The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis (cross-posted from his facebook page):

On Marx’s 200th Birthday: Farewell to the Proletariat

Paul Mason, my favorite radical left writer, has another great piece out in his series on Open Democracy. He asks:

“We can only move forward if we can answer the…question: who wants to change the world, and who has the agency to do it?”

He answers:

“After reporting on the 2011 revolts, and observing the similarities between the people in the streets and squares of Cairo, Athens and New York City, I became convinced that a new kind of person had emerged, which sociologists labelled the “networked individual”.

Networked technology, combined with high levels of education and personal freedom have created a new historical subject across most countries and cultures which will supplant the industrial working class in the progressive project, just as they replaced the cottage weavers and artisans of the 18th century.

Orthodox Marxists are appalled by this proposal, and for good reason. If the classic proletariat, owning no substantial property and destined to spontaneously solidaristic ways of life, is not in fact destined to overthrow class society, then a key tenet of Marxism is disproved.

This, as I argued in ‘Postcapitalism’, is the inevitable conclusion we have to draw from 200+ years of working class history. The working class always wanted to go beyond the piecemeal reforms offered by parliamentary socialists like Beatrice Webb, but never – outside extreme circumstances – wanted to impose the proletarian dictatorship proposed by Marx. Nor during the rare times that workers’ council-type bodies gained power were the working class able to secure these institutions against the influence of outside parties and bureaucracies.

The actual 200 year record of the proletariat is heroic: it wanted control and cultural space within capitalism and would fight to the death for this, even against parties claiming to be communist. But it persistently refused to play the role of capitalism’s gravedigger.”

I think this is exactly right. In this light the political configurations of today make sense. Conversely seeing the industrial working class as the leader of the progressive parade is at best confusing, at worst utterly depressing.

I would add to Mason’s analysis something he touches on only briefly: the inescapable demographic/structural facts of our situation.

Broadly speaking, the progressive coalition for perhaps 150 years—but most robustly for the hundred years between 1870 and 1970—was primarily based in the industrial working class (though of course additional support, especially for the non-socialist left, came from reformist elements of the white collar middle class and the agrarian sector). This coalition led by the industrial working class ebbed and flowed in this period but reached its peak of power and influence in the 30 years after World War II, resulting in the progressive welfare state that dominated the Western world. But this dominance did not last and one of the key reasons is very simple: the industrial working class had typically peaked in size by 1970 (in some countries somewhat earlier) and after 1970 experienced a precipitous decline. The general pattern has been a decline from 40-50 percent of the workforce to only around a quarter in a very short historical time span.

For example, in Germany the proportion of blue collar workers in the workforce has been cut in half since the late 1950’s to just over one-quarter of the workforce today, while the proportion of white collar workers has nearly tripled to 57 percent . Similarly, in Sweden the proportion of blue collar workers has been cut in half to one quarter of the workforce just since the mid-1970’s .

Closely related to this trend, employment in the industrial sector has dropped rapidly across countries, replaced by employment in the service sector. In Germany, the industrial sector has declined from 55 percent of employment in 1950 to just 26 percent today . Similarly, in the Netherlands industrial employment dropped from 40 to 20 percent of the workforce between 1950 and 2003 and in the UK from 47 to 24 percent over the same period .

In the United States, these changes have, if anything, been even stronger. The blue collar workforce is now down to just 21 percent of workers and industrial employment is down to just 16 percent .

To put these changes in perspective, consider that industrial employment in the United States, after rising for around 150 years, is now back roughly back to the level it was in 1820, when 70 percent of employment was agricultural . And now services are well over three-quarters of employment, so agriculture and services have essentially swapped places since 1820, while industry over this nearly 200 year time span has wound up back in the same place as a share of employment.

The profound significance of this remarkable change has yet to be fully absorbed by the left. Surely it is of earth-shaking significance that the class upon which progressive coalitions were built for so long has subsided back to its level of the early 1800’s.

