Amid soul-searching by liberal commentators and Democratic Party politicians, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin claims she knows why Kamala Harris didn’t beat Donald Trump. The problem, Rubin wrote Nov. 29, was the “prevalence of low-information” voters, who “know shockingly little about government.”
In case there’s any confusion about what she means, Rubin says they are “sometimes categorized as ‘ignorant.’” This is to be sharply distinguished from people like her, who she describes as a “certain stratum of Americans” who “prioritize learning about politics.”
Rubin goes so far as to make the argument that “low-information” voters have trouble understanding issues or “assessing the state of the economy.” But workers live in the crisis-ridden reality of high prices, joblessness and rising uncertainty. We know what is happening to ourselves and to millions of fellow workers who are looking for ways to change these conditions.
Rubin says, “What is the point of asking such voters their view?” She urges Democrats to just “reduce and simplify” their message for workers who voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all. Some 89 million eligible voters didn’t see enough in either capitalist candidate to vote, substantially more than the numbers of votes either Trump or Harris got.
Rubin’s piece captures the disdain shown toward working people by the liberal big-business media and capitalist politicians of all stripes. These views are especially prevalent among members of the upper-middle-class meritocratic layers that dominate the Democratic Party today. They’re convinced their own “higher education and income,” as Rubin puts it, qualifies them to administer and regulate the lives of the toiling majority on behalf of the country’s exploiting capitalist rulers.
Exemplified by Barack Obama, these “smart people” deeply believe the working class is ignorant, inherently bigoted and the source of ultra-right reaction. “The fascist won a lot of working-class support,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Nov. 6, referring to Trump.
In fact the most important thing working people have been doing in recent years is turning to our unions, organizing strikes and winning solidarity. This is a change after decades of relatively low labor resistance to the bosses’ drive to increase their profits on our backs.
The course put forward by the Socialist Workers Party’s presidential ticket and its other candidates in 2024 was grounded in this reality. They joined picket lines, built unions and campaigned on a program to end the twin scourges of inflation and joblessness.
They won support while explaining workers need to break from the bosses’ parties and build a party of our own, a party of labor, to advance the fight to take political power into our own hands. Along that road, the working class will develop a leadership grounded in the experiences of past revolutionary struggles that can point the road toward victory.
‘Preachy or disconnected’
Other liberals argue that Democrats need to learn to be less condescending, at least in appearance. The newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Gregory Casar, says the party must stop being “seen as preachy or disconnected” from the working class.
Democratic Party strategist Steven Schale says Kamala Harris was defeated because “we tend to put voters in different buckets — black, Hispanic, young, gay etc. — and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are.”
The 2024 vote registered growing rejection by working people of “woke” attitudes and policies. These are based on the notion that divisions of race, skin color, nationality and what they call “gender” determine who you are, not what you say or do. At its crudest, if you’re white and male then you must be an oppressor. This outlook seeks to bury any idea that class divisions underlie exploitation, national oppression and the second-class status of women.
President Joseph Biden used executive orders to extend the use of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion recruitment and training programs, since he knew he couldn’t get such programs adopted by Congress. DEI officers are charged with the indoctrination of “woke” values and punishing anyone accused of transgressing them.
These programs are in decline today, and rightly so. Tens of millions of workers reject being told what they should think or say, or how they should treat each other.
Under DEI programs, terms like “mother” have been replaced with the politically correct, but biologically false, “pregnant people.”
One of the most popular ads run by the Trump campaign mocked the use of gender-neutral pronouns. It ended, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Convinced that men weren’t backing Harris because they’re sexist, Democrats tried to reach out to these “low-information” men by running a condescending campaign ad with men dressed as cowboys showing viewers just how “man enough” they were because they were going to vote for a woman.
A substantial wing of the Democrats campaigned in defense of men who identify as women competing in women’s sports, part of a broader assault on women’s rights. Trump won support by pledging to put an end to this attack on women’s athletic competitions.
The rejection of these anti-working-class “woke” policies is an advance.
The worsening conditions workers face were key to the outcome of the election. This is especially true of the ruinous impact of high prices, affecting workers’ ability to pay for everyday essentials and to sustain a family. Told they had no choice but to pick one of the two main bosses’ parties, many workers viewed Trump and the Republicans as the lesser of these two capitalist evils.
As workers continue to use our unions and to win solidarity, our confidence in our own capacities and worth will grow, contrary to all the attempts — from bourgeois commentators to the middle-class left — to dismiss us as the “low-information” folk.