“Angry White Men”

Who are these “angry white men”? Are they the same “angry white men” who, on the day that they elected both President Obama and a Democratic Congress, made it clear that, in Florida and California, they wanted back the country where marriage only ever meant one man and one woman? That, in Colorado, they wanted back the country that did not permit legal discrimination against working-class white men? And that, in Missouri and Ohio, they wanted to preserve the country where gambling was not deregulated?

The name of that country is America. She long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against exportation to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. She could until recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.

For she is the country of big municipal government. Of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific. Of very high levels of co-operative membership. Of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes. Of small farmers who own their own land. And of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. Universal public healthcare provision is not only a natural extension of this, but has long been the vital missing link in it.

The Republican Party once called for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Republicans’ rural and Western half supported the New Deal while standing foursquare with the rest of their party in opposing needless foreign entanglements, insisting instead that America should only go to war if attacked (as eventually happened) or under clear and present threat of being attacked.

Eisenhower ended the Korean War, was even-handed in his approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and denounced the military-industrial complex. Congressional Republicans passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance. Nixon ended the Vietnam War as Obama will end the Iraq War, and began détente with China as Obama is beginning détente with Iran (and beyond). Even Reagan initiated nuclear arms reduction, the only conservative thing that he ever did.

And Republicans opposed Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration. Between eighty and one hundred per cent of Congressional Republicans would have voted against any Democratic proposal to invade Iraq.

The battle over healthcare can make the Democratic Party leaner and fitter, defined unambiguously by economic populism and thus by that populism’s underlying conservative principles. Once more the party of the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion, passed by a Democratic Congress, signed into law by Carter, and still in force. What have the Republicans ever done like that? Where, today, is their Pregnant Women Support Act, endorsed by Obama at Notre Dame? The Democratic Party could be strictly the party that people were in because they supported things like universal healthcare, for the born and the preborn alike. Very “angry white men”.

In that vein, we seem to be seeing the beginnings of Jim Webb’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Reagan’s old Navy Secretary became a Democratic opponent of the Iraq War. His election in the purplest of Southern border states clinched the Senate for the party of his birth. There may emerge a candidate who is all three of a better economic populist, a better moral and social conservative, and at least as good a foreign policy realist. But until such time as that candidate emerges, Webb is the “angry white man” to watch.