And there are related changes that deepen the significance of this shift in the class structure. For example, union membership, a traditional driver of left voting, has been steadily dropping across countries, as well as shifting its composition toward public sector employees. In the United States, union membership peaked at 35 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in the mid-1950’s and is now down to about 11 percent and even lower (7 percent) in the private sector .

Similarly, in the Netherlands, union membership has dropped from 37 to 21 percent of the workforce between 1979 and 2007. In Germany over the same period, unionization dropped from 35 to 20 percent. In the UK, the decline was from 52 to 29 percent; in Spain, from 43 to 15 percent . Only the Nordic countries have been able to maintain their high union membership rates at close to their historic levels.

But even more significant is the glaring fact that, as the industrial working class has declined in numbers, it has become less supportive of traditional left parties. In Sweden, the social democrats’ share of the LO (blue collar workers union) vote has declined by 20 points from 1982 to 2010. In Denmark, social democrats’ share of the traditional working class vote declined by 17 points from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, in the UK by 18 points from the 1960’s to the 2000’s and in France (second round Presidential) by 19 points from 1974 to 2007. And in the United States, the white sector of the working class is now more likely to vote Republican than Democratic in most elections.

Outside of the US, there is also considerable variation in where the lost support from blue collar workers is going. Some of it is going to the traditional right but in countries with strong multi-party systems much of that lost support has been finding its way to parties of the populist right (e.g., the Freedom Party in Netherlands, the National Front in France, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, JOBBIK in Hungary) A much smaller portion has typically migrated to parties of the populist left (e.g., the Socialist Party in Netherlands, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist People’s Party in Denmark). However, the recent emergence of new left populist parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece indicates that the situation may be more fluid in Southern Europe.

In short, the old progressive coalition is dead; by dint of declining numbers and attenuating support, the industrial working class can no longer play a leading role in the broad left. The ongoing (indeed, never-ending) struggle to reform capitalism will have to be waged on a new basis.

The left in the US is probably the farthest along in absorbing the implications of this change and building a new progressive coalition. Partially this reflects the fact that modernizing structural change is somewhat farther along in the US, creating new left constituencies at a particularly rapid rate. But if also reflects the advantage the US left gains from the simple two party nature of the US political system—the Democratic Party is the natural, indeed only viable, vehicle for progressive constituencies, new and old. By contrast, in Europe, to a greater or less degree, the multiparty nature of political systems has brought to the fore a variety of left socialist, ecological (green) and social liberal parties to compete with social democrats, the traditional parties of the industrial working class. To make things even more complicated, these alternative left parties typically do disproportionately well among new constituencies, a development social democrats have had a hard time accepting. This has made it even harder in these countries to fully harness the political power of emerging constituencies.

These emerging constituencies reflect the broad structural shift away from manufacturing and toward a postindustrial, knowledge-based society embedded in a global economy. Accompanying this shift have been changes in family and values norms—lowered fertility, diversity in family forms, rise of postmaterial values, decline of traditional religion—sometimes referred to as the Second Demographic Transition . Together these changes have given rise to an explosion of left-leaning groups that is making up for the decline of the traditional working class and powering the emergence of new left coalitions across the advanced Western world. Conservatives, in contrast, are relying ever more heavily on declining social sectors—very much including the traditional working class–to buoy their electoral fortunes.

So there we are. On Marx’s 200th birthday, let us finally discard the proletariat as the historical subject in the progressive project and accept that we are playing in a different ballgame. The goal of social justice remains but the players have fundamentally changed.

