Why is Ruy Teixeira leaving the most prominent liberal think tank for a conservative one?
“It’s class,” Teixeira told Michael Schaffer.
“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” Teixeira said.
Teixeira went on to recount how his idea to start a “Bobby Kennedy Project” that would appeal to the black and white working class together was ignored by CAP. “We did have some conversations with people in and around the foundation world, and nobody wanted to touch it,” Teixeria said. “People were leery of talking about the white working class, as if it was de facto racist.”
The antipathy white educated elites like those at CAP have for the white working class is well-documented. One recent paper found that white college-educated people have far more bias against less-educated whites than they did against any other group.
The reason for the antipathy is simple: Today’s Democratic Party believes that unequal outcomes only exist because of racism or sexism. If white people are poor or uneducated, therefore, it must be their own fault.
This bias against the white working class has made it tempting for Democrats to write off these voters entirely. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2016, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Unfortunately for the Democrats, Schumer’s math doesn’t add up. More than 6 in 10 people do not have a college degree.
Until Democrats stop making every issue about race, expect them to lose more working-class voters and more scholars who focus on working-class issues, like Teixeira.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... 127edfd414
