← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Who Speaks for Working-Class Americans?
00:20:49
They used to embrace the Democratic Party. This year, those voters comprises the core of Donald Trump’s support. George Packer joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss why the Bill and Hillary Clinton catalyze the anger of the white working class, and whether a Clinton administration could win them back.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, October 27th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, Executive editor of the New Yorker. In 2000, Bill Clinton celebrated the prosperity of the 1990s in his final State of the Union address.
- [01:35]
Bill Clinton (quoted)
We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has our nation enjoyed at once so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before have we had such a blessed opportunity and therefore such a profound obligation to build the more perfect union of our founders dreams.
- [02:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
Sixteen years later, during Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, she seemed to acknowledge that her husband's policies had left white working class voters behind.
- [02:24]
Hillary Clinton (quoted)
We're still facing deep seated problems that developed long before the recession and have stayed with us through the recovery. I've gone around the country talking to working families and I've heard from many who feel like the economy sure isn't working for them. Some of you are frustrated, even furious. And you know what? You're right it's not yet working the way it should. Americans are willing to work and work hard, but right now an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do and less respect for them, period. Democrats, we are the party of working.
- [03:08]
Dorothy Wickenden
People.
- [03:14]
Hillary Clinton (quoted)
But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help.
- [03:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
George Packer joins me to discuss how the Democratic Party lost these voters and what Hillary Clinton will have to do to reclaim them if she wins the presidency. Hi, George. Thanks for joining me. You interviewed Hillary Clinton a few weeks ago for a piece just published in the New Yorker. Did she object to your thesis?
- [03:42]
George Packer
No, she sort of brought up my thesis. She said herself that we Americans have not handled globalization very well, that we've missed opportunities and left people behind. She said that something that she called educationalist elitism has hindered us by keeping us from seeing that there are a lot of Americans who could not educate themselves into the global economy and would need to simply be trained and given skills to work in jobs that need to be created in manufacturing. We can't all become computer programmers and financial analysts. So I think she's taken some lessons from the failures that followed her husband's presidency, when globalization turned out not to be the panacea. She seems keenly aware that there's a whole cohort of Americans who I call the wwc, the white working class whose trust and support she and the rest of the Democratic Party have lost and took for granted. Very much so. And the Republicans also took them for granted. And that's the other side of the story. This was kind of an abandoned group who didn't feel spoken for by either party and who have rebelled. And that's what brought us Donald Trump.
- [05:06]
Dorothy Wickenden
I want to trace it back because it goes back decades before the Clintons arrived on the scene, actually. And you trace it to the election of 1972, when Democrats voted for Nixon over George McGovern in huge numbers. What led to that shift and to that devastating defeat for the party?
- [05:23]
George Packer
You know, there was this chaotic convention in Chicago in 68 that was torn apart over the Vietnam War, and the established Democratic Party won that battle, although they lost the election. And the outsiders who were against the war said we need to reform the party in order to make sure that it doesn't produce a rigged election again and give us a candidate like Hubert Humphrey who doesn't enter a single primary. So instead, they changed the party rules to empower the voters in the primaries to select the nominee. And the first beneficiary was George McGovern, who had actually chaired the commission that rewrote those rules. But it changed the, the character of the party by bringing in more young people, more cause oriented people, anti war activists, civil rights activists, feminists, environmentalists. It became the Democratic Party that we've come to know beginning in that election of 72, which was a catastrophic defeat.
- [06:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
It's so interesting to think back on all of this. So when Bill Clinton ran for president 20 years after the McGovern defeat, he ran on a populist platform, but then he governed as a moderate Republican, as you point out in your piece.
- [06:37]
George Packer
That's right. I mean, Bill Clinton was both faces of the party in a way. He had a populist streak. He was himself a son of the southern lower middle class and he could talk the talk of the old time Democratic party. But really he was a forward thinking Democrat who wanted to moderate the party and to pull it to the center so that they could begin winning national elections. Remember, other than Jimmy Carter, no Democrat was elected between 68 and 92. So Clinton moderated economic policies, moderated social issues. And although he campaigned with a policy of investing in the people, once he got to the White House, he surrounded himself with advisors who were sympathetic to Wall street, like Robert Rubin and Lloyd Benson, his Treasury secretary. And instead of going for spending on infrastructure and training and other programs that would benefit working Americans, he went for deficit reduction in order to reassure Wall Street. And that set the compass for the rest of his presidency. Even though he tried at different times to pull the party back toward the left, the Democrats were set toward a direction that was much more in keeping with the young professional character of the party that was emerging as the dominant one. And they began to lose working class Democrats. The NAFTA vote of 1993 was a big part of that. When Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, argued that NAFTA would benefit all Americans. And they did that over the dissent of the trade unions who traditionally supported the party. So the party really went off in a new direction of embracing free trade, embracing free markets. And by 2000, when he said those words that you quoted at the beginning, the Democratic leadership was firmly in the camp of embracing globalization as the key to sort of general prosperity.
