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CLASS_VS_RACE

                                                      July 26, 2020

It's an old bit at this point: the left (e.g. Bernie
Sanders) prefers to see Americas problems through the
lens of "class" and while it doesn't deny issues with
racism, it's less likely to feature them.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the Epilogue for "Eight Years in
Power" (2017) complains about this quite a bit,
attacking the likes of Sanders for saying "alarming"
things about this, complaining about how democrats
just don't know how to talk to the white working
class.

Coates pushes the analysis that American elections
are *entirely* about race-- e.g. Trump won the white
vote in all categories, not just the low income
group.

My understanding is that this is substantially
correct, and if look at data for recent decades you
don't need to consider anything besides race to
understand the outcomes of elections: it's a really
good single-factor explanation, if you like
single-factor explanations.

Coates ignores the more fine-grained differences in
the data though: yeah, Trump did well with all kinds
of whites, but not quite so well with the educated,
higher-income grouping...

So, it is *also* true that Bernie Sanders position is
correct: lower income whites are not getting the
liberal/left message at all.

Coates rather grudgingly conceeds that Bernie might
know what he's doing about trying to marshal a
coalition of American voters, which would seem to be
the point, no?








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