The Hope That House Built

"We put a question on the ballot and in November 1967 we got roughly 40 per cent of the people of Cambridge to vote against the war, roughly the same percentage as in other places. We then had a sociology graduate student study the vote and his report was very clear: the higher the rent you paid, the more expensive your home, the more likely you were to vote against the war. We got the Harvard vote, but we lost the working class. It was a blow to all of us young lefties who thought the key to everything was the working class. And that political division was really a split in the Democratic Party. [There were] the anti-war liberals who were well-educated and tended to have more money than the traditional base of the party. The split between them and the working-class base is the key to the next 30 or 40 years of American politics. We are maybe coming out of that period. But the struggles of the Obama administration suggest that one election does not transform a country."

Luke Slattery in The Australian interviews Michael Waltzer.