CNN Political Analyst Julian Zelizer’s “Democrats, focus on midterms — not Trump impeachment talk” pinpoints the party’s 2018 dilemma: “The biggest challenge for Democrats is to avoid letting anti-Trump fervor drown out their own message. To be sure, attacking the President is often an important part of wave elections. Though they already had control of the House in 1982, Democrats expanded their majority by urging voters to take a stand against the Reagan Revolution. In 1994, Newt Gingrich used President Bill Clinton — and his failed health care plan — as a foil to excite voters to turn out in the election. Nancy Pelosi returned the favor in 2006 as Democrats were determined to send a message to President George W. Bush, just as Tea Party Republicans did in 2010 when they took back the House.” However, “Democrats are making a big political bet if they think that the news over Russia, payments to porn stars and ongoing lies will be enough to bring voters out to the polls. This is especially risky given that unemployment is now at historically low 3.9% and Trump might be on the cusp of helping to orchestrate a major peace deal between North and South Korea…Democrats must avoid two big pitfalls — failing to deliver a compelling agenda and dampening their own turnout though excessively hard-line tactics in the primaries. And that could leave Republicans in much better shape than they otherwise would be in the age of Trump.”

The Washington Post provides the following video clip, explaining “How Democrats Are Planning to Take Back Power“:

At npr.com, Jessica Taylor reports that “Republican Fears About Holding The Senate Start To Sink In,” and observes, “In conversations with several top GOP strategists, nearly all conceded that the overwhelming Democratic enthusiasm they’re facing this November is incredibly worrisome. Most still think it’s a better than even chance that they do keep the Senate — albeit narrowly — but it’s no longer out of the realm of possibility that the upper chamber could change hands, especially given the volatility of the GOP’s two-seat majority…Lackluster fundraising as of late from GOP challengers and stronger-than-expected hauls from Democratic incumbents has further stoked worry among Republicans. Taylor probes the political dynamics of ther most vulnerable senate seats of both Democrats and Repubicans and notes, “Tennessee has emerged as the biggest wildcard that could make or break the Senate majority for both parties. Democrats scored a major coup by convincing former Gov. Phil Bredesen to enter the race after frequent Trump critic and GOP Sen. Bob Corker announced he wouldn’t run for re-election.”

In FiveThirtyEight article, “Democrats’ Horrible 2018 Senate Map Couldn’t Have Come At A Better Time” Nathaniel Rakitch writes, “Still, Democrats should probably be thrilled with an overperformance of even half that. It all comes back to that pesky Republican bias in the Senate — and specifically its lopsided distribution. In short, 2018 could be not just bad, but a veritable armaggeddon for Senate Democrats. They should count their lucky stars that their worst-case map looks like it’s going to coincide with their best-case turnout environment.” Rakitch cites Demo rats “healthy lead in generic-ballot polling,” but adds that “Democrats need to overperform by a whopping 11 seats in order to snag a majority. Still, Democrats should probably be thrilled with an overperformance of even half that…They should count their lucky stars that their worst-case map looks like it’s going to coincide with their best-case turnout environment.”

In another FiveThirtyEight post, “What’s At Stake In The First Big Primary Day Of 2018,” Rakich previews tommorrow’s primary contests and sets the stage with a trio of questions: “Will a new political dynasty be born? Will a man not quite a year removed from prison become the GOP’s candidate for Senate? Will Dennis Kucinich finally win a nomination — 14 years after his first quixotic presidential bid?” rackich writes, “These things could all happen Tuesday, primary day in the great states of Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia. As opposed to recent special election days, when the entire political world turned its eyes to a single district, we’ll be dividing our attention among several key contests as the results come in. There are lots of weird, interesting races, but the most significant takeaway will be whether the Democratic and Republican parties are nominating strong candidates for the fall.” Rakitch provides in-depth insights about several of the major races.

Sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin’s NYT op-ed “You Can’t Separate Money From Culture” explores the “misguided debate about whether culture or economics was the driving force in Mr. Trump’s win.” Cherlin argues that “those who try to distinguish between the explanatory power of stagnant wages and a declining industrial base on the one hand, and anxieties about the ascent of minority groups on the other, miss the point: These are not two different factors but two sides of the same coin…astute scholars do not see a wall between economics and culture. They acknowledge that financial hardship affects the daily lives of working-class Americans, but they add that how they respond is based on cultural beliefs that may lead them to scapegoat minority groups…People who are frustrated by their lack of progress may still try to defend the dignity of their work. It is a mistake to see economics and culture as distinct forces. Both propelled Mr. Trump to victory.”

