Richard D. Kahlenberg, Opinion, The Sunday Review, March 16, 2018<\/p>\n
After the 2016 election, many progressives were furious to learn that 22 percent of the working-class whites who once supported President Barack Obama voted<\/a> for Donald Trump. How could the same people back two political figures with such diametrically opposed approaches, particularly on the defining issue of race?<\/p>\n As we move to the 2018 midterms and beyond, progressives are asking whether they can win back Obama-Trump voters. Should they even bother to try?<\/p>\n To some, every outrageous act of Mr. Trump\u2019s reinforces the idea that Trump voters are beyond the pale. But as the former Obama staff member Van Jones has noted<\/a>, voters make decisions for complicated reasons, and the belief that \u201cIf you vote for a bigot, you are a bigot\u201d is wrong. As the pollster Guy Molyneux has found<\/a>, about 15 percent of white working-class voters are reliably liberal, about half are reliably conservative, and about 35 percent are up for grabs. That\u2019s 23 million people.<\/p>\n To reach these swing voters, progressive populists like Bernie Sanders say they will fight for working-class interests against a rigged system, while right-wing populists like Donald Trump say, among other things, that they respect the values of working-class people in a way that liberals don\u2019t.<\/p>\n But a half-century ago, a champion of civil rights offered a third approach: a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. In a remarkable 82-day campaign, Senator Robert F. Kennedy ran in several Democratic presidential primaries and was able to forge a powerful coalition of working-class whites and blacks, even as race riots were raging across the country, and at a time when whites were far more bigoted than they are today.<\/p>\n A passionate supporter of minority empowerment and a critic of the Vietnam War, Kennedy faced an uphill battle in appealing to working-class whites, who were increasingly hostile to civil rights and remained hawkish on the war. By 1968, as David Halberstam wrote in a book at the time, \u201cThe easy old coalition between labor and Negroes was no longer so easy; it barely existed. The two were among the American forces most in conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n But Kennedy waited to enter the race until March 16, 1968, only after the peace candidate Eugene McCarthy had challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson and locked up the support of many young people and highly educated whites, who were pro-civil rights and skeptical of the war. As a result, Kennedy had to try to appeal simultaneously to minority voters and white working-class constituencies who were part of the backlash against racial progress and the peace movement. This was especially true in Kennedy\u2019s first primary state, Indiana, where Gov. George Wallace of Alabama had shocked observers four years earlier by getting strong support from white ethnic precincts when he challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n Kennedy sought to build his unlikely coalition in part by running an economically populist campaign that vilified wealthy tax cheats and earned him the enmity of business leaders. \u201cWe have to convince the Negroes and the poor whites that they have common interests,\u201d he told the journalist Jack Newfield.<\/p>\n But Kennedy knew that a populist economic message would not get through to working-class whites unless it was accompanied by a respect for their beliefs on issues like crime, welfare and patriotism. Gerard Doherty, one of his aides, recalled speaking to Kennedy: \u201cI said if he was going to win, he has to conduct a campaign for sheriff of Indiana. And he did.\u201d Coupled with strong support for civil rights, Kennedy\u2019s message about punishing looters got through. At one point during the campaign, Richard Nixon remarked to the reporter Theodore White, \u201cDo you know a lot of these people think Bobby is more a law-and-order man than I am!\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy also campaigned on the dignity of work over welfare. In a TV commercial, he declared, \u201cI think welfare is demeaning and destructive of the human being and of his family.\u201d He didn\u2019t blame \u201cwelfare queens\u201d for cheating the system, as Ronald Reagan later would, but said he envisioned a policy of full employment in which a person could say to himself: \u201cI helped build this country. I am a participant in its greatest public venture.\u201d<\/p>\n On issues of national security, Kennedy took a principled position in opposition to the Vietnam War \u2014 whose very morality he questioned \u2014 but threaded the needle in a way that also made clear to working-class voters that he differed sharply from upper-middle-class white college students who avoided service or even sympathized with the North Vietnamese Communists. At Notre Dame, Kennedy was booed for saying college draft deferments should be abolished. \u201cYou\u2019re getting the unfair advantage while poor people are being drafted,\u201d he said. Remarkably, in Indiana he polled as well among those who favored Johnson\u2019s conduct of the Vietnam War as he did among those who opposed it.<\/p>\n Kennedy\u2019s campaign to woo working-class voters across racial lines worked. The candidate most identified with advancing civil rights did well<\/a> not only with black and Hispanic voters but also among working-class whites, some of whom had supported Wallace\u2019s segregationist candidacy in 1964.<\/p>\n A half-century later, how could progressives try to rebuild the Bobby Kennedy coalition? Kennedy\u2019s appeal was based in part on being the brother of a revered and martyred president, of course, and the most salient issues were different in 1968 than they are today. But Kennedy stressed fundamental themes that travel across time and transcend specific policy issues.<\/p>\n First, to appeal to a sizable number of white working-class voters in 1968, Kennedy did not forfeit his basic principles or change his positions on civil rights, or war and peace \u2014 and neither should progressives today. Ignoring the rights of women, gay people and people of color is both morally wrong and politically stupid if your aspiration is an inclusive populism.<\/p>\n Second, progressives should fight for economic justice in a manner that is relentless rather than episodic. On the campaign trail, Kennedy consistently hit themes of economic inequality and named the names of wealthy individuals, like the oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, who paid little in taxes. By contrast, in the final weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton de-emphasized economic issues in favor of attacks on Mr. Trump\u2019s qualifications, according to research by Democracy Corps and the Roosevelt Institute<\/a>, and his support among white non-college voters rose considerably. Progressives also need to vigorously punish Wall Street malfeasance. It is difficult to imagine that Kennedy, a tough prosecutor, would have argued, as some members of the Obama administration did, that some companies are \u201ctoo big to jail<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Third, progressives should explicitly signal the inclusion of working-class whites in their vision for change by applying civil rights laws to issues of class inequality, consistent with Kennedy\u2019s view that \u201cpoverty is closer to the root of the problem than color.\u201d I have long argued that we should extend<\/a> the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against workers of all races engaged in labor organizing; integrate<\/a> elementary and secondary schools not only by race but also by socioeconomic status; combat<\/a> discrimination in housing by economic status as well as race; and adopt<\/a> affirmative action programs in higher education for economically disadvantaged students of every color.<\/p>\n Fourth, progressives could adopt policies that respect the values of working-class people under the banner of patriotic populism, as Kennedy did. They should unapologetically champion a strong American identity around the shared values espoused in the Declaration of Independence as an antidote to exclusionary white nationalism.<\/p>\n An inclusive patriotic populism would be much more racially tolerant than Mr. Trump\u2019s white nationalism, and it would be tougher on national and domestic security than the populism offered by Mr. Sanders. If Robert Kennedy, the civil rights champion, could attract Wallace voters at a time of national chaos, surely the right progressive candidate with the right message could bring a significant portion of the Obama-Trump voters back home. Doing so would not only bring electoral success but also make it easier to forge a more economically progressive public policy to address America\u2019s dangerous economic divide.<\/p>\n