Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Fareed Zakaria's Message After Working Class Voters Ditch the Democrats: Good Riddance!

It's a mistake to dismiss the workers of this nation. And yet the elites within the Democratic Party have shown their disdain over and over and over again.



Hillary Clinton and Fareed Zakaria speak during the 10th Anniversary Women In The World Summit at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on April 12, 2019 in New York City.

Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images


OPINION
Les Leopold
Jan 28, 2025
Common Dreams


While some prominent Democrats are calling on party to reconnect with the working class by embracing economic populism, Fareed Zakaria, the host of a CNN news show and a Washington Post columnist, argues in a recent op-ed that it’s lost cause:
“[The Democrats] have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”

It's eerily reminiscent of what Senator Chuck Schumer infamously said eight years ago just before Hillary Clinton lost to Trump:
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Zakaria, however, claims that Biden didn’t follow Schumer’s advice and instead enacted massive infrastructure investments that were intended to please the entire working class. Biden, he writes, “presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2 percent target….wage inequality is down…and wage growth is outpacing inflation.”

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making.

But despite all this economic assistance, the working class increased its vote for Trump. For Zakaria, the Democrats’ electoral failure illustrates the futility of pandering to the working class.

We might better understand working-class alienation if we look at how Zakaria cherry picked his facts and ignored those that didn’t fit his story.He didn’t mention that most of those new jobs were a bounce-back after Covid -- the December 2024 employment level is 7.2 million higher, not 17 million higher, than the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020.
Yes, inflation is down, thank goodness, but it soared to a 40-year high during the Biden years, soaring by 20 percent, and causing enormous financial stress for working-class families.
He didn’t mention that the subhead for the link he cites on wage inequality reads, “But top 1% wages have skyrocketed 182% since 1979 while bottom 90% wages have seen just 44% growth.”
It’s not at all clear that wage growth for the average worker is outpacing inflation. (See “Are Workers Just Too Stupid to Understand Inflation.”)
And finally, Zakaria fails to mention the involuntary layoffs that hit millions of workers during the Biden administration. It’s hard to feel good about a party that fails to protect your job.

Zakaria loads the dice because he is sure that the White working-class cares more about race, immigration, gender, and sexual preference than it does about its own economic well-being. Hillary Clinton in 2016 ungracefully called half of the Trump voters “deplorables.” Zakaria means much the same when he writes that the Democratic Party “has been slowly losing the votes of the White working class, largely on issues related to race, identity and culture.”

The data from long-term voter surveys tell a different story. The White working-class has become more liberal, not more deplorable, on these issues. While researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, I identified 23 controversial questions put to tens of thousands of White working-class voters over the last several decades. In no case did the White working-class become more illiberal. On thirteen of those controversial questions workers became more liberal. Here are five examples:





Zakaria’s laments the Democrats leftward shift, but the Democrats have not in recent years put forth a strong populist agenda. (See “Are You Still Wondering Why Workers Voted for Trump?”)Democrats have not eliminated Wall Street stock buybacks, which kill millions of jobs each year while enriching the richest.

They have not limited the price gouging by food and drug cartels.

They have not stopped the healthcare industry from profiting wildly at our expense.
And their major infrastructure bills continue to pour money into corporate coffers without requiring job-creation guarantees.

Zakaria, nevertheless, has no trouble pushing these alienated workers into the MAGA movement. No big loss. But such abandonment is a loss for members of the working class. The MAGA oligarchs did not become billionaires by protecting the economic needs and interests of working people.

To counter the blooming oligarchy which appears to have planted itself firmly in both parties, working people need a new political home, one of their own making. Although the process is extremely difficult in our two-party system, working people and labor unions may have no choice but to build a new political formation of and by working people, just like the Populists did at the end of the 19th century to battle the robber barons of that era.

Their party’s name is as appropriate today as it was then: The People’s Party.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, “Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It." (2024). Read more of his work on his substack here.
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Organizers Report Longtime 'Loyal' Dem Voters Fed Up With Party's Inaction as Trump 2.0 Takes Hold


Leaders of the grassroots group Indivisible said voters are eager to beat the Trump agenda, and called on Democratic leaders to act as a true opposition party.



An Indivisible chapter in Chicago held a strategy session with more than 600 attendees on January 25, 2025.
(Photo: Michelle Singleton/Bluesky)


Julia Conley
Jan 27, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


A week into Republican U.S. President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, high-profile advocates with close ties to the Democratic Party expressed frustration at congressional Democrats' response to the slew of unconstitutional, xenophobic, and bigoted executive actions already unleashed by Trump.