Few political campaign media specialists will be surprised by the title and subtitle of Steven Musil’s CNET article, “Most Facebook users in US still loyal to social networking giant, poll finds: Three-quarters of America’s Facebook users say they use the social network as often or more frequently since a data scandal broke in March.” Sure millions of FB members are ticked off somewhat by revelations of compromised privacy. But anyone who believed that social media platform’s privacy protections were iron-clad was inviting disappointment. Musil notes, “User loyalty remains high with users of the social network, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released Sunday that found about half of Facebook’s American users hadn’t recently changed the amount that they used the site. Indeed, another quarter said they were using it more. Of the approximaely one-quarter of users who said they were using it less frequently, don’t be shocked if they come back.

Further, Elizabeth Grieco reports at the Pew Research Center ‘FacTank’ that “Facebook claims the largest share of social media news consumers, and its news users are much more likely to rely solely on that site for news. Just under half (45%) of U.S. adults use Facebook for news. Half of Facebook’s news users get news from that social media site alone, with just one-in-five relying on three or more sites for news.” According to a survey by statista.com reported in January 2018, “58.3 million U.S. Facebook users were between 25 and 34 years old. This distribution also closely mirrors the overall number of social network users in the United States, as 35.3 million U.S. social media users were aged 25 to 34 years. The total Facebook audience in the United States amounted to 214 million users. With more than 1.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide. In 2014, U.S. users spent an average of 39 minutes on the site every day and the social network has become a part of daily online usage for millions of users.” For the 50 most widely-circulated newspaper’s digital editions, “In the fourth quarter of 2016, there was an average of roughly 11.7 million monthly unique visitors (across all devices) for these top 50 newspapers,” according to the Pew Research Center Newspapers Fact Sheet.

Democratic candidates and campaigns should take a gander at “Political Rhetoric 101 for Beginners (such as Democratic candidates)” by X Smith at Op-Ed news. Smith shares some interesting tips, including: “Democrats should make better use of patriotic imagery. When John Kerry was running (sort of) against Bush Jr. in 2004, being from Massachusetts he had massive scope to drape himself with New England’s patriotic imagery–Lexington’s Battle Green and Concord’s Old North Bridge; Faneuil Hall; the USS Constitution; the Old North Church and Paul Revere statue; working-class war memorials in South Boston and Worcester. He could have used those to counter-act the Massachusetts ultra-liberal label and remind people that New England is the birthplace of American patriotism. Total missed opportunity. Republicans have long since seized the flag; Democrats should seize it back while reminding people what it stands for” and “The hard right will always find a way to make their goals sound reasonable, even a popular imperative: uniter not divider; fiscal conservative, defend our borders, restrain government. So don’t try to argue that their stated goals are undesirable: instead attack them for failing to live up to their word. They’re not delivering what the people who voted for them wanted; worse, they’re skilled at disguising what they’re doing (for example fiscal conservatives who pile up massive deficits.) The goal of this line of attack is to peel some moderate conservative voters away from the phony-conservative party.”

Talk about ‘Clinton Derangement Syndrome,’ Associated Press reports that, eighteeen months after the 2016 election Hillary “Clinton Stars as Central Villain in GOP’s Midterm Strategy,” with big bucks being invested in ads ‘linking’ Democratic midterm candidates to her. What’s hard to understand is how Republicans think obsessing about HRC is going to win them any new votes in 2018, instead of branding the GOP as the yesterday party that is hopelessly constipated by their own misogyny. Yes, Republicans, by all means, invest vast sums of money, time and energy in a new round of Clinton-bashing, which will win you oodles of seats in the midterms.

