Creating A Coalition of Minorities and the Working Class

One of the big challenges of the Democrats and the American Left is to try to reach out to the working class supporters of Donald Trump while at the same time defending the vulnerable minority groups that are threatened by Trump.

During the 20th century, liberal Democrats and democratic socialists aimed to create a coalition of working class white communities, minority communities and the poor to create enough political support for the fight for economic and racial equality.

Here are some examples.

In the 1950s and 1960s, White Baptist preacher Will D. Campbell worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement for equal rights for African Americans. At the same time, Campbell reached out to poor Southern White communities to try to convince them that they had common economic interests as the Black community (https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/will-d-camp…).

In the late 1960s, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton organized poor Blacks, Whites and Puerto Ricans in a common fight against the oppression of Chicago mayor Richard Daley and the harassment of the Chicago police (https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/the-first-rainbow-coa…).

Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign (https://tcf.org/content/report/inclusive-populism-robert-f-kennedy/) and Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign (https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/11/je…) both were supported by working class White communities, inner city minority communities, small farmers, and the poor.

When leftists were successful in creating this multiracial coalition of minorities and the working class, they created political support for Social Security, Civil Rights, Medicare, workplace safety rules, the minimum wage, Medicaid and other programs that helped all communities.

These leftists also hoped that by creating these multiracial coalitions, it would help steer working class White communities away from demagogues that would pit one one community against another.

The working class felt betrayed by Democrats in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton championed trade agreements that outsourced the jobs that gave the working class access to the middle class.

This made the working class vulnerable to a demagogue like Donald Trump.