DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
ELECTORAL
UPDATE FROM NOVEMBER 2020: OVER 74 MILLION PEOPLE VOTED FOR DONALD
TRUMP FOR THE PRESIDENCY. 75% OF THESE VOTES WERE CAST BY WHITE
AMERICAN VOTERS ALONE.
74 MILLION IS THE SECOND HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTES ANY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER POLITICAL PARTY HAS EVER RECEIVED IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
THE 137 MILLION VOTES THAT TRUMP RECEIVED IN TOTAL FROM THE ELECTIONS OF 2016 AND 2020 IS THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTES THAT ANY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER POLITICAL PARTY HAS EVER RECEIVED OVER THE COURSE OF TWO ELECTIONS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
OVER 80 MILLION OF THESE VOTES WERE CAST BY WHITE AMERICAN VOTERS ALONE.
74 MILLION IS THE SECOND HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTES ANY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER POLITICAL PARTY HAS EVER RECEIVED IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
THE 137 MILLION VOTES THAT TRUMP RECEIVED IN TOTAL FROM THE ELECTIONS OF 2016 AND 2020 IS THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTES THAT ANY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER POLITICAL PARTY HAS EVER RECEIVED OVER THE COURSE OF TWO ELECTIONS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
OVER 80 MILLION OF THESE VOTES WERE CAST BY WHITE AMERICAN VOTERS ALONE.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-white-voter-turnout/
Politics
Democrats Need to Have an Honest Talk About White People
The party needs a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters.
Politics
Democrats Need to Have an Honest Talk About White People
The party needs a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters.
by Steve Phillips
September 14, 2023
The Nation
PHOTO: Joe Biden with supporters during a caucus night watch party in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday, February 3, 2020. (Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
We need to talk about white people. Heading into the very high-stakes 2024 election cycle, progressives and Democrats need to engage in a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been banging the drum about how the Democratic Party overprioritizes wooing white swing voters (a shrinking population) and does not spend nearly enough on investing in, inspiring, and mobilizing voters of color—who, after all, make up nearly half of the party’s voters. But I’ve always also said that Dems need at least a certain percentage of white voters to win.
With Democrats and their allies preparing to spend more than $1 billion next year in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s critical for us all to pause and make sure that the planning, spending, and strategy heading into next year’s Election Day is informed by the latest and best data, including data on the most effective ways to attract more white voters. It’s also imperative to assess the limits of that support, that is, to get crystal clear on which—and how many—white voters are actually woo-able.
Much of the conventional wisdom about voting patterns along racial lines in this country is faulty. Many people are surprised to learn that Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win the white vote (in 1964). After he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, no Democratic nominee has won the majority-white vote again. Ever. (Jimmy Carter came the closest, winning 48 percent in 1976.)
Many misremember Bill Clinton’s 1992 election as a high-water mark of white support for Democrats, but Barack Obama actually eclipsed Clinton’s numbers in 2008 when he secured 43 percent of white votes compared to Clinton’s 39 percent. In Clinton’s 1996 reelection bid against a weak Bob Dole, he did manage to get the backing of 44 percent of whites.
That was the high point of white support for Democrats since the advent of modern-day exit polling in 1976; the nadir was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in 1984, and the average has been 40.3 percent. Forty-one percent of whites supported Joe Biden in 2020.
These figures should prompt Democrats to ask themselves two fundamental questions. First, how do we move the needle closer to the 43-44 percent that Clinton and Obama enjoyed? Second, when does political spending that targets whites reach the point of diminishing returns—that is, at what point do we reach the ceiling on how many white votes we can win?
This inquiry needs to go beyond the usual handwringing about Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters. Trump bested Hillary Clinton among white non-working-class voters as well. How should we understand this, especially in light of the ongoing outsized attention showered on white working-class voters in Midwestern diners by candidates and the media? Maybe we should be paying more attention to trying to boost the turnout of college-educated white voters instead of continuing to chase those least likely to support us.
I’ve spent the better part of the past decade trying to sound the alarm about the need for Democrats to have a data-driven conversation about how to maximize the turnout of voters of color in a nation that is increasingly diverse and increasingly racially polarized. In a 2016 analysis, I showed that nearly 80 percent of Democratic dollars in that election cycle were spent on targeting white voters. In my 2016 book, Brown Is the New White, I broke down the math of the Obama coalition, which I dubbed the “New American Majority.” This coalition comprises of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters. My book offered lessons on how Dems could maximize support from each racial group, including whites, in such a way that the elements commingle and create a winning formula. And yet that year the Democratic Party’s white support dropped to a 34-year low as Trump turned white racial resentment and rage into a powerful political force.
