How the left loses working-class voters

It's a rather minor example, perhaps, but this short posting at Daily Kos illustrates perfectly the mind-set by which the left alienates the very people it should be representing.  The posting is itself a response to an article in the Washington Post criticizing mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's plan to eliminate fares on city buses.  The Daily Kos writer quotes the Post:

Vagrants and drug addicts would camp out all day on New York's buses, especially in the winter.

To which he responds:

God forbid people who the WaPost views as subhuman use a public service.  To the folks at WaPost, the sight or smell of the unwashed masses and the incredible anxiety it causes to rich people when they are forced to interact with them is more of a problem than the suffering of those "vagrants and drug addicts".

There's more along the same lines, but you can read it at the link.

To begin with, I doubt that "rich people" use city buses.  They are not the ones who would be impacted by vagrants and drug addicts hanging out on board, which strikes me as highly likely if doing so were made free of charge.  It's mostly working-class people who ride buses.

I am generally sympathetic to the homeless.  Several times in my life I have come very close to being homeless myself.  The Daily Kos writer is correct that they are as human as everyone else and that society should do a great deal more to help them.  However, it remains a fact that a lot of homeless people are homeless because of drug addiction or chronic anti-social behavior, which makes their presence nasty, threatening, or downright dangerous.  It's not the rich who suffer from that.  It's the vast mass of people in the economic lower-middle who do not have the wealth to insulate themselves from the rest of society, nor the rather more modest means to simply distance themselves from the problem by living in suburban environments (as I do).

Buses are intended as transportation, not as hang-outs.  Certainly the government should be doing more to help the homeless and to keep those who are dangerously dysfunctional away from the rest of society -- but assuming nothing much is done along those lines (and it will not be, at least not for years, even if Mamdani becomes the mayor), then making the buses free is indeed likely to lead to a lot of vagrants and drug addicts camping out there, many of them the kind of people who will make those buses far more unpleasant, menacing, and dangerous for the working-class people who have no alternative but to ride them regularly.  It is they who will have to deal with the stench, the profanity and threats, and the occasional junkie or nutcase who suddenly flips for no apparent reason and violently attacks somebody.

And you know damn well what will happen when they complain about this.  People like the Daily Kos writer and his approving readers, mostly living in suburbs far from the problem, will call them names.

From the victims' point of view, it will be yet another example of left-wing elitists making their already-hard lives a little harder, and turning a deaf ear to them.  And they will remember that when they vote.

The problem is somewhat similar to the one which I discussed here, the propensity of left-leaning, not-wealthy-but-comfortable suburbanites in the West to fetishize useless and dangerous but photogenic wild animals over the marginalized and mostly non-photogenic humans who share the same environments with them.  Peasants in Botswana cannot vote in US elections, of course, but ranchers in Colorado can.

The working-class commuter on a bus or train who endures a junkie throwing up on his shoes (or, Satan forbid, pulling a knife on him), the parent whose daughter finds pornography in the school library or a boy (claiming to be a girl) watching her change in the girls' locker room, the rancher who suddenly has to worry about his livestock or family being attacked by wolves introduced via some program supported by distant suburbanites who will never have to deal with the resulting danger, the retiree who finds his old neighborhood gradually being swamped by an alien culture and language -- all these and many more know well that the left and the Democratic party are not on their side, and will insult and demonize them if they dare voice their concerns.

And they vote accordingly.

Most activists on the left seem to believe the solution to their electoral woes is to find some way to convey their message more effectively so as to win back those alienated working-class voters to support the whole existing leftist panoply of policies.  This is totally wrong.  They need to listen to the voters they have alienated, and be open to fundamentally re-assessing the left's existing policies and re-configuring them to meet working-class needs as defined by working-class voters, not as defined by activists who think they know better.  It's a cliché but still true:  the voters did not leave the party, the party left them.  They will not start voting for it again until it comes back.