In The Nation: "Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics."

Know The Nation:

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, with the stated mission to "make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."

A message earlier this week from Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation.

Today, we rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists of principle and conscience. Today, we recommit to mobilizing against hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and economic pain. And as we have at other times of crisis in our nation, we will move forward in solidarity and in the belief that stronger communities arise in times of crisis. We rededicate ourselves to thinking anew, to putting forth a compelling vision of fundamental change.

We stand for an inclusive and progressive populism—one that addresses inequality and economic insecurity. We stand with women and with Muslim, African-American, and immigrant communities who have been threatened by the blatantly racist, sexist, and bigoted campaign Trump ran.

As Nation writer Ian Haney-López reminded us just a few weeks ago, “Remaking our politics and economy will depend on a broad coalition that must include substantial numbers of racially anxious whites. Ignoring their fears, or worse, pandering to them, further impoverishes all of us. Instead, we must have a unified message for whites as well as people of color. Fearful of one another, we too easily hand over power to moneyed interests, but working together, we can rebuild the American dream.”

The answer to what some have called Trump’s “whitelash” is not to retreat on social liberalism, ever; it is to double down on an economics that speaks to working and poor people.

The immediate response to Trump’s election is one of opposition—we commit to obstructing, delaying, and halting any attacks on people of color, women, or working people that may come from a Trump administration. But we must also understand why millions are angry and anxious, and why they voted for the cruel hoax that is Trumpism.

We knew this was an election about change and a revolt against political elites. Yet it is also a revolt against what elites in both parties have done or accepted—global trade and tax deals of, by, and for the corporations; Wall Street bailouts; big-money politics and crony capitalism; decades of promises not kept. It is a time for great reflection and an even greater reformation—of the Democratic Party, of our politics, of our society. The Nation's work will continue—as it has in good, not-so-good, and bad times—to offer alternative visions and ideas, to deepen our journalistic mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further the work of the political revolution in a nation divided.

A current excerpt of relevance:

Inequality Between Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary’s Loss, by By Kathleen Geier (The Nation)

Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics.

... Class differences among women are an all but taboo subject. But scholars such as Leslie McCall have found that economic inequality among women is just as large, and has been growing just as fast, as economic inequality among men. This economic divide among women has created one of the most significant fault lines in contemporary feminism. That’s because professional-class women, who have reaped a disproportionate share of feminism’s gains, have dominated the feminist movement, and the social distance between them and their less privileged sisters is wide and growing wider. In the decades since the dawn of the second wave, educated women gained access to status jobs, but working-class women experienced declining wages and (because of the rise of divorce and single parenthood among the working class) shouldered an increasingly heavy burden of care. Yet mainstream feminist groups and pundits have consistently stressed the social and cultural issues that are most important to affluent women, while marginalizing the economic concerns of the female masses.