alt Hacker News> You can’t “table” cultural issues because people’s view of what’s good and desirable arises out of their culture. That makes it extremely difficult for people with divergent cultural views to cooperate on shared economic goals.
What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues.
> Viewing this as some top-down effort to “fracture the coalition” overlooks that the coalition doesn’t exist in the first place. If you look all over the world, people unify over ethnicity, culture, and ideology—usually in that order.
It's not a top down effort, but I wouldn't but it past oligarchical economic interests to fan those flames a bit. These issues fracture the working class coalition nonetheless.
And it's not like this is some kind of impossible ask: the Democrats of the 1980s (say) did a far better job of it than the Democrats of the 2020s.
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It seemed to me that the Democrats of the 1980s achieved almost nothing to stop or to slow down the biggest threats to working-class economic power of the 1980s, namely low-skilled immigration and offshoring (then called "globalization").
> What I'm saying is people need to learn to be grown ups and work with people who are different than them on common issues
This is like saying “people should grow up and learn to solve their disagreements without war.” I’d argue that view is the one that exhibits a childish utopianism. It overlooks what actually drives the formation of coalitions.