The late Social Security and Medicare recipient, Ayn Rand still occupies a tender spot in the hardened hearts of Republican leadership, despite the fading fortunes of her acolyte, lame duck Paul Ryan. But a new, less atheistic guru has now arisen from the currents of modern conservative thought, reports Hugh Drochon at The Guardian: “American conservatives, especially among the country’s powerful Catholic minority (which includes six of the nine supreme court justices), have found a new champion for their cause in the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. His latest book, Why Liberalism Failed, has been critically acclaimed throughout the conservative press, with the prominent Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, himself a recent convert to Catholicism, declaring it a “triumph…Deneen never spells out exactly what these local communities might look like, but it’s clear that what he wants, in reality, is a return to “updated Benedictine forms” of Catholic monastic communities. Like many who share his worldview, Deneen believes that if people returned to such communities they would get back on a moral path that includes the rejection of gay marriage and premarital sex, two of Deneen’s pet peeves.”

In his syndicated column, “Where are the conservatives we need?,” E. J. Dionne also comments on the moral vacuum at the center of modern conservatism: “If conservatism in the United States has claimed to stand for anything, it is the idea that government authority should be limited. Conservatives regularly argue (especially when Democrats are in the White House) that the executive’s clout should be checked and that legitimate law enforcement authorities deserve our respect, particularly when they are investigating abuses of power…Any doubts that Republicanism and conservatism have given themselves over to one man, his whims and his survival were dispelled by the GOP’s use of the congressional oversight process to undermine a legitimate probe into a hostile power’s interference in our elections…There is an emptiness where problem-solving conservatism used to be…the corruption of American conservatism is the primary cause of our inability to have constructive debates that move us to resolve issues rather than ignore them…except for a small, honorable cadre of writers and think-tankers, the American right has taken itself out of the game. Our politics will remain broken as long as conservatism confines its energies to cutting taxes and defending a reckless president at all costs.”

From “America is still unprepared for a Russian attack on our elections” by The Washington Post Editorial Board: “As this year’s midterm elections approach, the country is still unprepared for another Russian attack on the vote, and President Trump continues to send mixed signals — at best — about what he would do if the Kremlin launched an even more aggressive interference campaign than the one that roiled the 2016 presidential race…In last month’s omnibus spending bill, Congress set aside more than $300 million for states to invest in hardening their election infrastructure. They have a lot to do. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks election technology and procedures nationwide, reports that most states are using electronic voting machines that are at least a decade old, many running antiquated software that may not be regularly updated for new security threats. Though most states recognize that they must replace obsolete machines, not much has changed since 2016…Beyond voting machines, there are softer targets that are more exposed to remote hacking, including electronic voting rolls, vote-tallying servers and state elections websites. These are the sorts of electronic resources that Russian hackers seem to have infiltrated in 2016. There is no evidence the hackers changed anything, but there is also no guarantee they will not try in the future.”

Jared Bernstein argues “Why Democrats must, for the sake of the future, repeal and replace the Republican tax cut,” and observes that “The tax bill obliterates the revenue needed to protect those hurt by globalization and technological change. As we speak, conservatives are trying to disassemble the safety net and impose work requirements, regardless of whether remunerative work is available or feasible. Now that they’ve shifted revenue from the Treasury to their donor base, they are arguing that we can’t afford social insurance programs…Deficit spending can relieve the tension for a while. But, eventually, the tax cut, unless it is reversed, will erode the policy insulation that must both provide meaningful opportunity to those on the wrong side of the inequality divide and prevent the rigging of the system. Because once the system is rigged, rest assured that Trump-like characters will promise that its de-rigging depends on global insulation and nationalist racial/immigration policies…the opposition party must make repealing and replacing the tax cuts its top priority. And it must understand the point of doing so is not to cut taxes for those with less means, but to help those hurt by forces beyond their control to reconnect to the broader economy, which has long left them behind.”

