Nicholas Kristof, the long-time liberal New York Times columnist, has a warning for his fellow Democrats: dismiss Oliver Anthony at your peril.
“Have Democrats retreated so far from their workingman roots that their knee-jerk impulse is to dump on a blue-collar guy who highlights ‘folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat?'” Kristof asks.
Anthony has been called a “racist” by some on the left, but it’s the general disdain that the left holds for working-class Americans that will cost them at the ballot box next year. And as Kristof has pointed out, “Harvard professor Michael Sandel has noted, one of the last acceptable prejudices is disdain for the less educated.”
This disdain manifests itself throughout our culture. Hollywood’s portrayal of working-class whites as ignorant bigots is standard fare. Racists, misogynists, violent — their portrayal of these Americans breeds a contempt that’s hard to disguise.
And then Democrats wonder why they’re losing the votes of these people?
Kristof says that Anthony’s lament isn’t anti-liberal. It’s anti-elites.
He makes the valid point that these disparate social crises reflect a broader pathology that is holding America back. “People talk about epidemics in this country, and the homelessness and the drug use and the lack of skilled labor and the suicide rates,” he said. “Those aren’t problems; those are symptoms of a bigger universal problem. … We don’t talk about it enough.”
The problem for the left is that while Anthony may be disparaging conservative elites as much as the left, the populist right has embraced his message. And that has gone over the head of most on the left.
Liberals are properly attentive to racial injustice but have a blind spot about class, driven in part by unfair stereotypes that members of the white working class are invariably bigots. In fact, you can’t think seriously about inequality in America without contemplating race, but that’s also true of class. And as the Harvard professor Michael Sandel has noted, one of the last acceptable prejudices is disdain for the less educated.
Anthony sounded some conservative themes in his song, including complaining about taxes — and that led to some liberal jeers. But as Noah Smith observed in his economics blog, a Virginian earning the median factory wage pays a total tax rate of more than 24 percent —higher than one estimate of the rate paid by the 400 richest Americans.
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In fact, most of Anthony’s song was about themes that Donald Trump has been talking about since 2016. The question is why these populist themes have been sneered at by the left. Anthony’s lyrics could have been uttered by the patron saint of lefitsm, Franklin Roosevelt.
If we’re going to achieve a more progressive agenda, then we need to win elections — and that means respecting workers rather than scorning them, insulting their faith and casually dismissing them as bigots. If we believe in empathy, let’s show some.
It’s always easy for the left to hold blue-collar Americans at arm’s length. It makes them feel superior and morally righteous. So keep denigrating the working class, Democrats. Giving Republicans a majority as well as the presidency is what this nation desperately needs.
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