While wooing white voters has always been top of mind for Democratic strategists, operatives, and leaders, there has been shockingly little transparent and constructive conversation about the evidence underlying the party’s strategies and spending tactics. For example, Democratic operative David Shor has become infamous over the past couple of years for his advocacy of “popularism” as a way to boost white support. In The New York Times, Ezra Klein distilled the essence of popularism down to: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” (Spoiler alert: Much of that “unpopular stuff” includes talking about the problem of racism in this country.)
Shor’s views have reverberated throughout the Democratic ecosystem. His tweets and views have been retweeted by Obama. Klein’s 6,000-word piece in the Times was a paean to Shor’s way of thinking. And yet, despite the reverence for his ideas and his lofty status as a “data scientist,” Shor has never published anything clearly articulating his views, let alone outlining the evidence supporting it. (One thing is clear, though: as Elie Mystal has pointed out, Shor is “convinced and vocal that Democrats should dump their racial justice message if they want to maintain power.”)
Over the past 20 years, I have been in multiple meetings with top Democratic Party leaders and operatives who were making million-dollar asks of major donors. Rarely in those meetings did I witness insiders share any meaningful data to justify these asks. Shockingly, too many billionaire donors simply fork over large political contributions without asking tough questions or demanding to see hard evidence or plans. These are the same donors who conduct extensive due diligence before making private-sector investments.
Small-dollar donors also fall prey to impulse buying. Time and again, we have seen tens of millions of dollars flow to Democratic candidates running against prominent and destructive Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham. These candidates’ respective opponents—Amy McGrath, Sara Gideon, and Jamie Harrison—received a combined $300 million in 2020, but all three Democrats lost badly because the races were never really that winnable in the first place based on historical voting patterns. This would have been obvious based on a clear-eyed assessment of the data.
The stakes next year are too high for our standards to be so low. That’s why I have joined with the Working Families Party and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) to start a candid conversation among progressives about what the data really shows about how best to attract and retain the maximum amount of white support possible. We are calling this effort the White Stripe Project (broadening our nation’s multiracial rainbow). We will be inviting all sectors of the progressive movement—including Democratic Party and super PAC leaders—to share the data they rely on and encourage a transparent and constructive conversation about 2024 strategy and spending.
This conversation is long overdue and vital as we gear up for an election taking place at a time when the country is more racially polarized than at any point since Martin Luther King’s assassination and the subsequent urban rebellions in 1968. Notably, Richard Nixon won the ’68 election by less than 1 percent of the vote. The margin of difference in 2024 also stands to be razor-thin (even if one of the candidates is in jail). This means that those spending the most money need to engage in the important work of explaining, sharing, and defending their plans and the evidence underlying them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Phillips is a bestselling author, columnist, and national political expert. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White. He is also the founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization dedicated to race, politics and the multicultural progressive New American Majority. Phillips is the host of “Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips,” a color-conscious podcast on politics. His new book, How We Win the Civil War, came out October 18, 2022. He is a regular contributor to The Nation.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-race-power/
All,
This is yet another outstanding and typically incisive article by Steve Phillips, one of the finest and most intellectually honest as well as truly reliable progressive journalists and activists in this country. Thank you Steve…
Kofi
September 14, 2023
The Nation
PHOTO: Joe Biden with supporters during a caucus night watch party in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday, February 3, 2020. (Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images)We need to talk about white people. Heading into the very high-stakes 2024 election cycle, progressives and Democrats need to engage in a sober, empirically grounded analysis of what we really know—and don’t know—about how best to expand support among white voters.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been banging the drum about how the Democratic Party overprioritizes wooing white swing voters (a shrinking population) and does not spend nearly enough on investing in, inspiring, and mobilizing voters of color—who, after all, make up nearly half of the party’s voters. But I’ve always also said that Dems need at least a certain percentage of white voters to win.
With Democrats and their allies preparing to spend more than $1 billion next year in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s critical for us all to pause and make sure that the planning, spending, and strategy heading into next year’s Election Day is informed by the latest and best data, including data on the most effective ways to attract more white voters. It’s also imperative to assess the limits of that support, that is, to get crystal clear on which—and how many—white voters are actually woo-able.
