It’s precisely because racial resentments are such a powerful motivating force in American politics that dwelling on racial division inherently benefits the white people’s party. This debate is often conducted as if it’s identical to a debate about the best way for Trump’s opponents to campaign against him - with economic anxiety theory taken as underwriting a populist pitch on economic policy, counterposed to a call for bold confrontation with the forces of white supremacy.īooker’s speech, implicitly, draws a different line between these concepts. Beyond the “economic anxiety” debateĮver since the 2016 campaign, the left-of-center community has been obsessed with an often tedious debate about the role of economic concerns versus politely phrased ways of saying “racism” in inspiring people to vote for Donald Trump. In the modern day, it may take a candidate of color to pull it off. But Booker’s argument - that race is a superficial thing that is cynically deployed to divide Americans and distract them from their common interests - is really the argument Democrats from Lyndon Johnson through Barack Obama have long employed. It’s a pitch that sounds incredibly novel in a post-Obama, post-Trump Democratic Party that’s obsessed with the political power and significance of race and racism. “My neighbors are incredible folks who work hard - in many cases, they work harder - than their parents did, but they’re making less money.” He said explicitly that when he read Hillbilly Elegy and other work about poor rural whites, it reminded him of his neighbors in Newark. Without stinting the importance of the civil rights movement, he also argued Tuesday that “you don’t even need to use race as one of the lenses” to understand how kids born into low-income families are disadvantaged in life. Virtually any other Democrat speaking in 2018 would have dwelled at length on the progress America has made since Cary Booker’s time on racial issues rather than a narrative of decline. His dad, Cary Booker, was born in 1936 in North Carolina and grew up under a brutal Jim Crow system that systematically disenfranchised people like him. “It’s like we inherited this incredible house from our parents and we trashed it.”īooker is, of course, black. Cory Booker (D-NJ) delivering a stem-winder of a midday keynote address Tuesday at the Ideas Conference, hosted in Washington by the Center for American Progress to celebrate its 15th anniversary. “I am so frustrated with the obvious changes going on between my dad’s age and now,” said Sen.
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