Between 1845 and 1852, over a million Irish men, women and children starved to death in an event referred to in Irish Gaelic as An Gorta Mór – “The Great Hunger.”
Many Irish starved in their farmhouses and in the fields; others on the road to cities, where the authorities had promised relief. Many who survived the journey arrived in the cities only to find that promises of help had been exaggerated, and the cities proved to be breeding grounds for cholera and other diseases, which felled many more hunger-weakened bodies.
Many others fled Ireland entirely; by hundreds and thousands, in rickety, creaking ships making a perilous crossing of the North Atlantic, they came to America, dreaming of a better life in a place that was coming to be seen by the world as a place to make a clean fresh start. This is when the great northern American cities – Boston, New York, Philadelphia – became heavily Irish, and when Catholicism became a prominent form of Christianity in the United States.
In the 1850s, this wave of immigrants began to experience resentment and backlash from native-born whites, who were overwhelmingly Protestant, and who organized themselves into a political movement known as the Know Nothings – not because of their ignorance, but because it was at times very secretive, and because prominent members of the movement gave a stock answer (“I know nothing!”) when they were asked about the organization.
In some ways, our current political moment is similar to the 1850s. In both eras, the parties representing the political right were/are badly split and undergoing terminal crises. In the 1850s, the Whig Party was badly split over whether slavery ought to be permitted in the expanding western territories, and other issues.
Today’s Republican Party is similarly split between two factions who have very different priorities.
The Trump faction is a typical populist-right movement; they are typically cultural traditionalists, there is a strong undercurrent of nativism and white supremacism, and they make nostalgic economic appeals to working class (mostly white working class, but also smaller fractions of minority working class) voters. It is protectionist and anti-globalist.
The other faction of the Republican Party is the circa-1990s movement-conservative wing. This faction is the more familiar one to most observers of American politics. The late New York Congressman and George H.W. Bush cabinet secretary Jack Kemp was this kind of conservative, as was Ronald Reagan and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Gingrich’s 1994 Congressional election triumph was a touchstone of this faction.) The agenda of this group is basically pro-capitalist/big business: Lower taxes on the wealthy, free trade, deregulate business, smaller government, and weaken the social safety net.
I can’t see these two factions burying the hatchet and coming up with a “unity” candidate, post-Trump.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have problems of their own. As I have mentioned in previous columns, they do not have a big enough coalition to get a governing majority, and thus can get very little of their agenda accomplished.
The Republicans have established the de facto rule that, if they have the presidency or either House of Congress, they will simply refuse to cooperate with Democratic policy making in any way. This means that the Democrats need to have the presidency and both the House and Senate to make any progress whatsoever on their agenda; the problem is that they are not geographically diverse enough to reliably get that result.
The “Coalition of the Ascendant” that is the current target demographic of the Democratic Party is composed of highly educated voters, particularly in the bigger, more cosmopolitan “Alpha” and near-alpha cities and metropolitan areas (New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) plus racial and cultural minorities.
Added together, that is roughly 50 percent of the country.
The Democrats need more people to be reliable, loyal Democratic voters, so that the worst case is they have 50 percent plus a smidge, and the usual case is they have a governing majority. That is the only way to make lasting progressive change.
To get that result, I believe that the Democratic Party needs to do far more for working-class voters – and not just in terms of discrete policies they can point to, but getting reacquainted with the 70 percent of America that does not have a college degree, and whose incomes have been declining for 35 to 40 years.
I too often get the sense that when Democrats talk about working class people and issues, they are talking TO well-educated professional-class people ABOUT working class people, rather than to working class people directly.
The Democrats used to have lots to offer people like that, but for 20 or more years they have done far too little. Part of the explanation for why that might be requires a discussion about why the New Deal coalition fractured in the 1960s (and no, it wasn’t because of the hippies.)
More on that next week.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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