Much of the conventional wisdom about voting patterns along racial lines in this country is faulty. Many people are surprised to learn that Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win the white vote (in 1964). After he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, no Democratic nominee has won the majority-white vote again. Ever. (Jimmy Carter came the closest, winning 48 percent in 1976.)
Many misremember Bill Clinton’s 1992 election as a high-water mark of white support for Democrats, but Barack Obama actually eclipsed Clinton’s numbers in 2008 when he secured 43 percent of white votes compared to Clinton’s 39 percent. In Clinton’s 1996 reelection bid against a weak Bob Dole, he did manage to get the backing of 44 percent of whites.
That was the high point of white support for Democrats since the advent of modern-day exit polling in 1976; the nadir was Walter Mondale’s 34 percent in 1984, and the average has been 40.3 percent. Forty-one percent of whites supported Joe Biden in 2020.
These figures should prompt Democrats to ask themselves two fundamental questions. First, how do we move the needle closer to the 43-44 percent that Clinton and Obama enjoyed? Second, when does political spending that targets whites reach the point of diminishing returns—that is, at what point do we reach the ceiling on how many white votes we can win?
This inquiry needs to go beyond the usual handwringing about Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters. Trump bested Hillary Clinton among white non-working-class voters as well. How should we understand this, especially in light of the ongoing outsized attention showered on white working-class voters in Midwestern diners by candidates and the media? Maybe we should be paying more attention to trying to boost the turnout of college-educated white voters instead of continuing to chase those least likely to support us.
I’ve spent the better part of the past decade trying to sound the alarm about the need for Democrats to have a data-driven conversation about how to maximize the turnout of voters of color in a nation that is increasingly diverse and increasingly racially polarized. In a 2016 analysis, I showed that nearly 80 percent of Democratic dollars in that election cycle were spent on targeting white voters. In my 2016 book, Brown Is the New White, I broke down the math of the Obama coalition, which I dubbed the “New American Majority.” This coalition comprises of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters. My book offered lessons on how Dems could maximize support from each racial group, including whites, in such a way that the elements commingle and create a winning formula. And yet that year the Democratic Party’s white support dropped to a 34-year low as Trump turned white racial resentment and rage into a powerful political force.
While wooing white voters has always been top of mind for Democratic strategists, operatives, and leaders, there has been shockingly little transparent and constructive conversation about the evidence underlying the party’s strategies and spending tactics. For example, Democratic operative David Shor has become infamous over the past couple of years for his advocacy of “popularism” as a way to boost white support. In The New York Times, Ezra Klein distilled the essence of popularism down to: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” (Spoiler alert: Much of that “unpopular stuff” includes talking about the problem of racism in this country.)
Shor’s views have reverberated throughout the Democratic ecosystem. His tweets and views have been retweeted by Obama. Klein’s 6,000-word piece in the Times was a paean to Shor’s way of thinking. And yet, despite the reverence for his ideas and his lofty status as a “data scientist,” Shor has never published anything clearly articulating his views, let alone outlining the evidence supporting it. (One thing is clear, though: as Elie Mystal has pointed out, Shor is “convinced and vocal that Democrats should dump their racial justice message if they want to maintain power.”)
Over the past 20 years, I have been in multiple meetings with top Democratic Party leaders and operatives who were making million-dollar asks of major donors. Rarely in those meetings did I witness insiders share any meaningful data to justify these asks. Shockingly, too many billionaire donors simply fork over large political contributions without asking tough questions or demanding to see hard evidence or plans. These are the same donors who conduct extensive due diligence before making private-sector investments.
Small-dollar donors also fall prey to impulse buying. Time and again, we have seen tens of millions of dollars flow to Democratic candidates running against prominent and destructive Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Graham. These candidates’ respective opponents—Amy McGrath, Sara Gideon, and Jamie Harrison—received a combined $300 million in 2020, but all three Democrats lost badly because the races were never really that winnable in the first place based on historical voting patterns. This would have been obvious based on a clear-eyed assessment of the data.
The stakes next year are too high for our standards to be so low. That’s why I have joined with the Working Families Party and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) to start a candid conversation among progressives about what the data really shows about how best to attract and retain the maximum amount of white support possible. We are calling this effort the White Stripe Project (broadening our nation’s multiracial rainbow). We will be inviting all sectors of the progressive movement—including Democratic Party and super PAC leaders—to share the data they rely on and encourage a transparent and constructive conversation about 2024 strategy and spending.
