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Burying the White Working Class, by Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobin)

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In this article, Conor Kilpatrick provides an interesting rititque of the class condescension of the liberal Democratic elite.

The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning class: they’re all either dying (demographically orliterally), irrelevant in an increasingly nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care. As liberal hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and elitist — it’s that it’s not even true. The working class is bigger than ever, is still really white, and is broadly supportive of a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda. And it’s even less interested in that specificchunk of the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality of the economic system they cherish…Instead of acknowledging the size and importance of this part of the electorate, Democratic Party elites have simply constructed a new narrative to suit their interests — a narrative that was on display after West Virginia. Following Sanders’s win a significant chunk of the punditocracy came to the conclusion, mostly by abusing the hell out of exit polls, that a vote for the Jewish socialist was actually a vote for white supremacy.

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You can read the full piece here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/white-workers-bernie-sanders-clinton-primary-racism/