If there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.
Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.
That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.
A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.
