color line, could the problem of the 21st century be the class line?
Bernie Sanders has been saying it for years, and he said it again on Tuesday night: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
This is another turn in the wheel of social inequality—an evolved, insidious form of segregation just as difficult to penetrate. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is evaporating away. 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Over and over again this election season, voters made it clear that the economy was their top priority. The cost of living, of healthcare, of education, childcare, rent, groceries, transportation, utilities, reliable internet access, legal representation, retirement, clean water, emergency services, life insurance, cell phone plans, eldercare, basic hygiene, public safety; the cost of the clothes on our backs and that carton of eggs—there’s a line down the middle, with “us” on one side and “them” on the other.
It would be wrong to spend the upcoming weeks and months raging that 72 million Americans are bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobic assholes. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are. But as David Brooks points out, disparaging the other side because they don’t “speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue” only tightens the class line hold on us all. There was a rightward shift across the board—to the point where even Vermont lost its democratic supermajority in the state legislature—and we can’t afford to preach it away.
For all our pontificating about identity, equity, and justice, Brooks says, “there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.”
The Democratic Party has been losing me for a long time, and Tuesday night felt like the final nail in the coffin. After 2016, Democrats had an opportunity to listen to their constituencies, to shift gears and respond to desperate calls for change. Instead, we got Liz Cheney last month turning a vote for Harris into your suburban aunt’s dirty little secret. Democrats today are a bastion of global neoliberal capitalism, on their knees before America’s highest income brackets. Party elites have completely failed to recognize that politics in this country are no longer liberal versus conservative, but status quo versus change. Trump gets that. He turned an old Democratic dream into reality: winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote with a multiracial working class majority. It goes to show that voters aren’t interested in politicians who preach the sanctity of institutions and bipartisan chumminess anymore—that’s old news, and it hasn’t been working for a while now. Until people see change in the material reality of their everyday lives, this is the world we’re living in.
In the weeks to come, there will be fingers pointed and accusations leveled at any number of things. America is racist, sexist, and not ready for a female president; Democrats should have condemned Israel; Democrats should have doubled down on support for Israel; Biden should have dropped out sooner; Biden should have dropped out later; Josh Shapiro would have been a better VP; etc., etc., etc. I don’t see much use in rehashing what could have or should have been done. I’m furious, obviously. But I’ve also run out of patience for my own wallowing.
I think of Rebecca Solnit: “There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining.”
All I can hope is that we will keep walking, that we will save what can be saved, and that these next four years will finally force the Democratic Party to do some much-needed introspection.
When people want radical change, they vote radically. The left had better meet them there.
Sophie Jager can be reached at sjager@wesleyan.edu.