Let The Rich selfish bitchs go In America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, ....the Republican resurgence from the 1980s to the 2000 election was due to non-union white working-class men abandoning the Democratic party, with over 20 percent of them switching from Democrats to non-voters or third party supporters or Republicans between 1960 to 2000.

debunk the myth ...of a swing towards rightwing, conservative values. Polls show ..... these voters, like most of the country, became slightly more liberal in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor did working-class white men become more anti-government. They did, however, become...disappointed in government, feeling....little for them. ....those "not protected by a union, a bachelor's degree or affirmative action [who have] lost much ground in wages and benefits over the past quarter-century, while often being culturally and politically lumped into the 'white male' power structure with whom they share little but the color of their genitalia."

When income trends are broken down, working-class white men are the only group for which median income actually fell from 1979 to 1998.......who actually saw a new generation earn less than their fathers. Deindustrialization, globalization and de-unionization meant good jobs disappearing...... attribute the change in voting patterns to bitterness at falling behind economically. They recommend that the Democratic party take up a platform that would help working-class white men as well as other working-class people — universal health care, retirement security, and access to education.

When I told one long-time progressive activist I was writing a cross-class alliance building manual, this reply popped out of her mouth: "We don't have to worry about those red parts of the country anymore, now that people of color are a majority." She was referring to the color code of the 2000 Bush/Gore election map, in which the middle and south of the country tended to vote red Republican and the northern coasts and northern midwest tended to vote blue Democrat, labeled Red America and Blue America by David Brooks in "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" (Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2001). She was also referring to a recent Census announcement that people of color are now over 30 percent of the US population, but would be over 50 percent by 2050. I had not specified white working class people in my description of the project; it's interesting how often the words "working class" evoke a white image, and usually a white male image. And her image was not only white, but middle American and conservative. Her voice was full of scorn for white working class people, and relief that she now didn't need to work with them to keep the Republicans out of office. She was imagining a voting bloc made up of people of color and white middle-class liberals like herself.

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