Democrats losing the working class
Arthurdale has the distinction of being Eleanor Roosevelt’s “baby” — the first of a hand full of communities constructed by the New Deal to give sustenance and hope to Depression-era families. In this case, coal miners.
Some 15 miles from Morgantown and an hour from Uniontown, Arthurdale also has the distinction of sitting in the middle of one of the most reliably Republican counties, Preston, in what just may be the most GOP-leaning state in the Union, West Virginia.
The Mountain State looms in the mist of time as bellwether Democratic. Today, the idea that Hillary Clinton might carry either Preston County or West Virginia is inconceivable.
Donald Trump will sweep West Virginia along with western Pennsylvania, two former bricks in the coalition, built by FDR, that propelled Democrats from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter to the White House.
The last Democrat to win the state was Bill Clinton in 1996. It hasn’t been close since. Barack Obama collected barely more than a quarter of West Virginia’s votes in 2012. It’s hard to imagine Hillary doing worst, though I wouldn’t bet on it.
National Democrats have lost places like Preston County. W.Va., and Fayette County, Pa. For that matter, the party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt has lost all of white, rural, blue-collar Appalachia.
This vast region, once home to Washington fixtures like “Doc” Morgan of Frederickstown and the mid-Mon Valley’s Austin Murphy, has few remaining Democratic congressman; one is Mike Doyle of Pittsburgh.
How does it happen that the working class has turned its back on the party of the Roosevelts? Or could it be that the party has turned its back on them?
Jeanne Goodman, the former executive director of Historic Arthurdale, has an answer.
Standing in the small office where her talents (she is now the tourist group’s volunteer archivist) are dedicated to promoting Arthurdale’s unique historical roots, Goodman has one answer: Fox News.
She tells the story of one old-timer, the son of original Arthurdale “homesteaders,” who parrots everything he hears on Fox.
It’s distressing, Goodman said, to hear this fella, nearing 90, prattle on about the latest government misdeed, as interpreted by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. It’s especially distressing, she noted, because the federal government, the entity he now criticizes, managed in the long ago to help his family shed the shackles of impoverishment, the result of a failed economy.
In general, Goodman said, people “watch way too much Fox TV” with its reflex bias against government. “It’s so extreme,” she said.
Another interpretation is offered by Lawrence Summers. The former president of Harvard and secretary of the Treasury told George Packer of The New Yorker that during his years in government under Bill Clinton he never ventured out to places like Flint, Mich., and Toledo, Ohio, once home to vast numbers of blue collar workers and as reliably Democratic as Preston and Fayette counties were.
“Their problems were hardly on our radar screens,” Summers frankly admitted.
Hillary Clinton herself seemed to second the notion that Democrats had let down Americans who make things, telling Packer the government as a rule has “come to heavily favor the financial markets over the productive markets” — a mistake, she said, that needs corrected.
Others trace the slide from reliably Democratic to staunchly Republican to the rise and now the primacy of identity politics. The nexus of cultural, racial, and gender concerns has resulted not just in a corresponding diminution in the time and attention the party pays to pocketbook issues.
It has caused the party to speak in entirely new ways — to entirely new constituencies.
I remarked several weeks ago on the appearance in Pittsburgh over the summer of VIce President Biden to take on the issue of campus sexual assault.
I implied he should have gone instead to a coal miners’ rally that was held at the same time. I remarked that former Vice President Humbert Humphrey would have tended to the needs of workers.
In retrospect, however, the vice president’s advocacy was prescient. Because of Donald Trump and the kind of man he is and a certain lewd tape recording, the presidential campaign has become a battle that would have been unimaginable to the Roosevelts or to anyone else who labored in the vineyards of mid-20th century politics.
The 2016 campaign didn’t start out this way, not entirely anyway. There was a time when both sides were addressing the problems of blue-collar America and the economic vise of stagnant wages and incomes.
Hillary recognizes the importance of tackling both as well as the difficulties and dangers of the present moment. In West Virginia in the spring, she told an audience of working class skeptics, “I’m not gonna over promise … we gotta a lot of hard work to get where we can.”
She told Packer: “We have been fighting our (recent) elections on a lot of non-economic issues … we (Democrats) haven’t had a compelling economic case … If we don’t get this right, what we’re seeing with Trump now” — the anger and alienation of his followers — “will just be the beginning.”
For the moment, West Virginia is out of her reach. As for the future, only time will tell.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.