- [08:42]
Dorothy Wickenden
And so, by the way, were the Republicans. NAFTA was supported by more Republicans than Democrats. It was initially introduced by George H.W. bush. But Trump, cleverly, I must say, in this election, has made that a real flashpoint. And he Keeps hammering Hillary Clinton on that and on the current trade deal, Obama's trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership. She, of course, has flip flopped on it. What did she say to you about that?
- [09:07]
George Packer
Well, I asked her what her position on NAFTA had been back in 93 when she was first lady, and she dodged the question and said, I wasn't focused on it. I was actually focused on healthcare and healthcare loss. And NAFTA won. Well, that's not quite true. People who were around at the time say that she actually was opposed to nafta. She was to the left of her husband, but of course she wasn't going to take a public position against his administration. So she didn't say much more about NAFTA after that until she first ran for president in 2007 when she suddenly emerged as an opponent of it and then, as you say, changed her position on the Trans Pacific Partnership. It's very hard to disentangle political motives from ideology here and to say where the true Hillary Clinton lies. But, but what is interesting is remember Ross Perot, he was the voice against nafta, and liberals and Democrats for the most part sort of despised him and said he was a kind of a know nothing from Texas. Well, now that voice of Ross Perot has become Donald Trump's voice.
- [10:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
You trace the resentment of the Clintons to this combination that they embody, this sort of uplifting rhetoric and this elusiveness which we just saw in Clinton's non answer to your question about nafta. But there is more here, too. So the story in the Times this morning quotes Trump followers warning that there's going to be a revolution if she takes office. So we've gotten sort of used to some of this kind of rhetoric, but that would have been dismissed not all that long ago as the ravings of the radical fringe. The Clintons would say it's been dogging them from Bill Clinton's first day in office and that a lot of that conspiracy mongering was directed right at Hillary. We're going to now see a lot more of it if she's elected. Could you talk a little bit about how that resentment has metastasized into this really kind of scary reaction with elements of violence?
- [11:05]
George Packer
I mean, I think it begins when Hillary was First lady and there were a fair number of Americans who did not want their first lady to be leading health care policy and the President's most important advisor. There was resentment of her back then and resentment of both Clintons by the right. Remember the famous vast right wing conspiracy that she correctly targeted in an interview. It was not a paranoid illusion, it was real. But they made it worse, the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton, by hunkering down and refusing to release information about Whitewater and about other things and going into full battle mode when maybe a more subtle approach would have worked better. And we see the same thing in the WikiLeaks releases recently showing her aides urging her to come clean about email server and Hillary refusing. It's the same Hillary Clinton who feels besieged and under attack and suspicion and responds by counterattacking. And that is really her character. And so it's locked her into a multi decade battle with the right wing. But something has changed. And what's changed is just this stakes and the rhetoric are so much higher now that, you know, in the 90s, yes, it was bad, it was brutal. But now violence in the streets rather than impeachment in Congress seems to be the specter that we're facing. And the Republican leadership no longer controls its troops. It created a monster, I think, and that monster is now turned against the party and against the whole electoral process, the integrity of our democracy.
- [12:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
So let's go back to talk more specifically about the white working class voters. You cite hillbilly Elegy by J.D. vance, which has become almost a textbook for people to consult to understand what's going on right now. He himself is white, but he doesn't identify with, as he describes in the WASPS of the Northeast. Could you talk about what you felt as you were reading that book?
- [13:19]
George Packer
Well, for me, this started back in the first Obama term when I did a lot of reporting in poor white parts of the country as well as poor black parts, and just felt that the sense of just disconnection and cynicism of ordinary people, the sense that their leaders had utterly abandoned them and that ideologically they weren't really attached to either party, they were making up their own. And it was partly based on false information from the web and partly based on rumor and on their own situation and their sense of being plowed under by these relentless forces of technology, globalization, cultural change. So this was all the background for me in approaching the current election. And it, for me, made Trump's emergence not utterly surprising. JD Vance grew up in Ohio, but his people come from Kentucky. And, you know, he's from that hillbilly part of Appalachia that is both proud and also in decline. His book is powerful because it faces so directly both the failure of his own world, the world of the white working class, and the contempt and out of touchness of the elites he meets when he goes to Yale. And in some ways it reminds me a bit of this coming of age stories of black Southerners like Black Boy by Richard Wright, although not nearly as great a work of literature in showing how far out of the idea of normal America some Americans can be and how hard it is to fight your way in. And that goes for some white Americans as well as black.
- [15:07]
Dorothy Wickenden
It reminds me of the campaign of 2008 when Obama made what seemed to be a big gaffe when he talked about people getting bitter and clinging to guns and religion at times of economic insecurity. But he was saying exactly what you're saying now. He pointed out that they fell through the Clinton administration, the Bush administration. The awareness was there, but of course he represented the elite as well. How did things get worse under his administration, given that he set out to correct some of this?
