Number23 asked, so: white supremacy and the Democratic party
I made earlier a flippant comment on a somewhat baiting OP in GDP about white supremacy and its role in the formation of the DLC.
23 was curious why I said what I did, and I think that was a fair call-out, so I wanted to respond here like she ("she", I think?) asked.
No ghost needs to come from the grave to tell this group that white supremacy is embedded in every part of American politics that is not entirely non-white (for lurkers about to jump me on this: no, that doesn't mean that "bad people" are doing this; it means that white supremacy is incredibly insidious and nobody comes out with clean hands -- hell, even Carver was ultimately guilty of pushing the idea that black people were "damaged" or at least "nascent" Americans who might one day with proper education be allowed to take up the august peerage of full American citizenship). And that includes the DLC: I think it was a movement to placate downscale white voters who didn't like the idea of "welfare" (which people still bitch about on Facebook, despite AFDC having ended twenty years ago) because they thought lazy black people got it (I doubt I need to break down the actual demographics here, but obviously it's hard to dispute the perception existed). Now, it doesn't help that now we're getting from the left some very disturbing tendencies to jump immediately to Welfare Reform when the Clintons' record on race comes up -- guess what? More white people got thrown off AFDC than any other race...
Anyways. One of Coates's recent pieces (and damn, he's been on a tear lately at the Atlantic) mentioned Tom Watson, who it turned out was kind of the missing link for my thinking on this. Watson was William Jennings Bryan's VP pick in 1896, and continued with the explicitly populist movement even after Bryan went to the Democrats. And he's really the best example of the early stages of this fracture. He was anti-white-supremacist until he realized it got him nowhere.
My comment was flippant because I bought into the framing that "the DLC" (ominous music) was somehow unusual in adopting a white supremacist view of politics. Obviously it wasn't. But it's a pretty clear example of what I take Coates's point in bringing up Sanders to be: even the farthest reaches of the white Left, for more than a century now, consistently proves itself to be more interested in using white supremacy than in overturning it, when the shit actually hits the fan ("But, dude, we'll totally overturn white supremacy once white people are all equal"
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Anyways, my takeaway from this was that the DLC was yet another attempt by the white left to tap the energy of aggrieved poor whites, and that this history goes back a long time, and is a core strategy of both major parties, and scares the shit out of me. Time and time and time again well-meaning white populist liberals have chased this ghost, and either been trampled by it (La Follette) or succumbed to it (Long, Wallace). And my current worry is that the Sanders campaign is (he says so in as many words) an attempt to tap the energy of disgruntled working class whites. And it doesn't take a crystal ball to see where that leads.
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Good piece.
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I'm going to have to think about this. Could you expound a little more on how Bernie fits into this ... I have my thoughts; but, what to hear you out (so I'm not "interpretating that you inferred what I think you implied."
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