Liberals have in fact done a fair amount for the white working class, especially the lower fringes, by expansion of Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, etc. But in other cases they have worked directly against the interests of white workers, male white workers in particular.
The trade union movement in the U.S. has historically been an affirmative action program for white men. It was the explicit policy of unions to exclude women and children from the work force as much as possible, which they were able to accomplish in large part in partnership with middle-class liberals. Exclusion of blacks was explicit in the South and implicit in the North. The new affirmative action programs—however “just” they were—and often they were just, or largely so, clashing with engrained and encrusted favoritism and bias—they certainly did not make life better for working class white men.
The environmental passion of the left was perhaps even more dangerous, both politically and economically. It is often much easier to love animals and “Nature” than human beings. Seal pups and polar bears never play their stereo too loud, and never get drunk and piss on your lawn. Nor do they sell drugs or commit murder. Liberals love to love nature, love to close off millions of acres to economic development, just because it makes them feel good about themselves. In his famous discussions of conspicuous consumption, Thorstein Veblen argued that the fetish for broad, sweeping lawns reflected the desire of wealthy landowners to show that they were so rich they could afford to maintain rich pasture land for display rather than use. In many respects, modern environmentalism is a sublimated form of aristocratic display, an indication that one cares more for beauty than for self-advantage (and, implicitly, that one can afford to care more for beauty than self-advantage). And just because liberals see their environmental passions as being entirely unselfish, they have no hesitation in pushing them without limit. “If only we could eliminate economic development entirely! America would be a paradise!”
And then of course there are guns, the one culture war that the left has indisputably lost. Gun control was the favored device of liberals to respond to the explosion of violent crime among blacks in the wake of the great successes of the civil rights movement. As an anti-crime measure, gun control has always been a complete flop, and it collided directly with the desire of millions of angry and frightened whites to protect themselves. The obsession over guns has been largely symbolic, on both sides, but man is the symbol-making animal. Since we often die for symbols, it’s not surprising that they can decide elections as well.
Well, you lose one, you win a couple. Liberals have won, or are winning, most of the other culture wars these days—the “war” against tobacco, for example (a faux war if there ever was one), and the war for sexual liberation (a pretty good war, actually). Cigarette smoking certainly should be discouraged, a lot, but a lot of working stiffs, a lot of them white, lost their jobs when cigarettes stopped being cool. As for the sex wars, well, I’m glad we liberals won, but that doesn’t make the losers any happier.
Thomas Frank, in his famous diatribe, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, claimed that liberals lost the white working class because they weren’t protecting the “real” interests of the working class (the economic ones), which allowed the conservatives to win elections on false issues (the cultural ones). In fact, Frank’s book had a lot in common with Murray’s—a lot of elitist bitching about other elitists—the “bad” elitists, the upper middle class, Upper West Side phonies that everyone loves to hate. President Obama echoed Frank’s analysis perfectly when he said that rural whites clung to “their guns and their religion” to console them through hard times. “They’ve turned against us because we aren’t doing our job!”
Well, self-abnegation has always been a liberal strongpoint. Intelligent self-analysis, not so much.