"Democrats in Congress: WHAT IS THE PLAN?" Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, demanded to know on Monday.

Watts cited Trump's purge of at least 12 inspectors general at federal agencies on Friday—an action that was met with outrage from Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but little in the way of specific action from party leaders.

"There's no sit-in? No filibuster? No direction to voters? And in fact, some of you are actually voting for Trump's agenda?" asked Watts, an apparent reference to Democrats such as Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who voted in favor of some of the president's Cabinet nominees and the anti-immigration Laken Riley Act, the first bill to be sent to Trump's desk, last week.

Watts suggested in a series of posts on the social media platform X that she has typically been aligned with the Democratic establishment, calling herself a "loyal 'normie Dem.'"




Leah Greenberg, a former Democratic congressional staffer who co-founded the grassroots advocacy group Indivisible, said the group's members across the country are sharing the same "exact sentiment" as Watts.


In addition to Trump's mass firing of officials tasked with overseeing federal agencies, the president in the week pardoned more than 1,500 people who were convicted or charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; launched an immigration enforcement crackdown in Chicago; and issued an executive order revoking birthright citizenship—an action that was swiftly blocked by a federal judge who said the order with "blatantly unconstitutional."

As Common Dreamsreported last week, Democrats' refusal to aggressively stand against the GOP, which now controls both chambers of Congress as well as the White House, has frustrated progressive lawmakers including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Last week she told Jon Stewart on his podcast, "The Weekly Show," that the entire Democratic Party must differentiate itself from the GOP by becoming unapologetic "brawlers for the working class"—but suggested that with many Democrats taking donations from corporate lobbyists and the ultrarich and trading stocks in numerous industries, it's the party must make major changes to remake itself as one that fights for working people, many of whom swung to the right in the November elections.

Watts highlighted Ocasio-Cortez's speech on the House floor last week when she opposed the Laken Riley Act—a bill that would require immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, including shoplifting, and allow state attorneys general to file legal challenges to detain specific immigrants—as "the energy we need."

In her speech, the congresswoman pointed to members of Congress who take donations from the private prison companies that will inevitably be "flooded with money" as the federal government looks to detain undocumented immigrants swept up in raids.

The Laken Riley Act passed in the House with the support of 46 Democrats who joined the GOP, and in the Senate with 12 Democrats joining the Republicans.

As the bill headed to Trump's desk, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Sunday garnered scorn by wrapping up the president's first week in office with a message one critic likened to "thoughts and prayers."



"This is what the Democrats have after a week of historic racism, homophobia, illegality, and fascism by the Trump regime," said civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger. "Here's the leader of the opposition party just leaving it to God."


Watts, Greenberg, and Ezra Levin, who also co-founded Indivisible, called on voters to put pressure on their representatives to act as a true opposition party and, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memowrote last week, "focus in on making [Republicans'] unpopular actions as painful as possible" for the GOP.

As an example, Marshall warned that Democrats are attempting to "court" Republicans who could vote against Trump's nominees by tempering their criticism of the potential Cabinet members.

"Far from courting potential defectors, they should be attacking them," Marshall wrote. "The criticisms of the bad nominees should be as intense as possible and all focused on the support of these senators. No one does you a favor in these settings for being nice: Senators defect when they think they may pay a price at the ballot box. That is the only way to have messaging that takes the initiative and stays on the attack. If things get too hot and the senator pulls their support, great. If not, that just lays the groundwork for beating that senator in the next election."

"The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose," he added. "Get to it."

Greenberg emphasized Monday that calling Democratic lawmakers and demanding that they stop "cowering in terror from Trump" will make a difference.



"It would be really cool if we had a party of principled and authentic leaders capable of acting like an opposition party without us constantly yelling at them," said Greenberg. "We do not have that right now! So we need to keep yelling at them!"

Levin reported that, contrary to claims by the corporate media, voters across the country are eager to fight the Trump agenda, and to demand that Democratic lawmakers join them.



"At the Chicago Indivisible meeting I joined yesterday, they filled the theater and an overflow room," said Levin. "In North Carolina where Leah Greenberg was yesterday, it was standing room only. We've had ~250 *new* Indivisible groups form since the election, and leaders report surging membership."

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