November 9, 2016

Dear American Left,

As we sit here attempting to pick up the pieces and debating about what went wrong, we must face the fact that Donald Trump is the president.  After parsing all the data and analyzing the campaign, we will realize one thing - that this failure is a generational failure of the left to build a truly imclusive coalition that actually includes the 99%.  The simple fact is that after McCarthy, we abandoned class politics, wholesale, and left the largest group of oppressed people, the white working class, to twist in the wind and be lured by white nationalism, gussied up with fresh local food and other purity narratives about nature and community.

This is not your mother's white nationalism.  It includes queer people, feminists, and even some people of color.  Hell, it may not even be white nationalism, but simply nationalism fortified by the arguments of taken-for-granted intellectuals like Milo Yiannopoulos, who is gay by his "choice." This white nationalism is cool, youthful, irreverent and fun.  It's a snarky, freewheeling, and energetic white nationalism, and we took it for granted.

What we took for granted was that the working class is utterly sick of being talked down to while at the same time seeing their bank accounts drain to nothing.  We told men just laid off at the plant that they were doubly privileged for being white and male, and while though it may be technically true, it's kinda assholish and a dramatic political miscalculation.

This is not to say that we should have ignored our traditional strongholds or race, gender, and sexuality, but to acknowledge that the creation of a strong justice oriented working class identity that is hopeful and an economic program that truly addresses both who they are and their growing despair was necessary to beat the right.  And they beat us, fair and square.  The right deserves credit.  They revamped old ideas, made them more palatable.  But, much of the blame is ours.  Our political philosophies became old, rigid, institutionalized, and virtually impossible for the white working class to decipher.  We didn't realize how many of them there were until Trump broke every turn out record in the book.  We became more wedded to dogma than efficacy.

And we lost, badly.

Sincerely,
Zac Henson