This conversation is long overdue and vital as we gear up for an election taking place at a time when the country is more racially polarized than at any point since Martin Luther King’s assassination and the subsequent urban rebellions in 1968. Notably, Richard Nixon won the ’68 election by less than 1 percent of the vote. The margin of difference in 2024 also stands to be razor-thin (even if one of the candidates is in jail). This means that those spending the most money need to engage in the important work of explaining, sharing, and defending their plans and the evidence underlying them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Phillips is a bestselling author, columnist, and national political expert. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White. He is also the founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization dedicated to race, politics and the multicultural progressive New American Majority. Phillips is the host of “Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips,” a color-conscious podcast on politics. His new book, How We Win the Civil War, came out October 18, 2022. He is a regular contributor to The Nation.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-race-power/
All,
This is yet another outstanding and typically incisive article by Steve Phillips, one of the finest and most intellectually honest as well as truly reliable progressive journalists and activists in this country. Thank you Steve…
Kofi
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
Republicans
Democrats
Voter suppression
The Party of White Grievance Has Never Cared About Democracy
From
the Democrats of the Civil War era to the Republicans of the Trump
years, the white party has always posed the greatest threat to our
political system.
by Steve Phillips
May 26, 2021
The Nation
IMAGE: Capitol building.
(Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images)
Alarm
bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior of
the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that
the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie,
refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at
the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression
legislation across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new
trend in American politics that threatens the foundations of our
democracy itself.
Viewed
through the lens of history, however, none of this is new. The hard
truth is that whichever United States political party has been most
rooted in the fears, anxieties, and resentments of white people has
never cared much about democracy or the Constitution designed to
preserve it. Those who do want to make America a multi-racial democracy
must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the
ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and
values.
Contemporary
analysis of domestic politics is obscured by the historical fact that
white Americans fearful of the ramifications of equality for people of
color have moved their political home from the Democratic Party, which
was their preferred vehicle at the time of the Civil War, to the
Republican Party, where they reside today. In the 19th century,
Democrats dominated the South, led 11 states to secede from the Union,
and waged a murderous multiyear war against their fellow Americans.
Today, it is the Republicans who are the standard-bearers of the
modern-day Confederate cause.
Whatever
the label, the party that prioritized protecting white rights has
always been more willing to destroy the country than accept a situation
where people of color are equal and can participate in the democratic
process.
Donald
Trump was not the first politician to refuse to accept the results of a
presidential contest. After Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery
Republican Party won the election of 1860, the Confederates did not
waste time filing lawsuits and trying to bully state election officials
into overturning their state’s election results. They simply severed
their ties with the United States of America, seceded from the union
with the defiant 1861 Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice President
Alexander Stephens declaring that “the negro is not equal to the white
man,” and quickly organized an army that killed hundreds of thousands of
their formerly fellow countrymen.
The
violence, bloodshed, and contempt for America’s democratic institutions
did not end with the conclusion of the Civil War. Just five days after
the Confederates formally conceded defeat and surrendered on April 9,
1865, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot the president of
the United States in the back of the head, having told colleagues that
Lincoln’s speech in support of allowing Black people to vote “means
nigger citizenship,” with Booth vowing, “That is the last speech he will
ever make.”
Even
passage of constitutional amendments ending slavery, securing equal
protection of the laws to people of all races, and guaranteeing the
right to vote (the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) meant little to the
political leaders committed to the concept that America is, first and
foremost, a white nation. Much as Southern leaders in the past few
months have passed a blizzard of voter suppression legislation in states
across the former Confederacy, so too did their predecessors furiously
draft laws designed to accomplish with pens and ink what they could not
achieve with guns and bullets.
In
her book One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson outlines the “dizzying
array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled
voter registration rules” adopted in 1890, all designed to evade and
undermine the 15th Amendment’s provision prohibiting laws restricting
voting “on account of race.” The antidemocratic motivation behind these
new laws was cheerily articulated at the time by Virginia State
Representative Carter Glass, who explained in 1890 that that era’s
election law reform was designed to ““eliminate the darkey as a
political factor.”
A
hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederates
continued the crusade of doing everything in their power to stop America
from becoming a multiracial democracy. As the civil rights movement
gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, public officials and party
leaders across the old Confederacy openly defied and actively undermined
the pillars of American democracy.
In
response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision desegregating public schools, public officials in Virginia’s
Prince Edward County shut down the entire school district for five
years. After civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964
for helping register Black people to vote, the state’s leaders
essentially sided with the white nationalist domestic terrorists
responsible for the killings by refusing to investigate or prosecute the
murderers (some of whom were public officials themselves).
