For much of American history, the holy grail of liberal politics and activism has been to find a way past such divisions, a way to make poor and working-class people of all races see that their fates and interests are linked.
But race, then as now, remains a powerful tool for driving a wedge in the working class. This is not to say that a coalition can’t be built, or has never been built. In the New Deal realignment of the 1930s, Democrats built a coalition that supported the working class, to at least some extent, regardless of race. It wasn’t perfect, of course, because it still accommodated racist Democrats in the South, but it was a coalition.
That coalition began to fall apart in the 1960s with the successes of the civil rights movement. Since that time, Black leaders have been struggling to reshape the coalition, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign of the late 1960s, to Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition, founded in the 1980s, to the Rev. William Barber’s focus on “fusion coalitions” that came out of his Moral Mondays campaign started in 2013 to protest North Carolina’s hard-right legislative turn.
Liberal politicians have developed another method at coalition-building, one that sometimes works: a cultural bilingualism that tries to speak to the white working class and educated liberals separately, on their own terms and in their own languages.
But as the forces of intellectualism and what we’ve come to call “diversity” exert increasing power in the Democratic Party, non-college-educated white voters have fled. As Nate Cohn pointed out in this paper in 2021, after Joe Biden’s victory: “When the Harvard-educated John F. Kennedy narrowly won the presidency in 1960, he won white voters without a degree but lost white college graduates by a two-to-one margin. The numbers were almost exactly reversed for Mr. Biden, who lost white voters without a degree by a two-to-one margin while winning white college graduates.”
Similarly, according to a Politico analysis, in 2020 Donald Trump won an astonishing 96 percent of those districts in which 70 percent or more of people were white and fewer than 30 percent were college-educated.
This partisan bifurcation of the white vote is being called the “diploma divide,” but it’s more than that. It also frequently represents a basic knowledge gap, which encourages a hostility to truth, which softens the ground for conspiracy peddling, hate-mongering, extremist radicalization and episodes of terrorism.