Afternoon Must-Read: Why The Republican’s Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy–Setting Working Class Against the Poor–Is Backfiring)

Robert Reich: Why The Republican’s Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy–Setting Working Class Against the Poor–Is Backfiring:

For almost forty years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies. The big news is it’s starting to backfire. Republicans told the working class that its hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off…. The poor were ‘them’–lazy, dependent on government handouts, and overwhelmingly black–in sharp contrast to ‘us’, who were working ever harder, proudly independent…. The strategy also served to distract attention from the real cause of the working class’s shrinking paychecks–corporations that were busily busting unions, outsourcing abroad, and replacing jobs with automated equipment and, subsequently, computers and robotics. But the divide-and-conquer strategy is no longer convincing because the dividing line between poor and middle class has all but disappeared…. Poverty is now a condition that almost anyone can fall into…. Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared a ‘war on poverty’, most of the nation’s chronically poor had little or no connection to the labor force, while most working-class Americans had full-time jobs…. Economic insecurity is endemic. Working-class whites who used to be cushioned against the vagaries of the market are now fully exposed…. This new face of poverty–a face that’s both poor, near-poor, and precarious working middle, and that’s simultaneously black, Latino, and white–renders the old Republican divide-and-conquer strategy obsolete…