One of the more odious terms to come out of the last half-decade or so is the prima facie unhelpful "working class." Much hay has been made over the Democratic Party's--or specific Democratic candidates'--ability (or lack their of) to connect with this group, who seem to be given unique status as authentic, average Americans. What's the Matter With Kansas argued that Democrats, while having economic policies that would favor "the working class" lose them to Republicans because of social issues (gays! abortion! did I say gays!).
Before evaluating this thesis, we have to know what the fuck working class means--not an easy project. Ezra Klein takes a stab at it, noting that one of the biggest flare-up over the Kansas thesis is actually over how to define "working class." He writes:
The essential question is how you define working class. If it's by income, then Democrats win the white working class. But the bottom third of the income distribution includes students, retirees, and non-profit magazine writers, which isn't exactly what folks are going for when they reference the white working class. If you're defining it through education -- say, those who lack a four-year college degree -- you've rolled two-thirds of the electorate into your definition, their average wage is above the median wage, and one of them founded Microsoft.
I would agree that "working class" is problematic at best, and it is probably unintelligible. But, in general, (1) you have to be white, (2) have some kind of job that involves manual labor (i.e. plumber), or (3) live in Appalachia somewhere. There are more criteria--and exceptions. But, in general, the term is useful only in the context of beating the crap out of your political opponents, and it is meaningless as a way of actually analyzing numbers. Klein continues:
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia, would argue, basically, that this whole debate is wrongheaded. The problem is not Republican performance among the working class, but stupid journalists. Gelman noticed that incomes follow an odd pattern when you break them down by states: In poor states, income is heavily related to partisan affiliation, with the rich being almost monolithically Republican. In rich states, income is less strong correlated to voting preferences. Journalists live in rich states. They know a lot of rich Democrats. They tend to assume Democrats are strongly supported by the rich. Meanwhile, they know that states like Mississippi and Arkansas are poor, and are Republican, and they presume that means that poor voters are Republican. That's not true, but journalists are lazy, and don't notice that that's not true, and so we have an odd political discourse in which people are confused by the Democratic coalition even as its composition is not, in any real way, confusing.
Matthew Yglesias, another American Prospect writer, chimes in:
To best identify which people are abandoning Democrats, one would ideally want to combine the metrics and assess the impact of education, income, and age on voting behavior as independent variables. But the three factors are tightly entwined together and immune from meaningful statistical analysis. Thus, we're left to swim in a somewhat surprising pool of ignorance regarding the basic dynamics of the American electorate, falling back on somewhat pointless definitional disputes.
We do know, however, that insofar as talk of working-class conservatism leads people to imagine an army of impoverished Bush voters, the talk is misleading. Poor states tend to favor the GOP, but poor people do not; indeed, the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Democratic, and this effect is stronger in the poorer “red” states than in the more prosperous “blue” ones. Conversely, among the white population at least, classic “working poor” families turn out to be rather thin on the ground. Only about a quarter of white voters are in the bottom third of the income distribution, and this group is dominated by retirees, other nonworkers, and the young -- many of whom are not likely to fit a traditional “working poor” profile. The working poor present an urgent policy problem, but not a potential electoral goldmine for the Democrats.
In whatever sense working-class conservatism is real, it is a phenomenon of middle-income -- or slightly richer -- whites, with attendant consequences for political strategy. People in this range don't benefit from Republican economic policies oriented toward tax cuts for the very rich, but neither have they felt the sting of Republican budget cuts that have been targeted at the truly poor. Consequently, winning their votes will probably require something beyond crass appeals to alleged economic self-interest, whether or not these are coupled with moves to the right on other issues.
Now that we've dealt with methodology--and discovered that "working class" is meaningless--we can get back to the discussion of why middle-income white males don't vote for Democrats as much as Republican (tho, Obama did better with them than either Gore or Kerry, but largely won without them). Klein argues, essentially, that it's not really about social issues as much as foreign policy, although he does temper this with a warning against generalizations.
I would disagree. The problem isn't social issues per se. It's that Republicans have very effectively made political discourse largely about cultural identity, and white working class males, one could argue, share a similar culture. So, Republicans make appeals to this group while painting their Democratic opponents as elitist snobs.
This actually encompass foreign policy, because Republicans actively make masculinity a part of their cultural pitch. Even envioronmental and energy policy is shaped by a sense of culture--drill baby, drill!, anyone?
More on this later. I've got to run.
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