“It’s been just 17 months since the election, and we have a completely new consensus among Democratic politicians,” Paul Waldman writes at The Plum Line. “A group of Democratic senators led by Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Chris Murphy (Conn.) has introduced the Choose Medicare Act, which would open up Medicare to anyone who wants it and isn’t already eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. Individuals could get it through the exchanges and employers could put their employees on it instead of private insurance. In its basic structure, it’s extremely similar to the Medicare Extra For All plan put out by the Center for American Progress, the most influential liberal think tank. There’s also a plan to allow states to create a buy-in to Medicaid introduced by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and a Medicare-X Choice Act from Sens. Michael Bennett (D-Colo.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) still has his Medicare for All plan, which differs from these in that they emphasize that it would be voluntary, and private insurance would stay around as long as it can compete…These plans are not identical, and the details do matter — about how it’ll be structured, what will be covered, how it’ll be paid for, and so on. But the basic idea seems to have been decided. Here’s the most succinct summary I can offer: Open up an existing government health insurance program, either Medicare or Medicaid, to anyone who wants it…But even if we don’t have a consensus among Democratic policy wonks, we’re getting awfully close to a consensus among Democratic politicians, on that one basic idea.”

Trump is a fount of political distractions. But it may be that one that he can’t control could end up helping him, as Ronald Brownstein explains in his article “Why Stormy Daniels Poses a Problem for Democrats: The intense media focus on President Trump’s personal dramas hurts the party’s ability to sell its message to the voters it needs most” in The Atlantic. “As Brownstein concludes, “as in 2016, personal doubts about the president may not prove disqualifying for enough voters to provide Democrats a winning majority. By contrast, even without much media focus in recent weeks, polls show that most Americans now tilt slightly negative on the GOP tax plan and slightly positive on preserving the ACA. The election results in November are much more likely to turn on which side wins the arguments over those policies than on whether slightly more or fewer Americans than today consider Trump unfit for the presidency. In other words: For a sunny outcome this fall, Democrats probably need more health care and taxes—and less Comey and Stormy.” See Ed Kilgore’s take just below on Brownstein’s article, and note also Ruy Teixeira Facebook post, “Ron Brownstein has this exactly right in my opinion.“

There is plenty of hand-wringing about whether or not young people will actually vote in November. “The massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February sparked a renewed interest in gun control, with students who survived the attack leading rallies, marches, walkouts and campaigns for gun legislation. People across the country, and the world, participated in hundreds of events demanding action on gun violence…Now, leaders are hoping the momentum from the March for Our Lives movement will lead to a more enduring next phase: getting young people to the voting booth in November, an effort to change not just policy in Washington, but the people who set it,” writes Katie Zezima at The Washington Post. “NextGen America, a liberal advocacy group founded by hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, and gun-control advocacy groups Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety have announced an initiative aimed at getting 50,000 teenagers registered to vote ahead of the midterm elections in November…Groups from around the country are hosting voter drives at high schools and colleges, including during widespread school walkouts on Friday, the anniversary of the 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School. They are setting up voter-registration tables at gun-control marches and are working to galvanize the nation’s youngest voters around a single issue…The groups plan to mail voter-registration forms to 18- and 19-year-olds on their birthdays, target them with online voter-registration ads and, where legal, preregister 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. The focus will be on students who will reach legal voting age by Election Day 2018.”

It appears that one controversial reform is rapidly gaining traction with both parties, according to “Democrats say looser marijuana laws attract young voters, and some Republicans are catching on” by Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim. The authors write “As they gear up for the fall campaign, both parties are trying to energize their bases to turn out at the polls. For Democrats, who have embraced the most liberal platform in decades, marijuana reform is another issue they hope will enliven their core voters…“This motivates young people because it’s a question of freedom, of justice,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, part of a younger, more liberal generation of Democratic lawmakers…The percentage of Americans who support legalizing marijuana is nearly double what it was in 2000, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall. The poll showed a partisan divide, with most Democrats favoring legalization and a majority of Republicans opposed. But younger Republicans saw legalization as much more favorable than older Republicans…Former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) recently joined the board of advisers for a company that cultivates and dispenses cannabis. Boehner was previously an opponent of decriminalizing marijuana…Recreational marijuana is legal for adults in nine states and the District. One of those states is Colorado, where Republican Sen. Cory Gardner secured a major concession from the Trump administration last week…The White House said Trump will get behind legislative efforts to protect states that have legalized marijuana, even though that collides with the approach favored by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis (cross-posted from his facebook page):

The big report on American’s Electoral Future is out!

