Max is a calm, sensitive advocate of class-based legislation as a solution that will address both most substantive racial oppression while strengthening the alliance with white working class voters.
But I think he buys into the conventional wisdom that affirmative action is the key problem progressives have faced in losing working class white voters. Max did not say this but others have argued that affirmative action has been supported by upper-income whites against the wishes of lower-income whites who often have born the burden of its implementation.
Now there is no question that many working class whites resent affirmative action, but the interesting result of both Prop 209 and the Houston affirmative action fights were that working class whites were vastly more likely to support affirmative action than richer white voters. (I haven't seen the exit polls from Washington State). Prop 209 had a increasing rate of support based on the income level of the white voter, while the Houston initiative was evenly split between low-income whites while upper-income whites overwhelmingly supported it.
And my political suspicion is even the moderate opposition of white working class voters to affirmative action would disappear in the context of stronger class legislation. In the context where the state was positively remedying economic inequality, most white working class voters are quite capable of recognizing the obligation for remedying issues of economic exploitation attribuatable to existing racism or deriving from past discrimination.
This relates to the discussion of Majority-Minority districts. I think that the 1992 application of them in reapportionment was an unmitigated good. It launched a whole new generation of prominent black leadership in the South and broke the power of the Boll Weevil Democratic southern leadership (with the collaboration of the Bushies and Gingrich in 1994).
Given recent Supreme Court decisions and likely changes after year 2000 reapportionment, they are unlikely to survive in their concentrated form, but that may be to the good. They are in many ways affirmative action at their best. By launching a whole wave of black leadership, they made elected blacks more credible both to whites and blacks who are more likely to vote for them in the future in less racially narrow seats (as McKinney and others have found after fighting it out in broader districts).
It is true that this new progressive, largely black led Southern base has to keep expanding and retaking the white working class vote. I have no disagrement with Max on that point, although the way to do that may be subtly different as my comments above note.
--Nathan Newman
program. It turns out that low- income white voters were closely divided on the bill, while middle-income white voters were 2-1 in favor of it; upper-income voters overwhelmingly supported the proposed ban on racial preferences.