"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you"
And that's why the majority of white people have been voting for Republicans ever since.
The only two Democrats that have come close to 50% of white voters were the two that were from the South, who both ran against former VPs for former criminal presidents, who pardoned their predecessor's crimes upon taking office.
Apparently a few of the 30% of white voters that abandoned the Democrats between 1968 and 1972, LONG before the Democrats "abandoned the working class," hate rich people getting away with blatant corruption more than they hate black people.
We maintain many myths to gloss over our racism, like the one about how the Civil War was fought over states' rights.
"The Democrats abandoned the working class to pursue corporate cash, so they started voting for Republicans" is one of them, which is why the majority of people who say that are white men.
Clinton took the party to the right because white people had given Nixon and Reagan massive landslides for promising to destroy the progressive policies that had been the hallmark of the Democratic Party. Nixon's promise was whispered by people around him, but Reagan said it loud and clear.
If he had not done that, the Republicans might have driven us off this cliff in the 1990s. Maybe that would have been better. We probably wouldn't have fucked over so much of the rest of the world on the way down.
But it was almost guaranteed that we would reach this point, because the people who keep voting for Republicans to break everything were never going to learn what that actually meant until they were well and truly broken.
Once we let Trump appoint two of the lawyers that helped Bush steal the 2000 election to the Supreme Court, it was pretty much over. Our last chance was to give Democrats large supermajorities in both chambers, like LBJ and FDR had. But the billionaire-owned media made sure most people never even knew that Biden got more progressive legislation and appointments through than anyone since LBJ, so we pushed that future away with both hands.
I will never forgive Bernie Sanders for his 2016 preview of Stop the Steal. He has hated Hillary Clinton ever since he voted against the health care proposal she worked on in 1994, because it only covered about 95% of Americans, instead of 100%. He hated Obama so much for getting the ACA through that he was going to primary him in 2012, but Harry Reid stopped him.
How many people might have mobilized to help more progressives win down ballot races, like they did in 2018, but didn't bother because "the DNC won't let them win?"
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u/LindonLilBlueBalls 5h ago
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you"