Just released! Here’s a key bit from the report but please check out the whole thing. There’s a lot of grist for your mill, no matter what kind of mill you’re working with.

“The wide range of scenarios considered here mostly have Democrats in 2020 maintaining and, in many cases, strengthening their popular vote victory from 2016. Indeed, in only two cases do the authors actually see a Republican popular vote victory in 2020: a 10-point pro-GOP margin swing white noncollege-educated voters and a 10-point pro-GOP margin swing among white college graduates—and, in the latter case, only if the third-party vote is reallocated.

From Ruy Teixeira’s introduction: “Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition: The Movie. The folks at C-Span were kind enough to film our conference today at the Bipartisan Policy Center so it is available for viewing in its entirety. If I do say so myself it was a very, very good conference, crisp presentations and discussions, no filler!”

The program:

Location: Bipartisan Policy Center: 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite #1000

Opening Remarks:
John C. Fortier, Director of the Democracy Project, Bipartisan Policy Center

Presentation:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Rob Griffin, Associate Director of Research, PRRI

Panel I:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Amy Walter , National Editor, Cook Political Report
Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research, Pew Research Center
Matt Morrison , Executive Director, Working America
Moderator: Rob Griffin, Associate Director of Research, PRRI

Panel II:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Anna Greenberg,Partner, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research
Sean Trende, Senior Elections Analyst, RealClearPolitics
Moderator: John C. Fortier, Director of the Democracy Project, Bipartisan Policy Center

View the video here.

Harold Meyerson shares some provocative insights in his article “What Now for Unions?” in The American Prospect, including:

Today, both the Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew, a good 20 to 35 percentage points higher than the approval ratings of President Trump and the Republican Congress. Among Americans under 30, unions’ approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent. As was the case in the 1930s, pro-union sentiment has grown only after the recovery was well under way.

At first glance, young people’s support for unions is puzzling: With union membership down to 10.7 percent of the workforce, and with many states having hardly any union presence, it’s a safe inference that most millennials have had no contact with a union at all. And yet, it’s young workers who are joining unions today, as the successful organizing drives among graduate students and the (disproportionately young) journalists at digital media outlets attest. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than three-quarters of new union members in 2017 were under 35.

Meyerson says their support for unions is “rooted in the economic adversities afflicting the young, including employment insecurity, student debt, unaffordable housing, and more. These struggles feed millennials’ apprehensions that the middle class they seek to join is further out of reach for them than it was for their parents and grandparents.” He argues that social media popular with young people, especially Facebook, has been a pivotal asset for energizing union campaigns:

The growing share of union members who are both younger and professional is probably one reason why digital mobilization played such a key role in the West Virginia teachers strike, and is so crucial to similar labor actions in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Nearly all of West Virginia’s 20,000 teachers were signed on to a strike-participation Facebook page leading up to their walkout, and when the two teachers unions in the state struck a deal with the governor to end the strike in return for a promise of a 5 percent raise, it was the spontaneous Facebook-page resistance of teachers—some local union officials, some not—to going back to work before the deal was actually done that prevailed. Both the universal rank-and-file walkout and, then, the universal opposition to returning to work without a deal would have been impossible without Facebook.

Indeed, it’s clear that Facebook provides workers with a form of mobilization that both complements and eclipses unions’ own capacities. West Virginia has only 75,000 dues-paying members in all of its unions, and only a fraction of those are teachers—yet nearly every one of the state’s 20,000 teachers walked off their jobs. In Oklahoma, a state with a unionization rate of just 5.5 percent, and where all unions claim a bare 84,000 members, a Facebook page called “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!,” started by one rank-and-file teacher, has 55,000 members and has been the key instrument for building support for a strike.

Looking ahead, Meyerson argues, “Should the Democrats recapture the federal government after the 2020 elections, they will need to do something that no Democratic Congress has mustered the will to do in the last 70 years: Change labor law to bolster workers’ right to organize—and, if the Democrats can figure out how to do so, do the same for workers who are independent contractors and temps.”

