re: #232 Backwoods_Sleuth

What if we DO understand their grievances already?

What if we know that their explanation for what happened to their hopes and dreams is wrong, that they weren’t taken away by sharing power and privilege with women and minorities, but by the economic system they voted for hoping it would preserve what was left their privilege by denying it to others?

Traub asks,

If that’s the case, then racism is so deeply inscribed in the American soul, as much of the party’s left claims today, that a Democratic majority can only be founded on a coalition of the disadvantaged and the high-minded.

What if the racism that’s so deeply inscribed in the American soul is SYSTEMIC racism? What if it’s not the racism of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, but rather the racism that many white people can’t see, the racism that makes 12 year old black boys playing with bb guns into imagined gangbangers, that makes any black protest into a riot, that causes hiring managers to unconsciously down-rate an excellent resume because of the name attached to it, that dismisses claims of discrimination because that would mean you didn’t get where you are solely by your own effort?

The GOP has played the long con here, simultaneously stoking white resentment with dogwhistles and destroying the economic system that supported the rise of the largely white middle class.

The Democrats have to be about more than just Old White Guy Socialism.