Some of the best advice Democrats have received recently came from Bill Clinton in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.
First, he warned against hubris: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.” That’s something that any Clinton understands in his — or her — gut.
Second, related and even more important, he cautioned against demeaning voters who don’t share liberal values.
“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”
That’s critical counsel because too often since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.
It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.
By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.
Feeling betrayed
Since I live in a rural area, many of my old friends are Trump supporters. One, a good and generous woman, backs Trump because she feels betrayed by the Democratic and Republican political establishments, and she has a point. When factories closed and good union jobs left the area, she ended up homeless and addicted; four members of her extended family killed themselves and she once put a gun to her own head. So when a demagogue like Trump speaks to her pain and promises to bring factories back, of course her heart leaps.
Then her resolve strengthens when she hears liberals mock her faith — it was an evangelical church that helped her overcome homelessness — or deride her as “deplorable.”
Then there’s the woman who cut my hair: She has a daughter who was overcome with addiction, so she quit the shop to care for a grandson. Her successor cutting my hair lost her husband to an overdose and is struggling to help a son who is addicted. She isn’t much interested in politics and didn’t watch any of the Democratic convention; she said she distrusts Trump and sees him as a bully, but she is mad at Democrats because food prices are too high.
“I’m not sure how I’ll vote,” she told me, “or if I’ll vote.” She’s a good, hardworking person who would benefit from a Democratic victory, and Democrats should fight for her — not savage her for political thought crimes.
Working-class Americans have a right to feel betrayed. After almost 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks, we started two wars and allocated trillions of dollars to the response. But every three or four days we lose as many Americans to drugs, alcohol and suicide as died in the Sept. 11 attacks, yet the national response has been pathetically weak. The social fabric in many blue-collar communities has unraveled, and people are angry and frustrated.
Party of the educated
Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith. And in a country where 74% of Americans report a belief in God, according to Gallup, and only 38% older than 25 have a four-year college degree, condescension is a losing strategy.
Michael Sandel, the eminent Harvard philosopher, condemns the scorn for people with less education as “the last acceptable prejudice” in America. He’s right: Elites sometimes indulge in open disdain for working-class voters that they would never acknowledge about other groups.
I worry about Democrats neglecting their proud heritage since at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt of standing up for working-class Americans. Maybe it’s time for more educated liberals to reread FDR’s famous “Forgotten Man” speech of 1932, hailing “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
We liberals today are attuned to identity and thus to racial and gender disadvantages, while often seemingly oblivious to class disadvantage — even though recent research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty underscores that race is playing a smaller role in opportunity gaps while class gaps are yawning wider.
You can’t have a serious conversation about inequality today without discussing race. But you also can’t have a serious conversation about poverty or opportunity without considering class (and for many people of color, race and class disadvantages overlap).
Kamala Harris seems to get this. She chose as her running mate a man who can reach working-class voters with his words as well as his policies. And she can present herself as the candidate who worked at McDonald’s while her opponent was exploiting his inheritance — and renters.
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I wasn’t planning to write this column, but then I approvingly tweeted Clinton’s comment about not demeaning those we disagree with. Plenty of readers replied hotly: But they deserve to be demeaned!
Sure, it’s satisfying to hurl invective. But calling people “Nazis” probably won’t win over undecided voters any more than when Trump supporters deride “libtards” or the “Biden crime family.”
Whatever our politics, Trump brings out the worst in all of us. He nurtures hate on his side that we mirror.
So let’s take a deep breath, summon FDR’s empathy for the forgotten man, follow Clinton’s advice — and, for the sake of winning elections as well as of civility, remember that the best way to get others to listen to us is to first listen to them.
Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.