The
partisan political migration of the defenders of the Confederacy began
as the Black demands for the constitutionally-mandated rights of
equality and democracy began to reach a crescendo in the South in the
1960s. After Democrat Lyndon Johnson unequivocally embraced the cause of
multiracial democracy declaring in a 1965 nationally television address
that “their cause is our cause…and we shall overcome,” fearful whites
felt betrayed and abandoned, and Republicans swooped in to offer their
party as the home for white racial resentment.
What
has been dubbed the Southern strategy began in the 1960s with South
Carolina segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond striking a deal with
Richard Nixon to rally white support for Nixon against Alabama’s
segregationist governor George Wallace’s more naked appeals to aggrieved
whites. It worked like a charm, building to the point where Ronald
Reagan sealed the deal by offering the unmistakable symbolic solidarity
of beginning his 1980 presidential candidacy with a pro “states’ rights”
speech to a massive crowd “almost entirely made up of whites” in the
very county where Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were murdered.
More
recently, the reaction to the election and governance of a Black
president mirrored prior periods of contempt for the Constitution and
resistance to public policies designed to benefit a multiracial
electorate. Echoing the actions of those who shut down school districts
rather than provide public education to students of all colors,
contemporary Confederates shut down the entire federal government in
2013 in attempt to stop the government from providing health care
through the Affordable Care Act to Americans. It is no accident that the
11 states of the Confederacy were the leaders in rejecting funding for
Medicaid.
Today,
82 percent of Republican voters are white, and the party has
comfortably won the white vote in every single presidential election
since Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The political home
of the defenders of the Confederacy and white power has shifted, but the
strategies and tactics of that constituency and its leaders has not.
While
none of this is new, fortunately the efforts to defend and expand
democracy also extend back over a century, offering important lessons
about how to repel efforts to destroy our democratic institutions.
The
primary strategy that has worked—and we now have 160 years of empirical
evidence to back this up—has been putting the full force of the federal
government on the side of equality, justice, and democracy for people
of all racial backgrounds, not just white people.
What
hasn’t worked is seeking compromise with those contemptuous of
democracy, the Constitution, and the social contract underlaying it.
Compromise only works when all parties are operating in good faith and
subscribing to the same set of core values. How do you compromise with
people who identify more with lynchers than with those being lynched?
The
most dramatic example of deploying federal power, of course, is the
Civil War itself. Also instructive is that after the military conflict,
clear-eyed congressional leaders recognized the fragility of the victory
and the ferocity of the vanquished and made sure to pass constitutional
amendments to entrench equality in the country’s governing document in
the form of the 13, 14th, and 15th amendments (and even those were
fiercely resisted, barely mustering enough votes in Congress).
In
the aftermath of the violent and bloody attacks on peaceful protesters
in the 1960s, who thought that the 15th Amendment did in fact apply to
them, Lyndon Johnson and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to, as
Johnson said, “establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be
used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.”
In
2021, the imperative of the hour is to pass similar legislation as was
advanced in prior periods of intense conflict with the enemies of
equality. Specifically, HR 1, the For the People Act, and HR 4, the John
Lewis Voting Rights Act, will both protect the democratic process and
advance the cause of expanding democracy that the Republicans are
working so feverishly to obstruct.
In
addition to the voting rights legislation, President Biden can use the
full force of the bully pulpit of the presidency. More than 100
corporate executives have expressed concern about the viral spread of
voter suppression litigation, and he should rally all of them behind a
national crusade for democracy where every corporate, entertainment, and
sports leader uses their platform to aggressively promote and support
voting. Every Amazon package, for example, could come with an 800 number
on it on how to vote. Google could provide easy searching for how to
vote just as it’s doing for vaccines. iPhones could facilitate voter
registration.
Failure
to meet this moment would be catastrophic. From the January 1861 start
of Confederate secession from the Union to the January 6, 2021,
attempted insurrection and failed coup supported by 147 Republican
members of Congress, the political party fueled by white fear has
scoffed at the Constitution and mocked the notion of fidelity to country
over Caucasians. The result after the Civil War was nearly 100 years of
Jim Crow voter suppression, widespread domestic racial terrorism, and
raging inequality and injustice. None of this is new. The question is,
do the current political leaders recognize what is happening, and, if
so, do they have the courage to do something about it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve
Phillips is the host of Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips, a
color-conscious podcast about politics. He is a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress and is the author of Brown Is the New
White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American
Majority. He is a regular contributor to The Nation.