In meeting this challenge, supporters of the restoration of unions in America’s workplaces will find ample support from young workers. As Meyerson concludes, “The anti-plutocratic, pro-democratic politics of the young in particular apply not just to the polity, but to the workplace as well.”

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis (cross-posted from his facebook page):

I welcome their hatred!

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle about an article I recently wrote with Peter Leyden that was part of our California Is the Future series on Medium. The article, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War”, was recently tweeted about by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, who said it was a “great read”.
Cue the right-wing outrage. Their view is:

1. The fact that the Twitter CEO favorably mentioned our article is irrefutable proof that Twitter is part of a Vast Liberal Conspiracy to promote the left and shut out the right.

2. The article argues that there is a struggle going on for which model America should follow and it will be resolved not by bipartisan compromise but rather by one side triumphing over the other. The article takes the Democrats’ side and sees California as our best current model for where the country is and should be going. The Trump model, closely embraced by today’s Republican Party, must be defeated.
That, according the right wing howls that Dorsey’s tweet has elicited, can only mean we envision turning America over to “mob rule” and a one-party state.

3. Since it is article of right wing faith that California today is a hellhole little better than Venezuela, the very idea of California as a model for America’s future sends them into a tizzy. As the commentator on the conservative Townhall site says: “I’d rather chug bleach”.

Well, that seems a bit over the top. Anyway, I do plead guilty to the idea that California is a way better model for the country’s future than the pronouncements and policies of the today’s Trumpized Republican Party.

Meanwhile, as FDR put it in a different context, I welcome their hatred.

The following post by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis (cross-posted from his facebook page):

More evidence that Democrats should not confine their efforts to affluent suburbia.

One common view on the struggle to reach white working class voters is that it’s just too damn hard. Democrats are making big progress with educated suburbanites, the argument goes, so it makes sense to clean up among these voters and not worry about those other voters who are so much harder to move.

Wrong. That’s what Nathaniel Rakich shows on 538 by digging into the actual data on 2017-18 special elections.

From Bill Keveny’s “Blue-collar TV: ‘Roseanne,’ ‘The Middle’ show working-class muscle in ABC’s Tuesday combo” at USA Today:

ABC has assembled a blue-collar comedy hour that’s likely to become a high-end ratings district, at least for its short duration.

Starting Tuesday, the network will pair Roseanne (8 ET/PT), which made shabby chic with a huge return last week (25 million viewers and counting) and a quick 11th-season renewal, with ninth-season Midwestern neighbor The Middle (8:30 ET/PT), presenting the first of its final six episodes.

The Conners of Roseanne and the Hecks of The Middle have different sensibilities, as evidenced by the lightning-rod reaction to Roseanne star Roseanne Barr. However, both represent a demographic — families surviving paycheck to paycheck, heartland division — that traditionally gets little representation on TV. (But maybe don’t call them proletarians, unless you’re talking to The Middle‘s Brick Heck.)

Keveny also cites ABC’s “Speechless,” NBC’s “Superstore” and Netflix’s “One Day at a Time” as other examples of network shows that are part of  “an uptick in TV characters living paycheck to paycheck” — shows that appeal to working-class families.

The ‘Roseanne’ reboot is getting lots of buzz, owing to the star, Roseanne Barr’s support of Trump. And yes, liberals are often the target of the jokes. But that doesn’t mean well-crafted ads for Democratic candidates won’t be effective, since many voters — and viewers — are conservative on some issues, liberal on others.

While most of these shows have white working-class characters in lead roles, “One Day at a Time” features a Cuban-American family. FX’s  drama, “Atlanta” often spotlights Black working-class characters and families. ‘Paycheck to Paycheck’ families of all races likely cross over in significant numbers to watch these shows.

Despite the increasing role of social media in presenting affordable political ads, television still rules when it comes to reaching massive numbers of voters quickly. In terms of internet political advertising, the Cook Political Report projects “a spend total of $600 million driven mostly by advertising done on Facebook,” compared to “$2.4 billion for local broadcast and $850 million for local cable for 2018.”