Stop the God-groveling, Democrats! Lack of religion is not your real problem [View all]

Every time Democrats lose, they rediscover the importance of religion. It's a simplistic and disrespectful reaction

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

THURSDAY, JAN 5, 2017 08:05 AM EST

Postmortems for the 2016 election are ongoing, but the early consensus that Republicans won because they were more attentive to the economic needs of the white working class seems to be holding up. The regions where such people turned out in larger numbers than usual for Donald Trump are also the ones where he took narrow victories in winner-take-all electoral states, so it’s a natural assumption.

Regional disparities in economic data show that while those rural and exurban areas are recovering from the financial crisis, they still have not improved to the extent the more populated metropolitan areas have. Those without college degrees do suffer from the ongoing dislocation of major agribusiness, automation and globalization, which made them excited to support a candidate who promised to reverse all that.

But there’s more to what happened than economics, and I think everyone understands that too. Race played a large role in Donald Trump’s campaign, from his promises to deport Mexican and Muslim immigrants to his emphatic claim of “I am the law and order candidate.” There have been many thoughtful essays written about how the subtext of “Make America Great Again” intersects with the changes brought by the Civil Rights movement. (This by Jamelle Bouie at Slate is highly recommended, explaining why some Obama voters moved to Trump.)

But answers about what to do about all this are not as simple as people think. Obviously a different message delivered by a different messenger might help, but this racial divide is a longstanding challenge for Democrats, going back at least as far as the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson signed the major civil rights and voting rights laws. Paul Krugman of the New York Times pointed this out back in 2015, citing a paper by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote entitled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?”:

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/05/stop-the-god-groveling-democrats-lack-of-religion-is-not-your-real-problem/