- [15:36]
George Packer
Well, I think he did understand what was happening, but he also spoke about it in a way that was inevitably condescending, and that was what was wrong with what he said. But I think you're right that he understood the trends, what happened after he became president? He did his best. He fought hard for economic policies that could improve the lives of working class people. Republicans resisted him every step of the way, as hard as they could. The economy slowly got better. But in some ways it took too long for white working class Americans to get over whatever suspicions they had about Obama as a black cosmopolitan elite, which was everything that they were not. And so in a sense, although in terms of hard numbers, people's lives in the working class have begun to improve, Incomes are up, inequality has begun to lessen, the cultural changes have continued to pace, and maybe those winds have been too strong for the economic improvements to make a difference.
- [16:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
The rise of the Tea Party was made possible by that remark of Obama's and by his failure to anticipate just how strong those currents were. Now many of those members of the Tea Party are ensconced in Congress. They will continue to be whatever happens in this election. And there will be new people coming in for fighting Hillary Clinton as strenuously as they fought Obama for two terms.
- [17:03]
George Packer
For sure, it's going to be a huge battle for her. What she doesn't have is Obama's ability to speak sort of above the battlefield and to speak to all Americans as Americans, which is what he's been doing in a series of really remarkable speeches this year, in his last year, and trying to overcome these divisions of race and class and party and geography that divide us so deeply. Now, Hillary Clinton doesn't talk that way. She's a fighter. She's a partisan. And although she's been saying, and she said to me, I'm going to be president of all the people, including coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia, that's not her style so much. She doesn't have a philosophical breadth. And instead she's kind of a deal maker who fights hard to get things done. I think she believes she can handle the Republican leadership in Congress better than Obama did. She'll spend more time with them. She'll have them to the White House. She will figure out what they want and start cutting deals in a way that Obama was never particularly adept at doing, partly because he despises politics in many ways and he doesn't particularly like schmoozing. So that's her ambition for herself. But she also knows better than anyone that the resistance will be dramatic.
- [18:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
I thought one of the most remarkable moments in her campaign, and I suspect you agree, judging from how you wrote about it in the piece, was her response when she was challenged by members of Black Lives Matter early in the campaign. It was quite a bristly exchange. And she was challenged and she said, I, I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws. You say she's an odd figure for Americans to have right now as their president. When people do want their hearts changed and they want a leader who can bring everyone together across this completely unbridgeable divide, it would seem so. Is she going to be able to deal with this fundamental economic problem in a way that keeps the country from split it even further apart?
- [19:15]
George Packer
She's going to get a lot of resistance in Congress. It partly depends on who controls the Senate. The bigger problem to me is that even if she does get some laws passed and we do continue to see economic improvement, which we've seen over the past year, will the public believe it? Will the public take it as a sign that politics can work again? The cynicism and distrust is so deep that you can almost imagine all the data pointing in one direction and the polling on people's personal views in the other direction. Politics has become so poisonous and politicians so distrusted, and she's the ultimate politician. If she needs to get things done by giving away a little here and trimming and compromising there and having these backroom deals, well, that's normal politics. But it's no longer acceptable to a lot of Americans who are not willing to give politicians that kind of license. So that's why she's such a strange throwback for a moment of real anti politics.
- [20:19]
Dorothy Wickenden
And do you think that she's likely toshe's listened to Bernie Sanders and she's picked up some of his agenda? She also has become quite close to Elizabeth Warren, somewhat surprisingly, given an earlier not so close relationship. And Warren's been a very effective campaigner for her. Do you think she will bring into her Cabinet people who represent what is now seen as the quite left wing of the party?
- [20:46]
George Packer
Yeah, I do. More than Obama, who if you remember, brought in essentially the Wall street friendly economic advisers. I think Hillary Clinton is the leader of a new Democratic Party that's much further to the left. She will bring those people in. But I think she'll also be the voice of pragmatism and say, what can we get done? But I think she, whether out of true conviction or simply understanding the political winds, is to the left of her husband and probably to the left of her predecessor, Barack Obama, on these economic issues.
- [21:23]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thank you so much, George.
- [21:25]
George Packer
My pleasure, Dorothy.
- [21:27]
Dorothy Wickenden
George Packer is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the An Inner History of the New America. This has been the Political Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com or on the New Yorker apps available at no extra charge from the App Store and Google Play. And you can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. The Political Scene is produced by Alex Barron and Jill Dubeuff. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [22:00]
George Packer
Foreign.
- [22:05]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [22:08]
George Packer
I'm Michael Kollory, Wired's director of consumer Tech and Culture.
- [22:12]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired, and our show Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [22:21]
Katie Drummond
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [22:31]
George Packer
Right?
- [22:31]
Katie Drummond
So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [22:52]
George Packer
From prx.