Many pundits and scholars have remarked on how the 2016 election reflected the significance of race in American politics. One strain of commentary to that effect contends that Trump’s election revealed a deep commitment to racism among white voters, especially working-class white voters, who are fundamentally alienated from a Democratic liberalism identified with nonwhites, feminists, LGBTQ people, and liberal technocratic elites.
From that perspective, the strategic moral of the Trump victory is that, as MSNBC Clintonoid Joy-Ann Reid put it in an August 29, 2017 Daily Show interview, the Democrats must recognize that they are the party of “black and brown people, of gay people, of marginalized people” and should stop longing “to be the party of the sort of Pabst Blue Ribbon voter, the kind of Coors Lite drinking voter…the sort of Archie Bunker voters” because the latter are committed Republicans. Reid imagines that, even though most Americans’ incomes have remained flat or declined and their lives have become more precarious over the period, the Democrats have been trying to appeal to those voters’ economic interests for forty years only to be rebuffed consistently because the latter care more about their “values” than their economic interests, and “the Republican party represents their values.”
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