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Welcome to the second issue of the white working class roundtable newsletter.
The 2014 elections generated the most robust discussion about Democrats and the white working class in several decades. In the last few weeks opinion articles about this critical challenge for the Dems have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The National Journal, Politico, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, Salon, Talking Points Memo, The Daily Beast and a range of other publications.
The first-of-its-kind June 2014 Roundtable on Progressives and the White Working Class- a roundtable organized and published jointly by The Democratic Strategist and The Washington Monthly-played an important role in this unique discussion. The roundtable was directly cited by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, Noam Scheiber in The New Republic, Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, Jamelle Bouie in Slate and many other commentaries used data and quotes drawn from the contributions to the June 2014 roundtable discussion.
In late December the Roundtable distributed a significant background paper reviewing this discussion. It is available HERE:
TDS Strategy Memo: The 2014 election produced the most serious discussion about Democrats and the white working class in many years. What Democrats need to do now is to carefully review that debate, identify disagreements about facts and then seek the data to resolve them.
Below is a list of the major articles that have discussed the white working class since the 2014 elections:
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Post 2014 Articles on the White Working Class
Time to Bring Back the Truman Democrats by Joel Kotkin
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Two interesting columns about social class in The New York Times
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Film
A Labor Day Documentary: 'Brothers on the Line' Tells the Story of the Reuther Brothers -- Founding Fathers of the American Middle Class by Peter Dreier
Read More...
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Conferences
Fighting Inequality: Class, Race, and Power
May 28-31, 2015 Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Joint Conference of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Working-Class Studies Association.
Economic inequality, while long a challenge for working-class people, has grown and become increasingly central in public life. It has been a theme in struggles for justice for low-wage workers and has shaped policies related to education, housing, health care, and the right to organize.
Fighting Inequality will bring together scholars, activists, and artists to explore some core questions about economic inequality and strategies for resistance, both historically and in the current moment:
- What forces--social, political, economic, and cultural--have contributed to inequality and influence people's responses to it?
- How do working-class people gain power within democracy when access and rights are limited by policy and ideology?
- How have the complex relationships among class, race, and power sometimes enabled and sometimes constrained working-class resistance?
Read More and Register
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