Just to follow up on my post yesterday regarding public perception (particularly among the working class, whose ranks represented the biggest voter shift) and November’s electoral victory for the Democrats, I’d like to point you to this piece by Reihan Salam and Atlantic Monthly associate editor Ross Douthat, “What Is the Matter with Kansas? Economic populism makes a comeback,” which is able to further (and better) articulate some of the points I was trying to make. To do so, Douthat and Salam deconstruct what appears, at first blush, to be a vindication of Thomas Franks’ infamous 2004 best-seller, What’s the Matter with Kansas, a book whose central thesis is that white working class GOP voters, the lot of them dullards hypnotized by social wedge issues, were being conned into voting against their material interests. To rectify this “probem,” the answer was for the Democratic party to take tack leftward, returning to its progressive roots: attack free trade, corporations, and globalization, while downplaying social issues like abortion.
The strategy worked. Democrats often ran to the right of Republicans on the border issue, while demonizing Wal-Mart and free-trade agreements and agitating for an increase in the minimum wage (the success of which actually outstripped that of the party’s success). This economic populism played well with white working class voters—a class of voter Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has termed “Lou Dobbs Democrats”—but as Douthat and Salam explain, it did not because white middle class voters had previously been voting against their own economic interests, but rather because the populist message was able to appeal to certain anxieties among a group that had conversely been moving upward, economically, but who feared the volatility that free trade can bring:
Though he was rarely invoked by name, the renewal of Democratic populism, particularly in the so-called red states so many liberals had written off, bore the stamp of Frank’s analysis. The Democrats had attempted this populist turn before–Al Gore’s “people versus the powerful” rhetoric, John Edwards’s talk of “two Americas”–but this time around they made a concerted effort to soft-pedal their social liberalism as well. Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey Jr. loved their guns almost as much as they loved God, and they were at least ambivalent about abortion. And as seats flipped across the country, no one must have been more pleased with the results than Frank. His thesis, after all, had been vindicated.
Or had it? Here’s where things get complicated. The original problem with the Frank thesis, as many reviewers pointed out, was its allergy to actual data. He claimed the white working class had been immiserated under GOP rule, even as they voted Republican in ever-greater numbers. But had they really? If we define working-class status by education, the white working class represents roughly two-thirds of the white population, and its median income actually surpasses the national median. Indeed, roughly 40 percent of these voters had family incomes over $60,000 in 2004, an amount of money that still goes a long way in most parts of the country. This is a group that literally defines the American mainstream.
What this means is that the white working class is so large and variegated as to defy easy generalizations. It includes successful small-scale entrepreneurs as well as impoverished blue-collar workers, managers at big-box stores as well as their struggling part-time subordinates. The Republican edge with these voters in recent years has been based on many things, including rational economic interests, not a grand deception. Working-class Americans who have thrived in the changing economy, the capital-rich who’ve seen their homes appreciate and their businesses grow, are supportive of tax cuts and deregulation. And enough of them are thriving to have provided the GOP with supermajorities of the white working class vote in 2002 and 2004.
Meanwhile, those working-class voters who find it harder and harder to keep up have been trending leftward. Indeed, far from becoming less Democratic over the past half-century—under the influence of those “hallucinatory” culture war issues, as Frank would have it—poor non-college-educated voters have become far more Democratic. These voters’ struggles are real: The sad fact, as Thomas Edsall reports in Building Red America, is that only 45 percent of whites in the bottom third of the income distribution work at all, and almost 60 percent are unmarried. They depend on government services, and they vote for them.
But there aren’t enough of these downwardly mobile Americans for the Democrats’ populist appeals to win elections, at least until this cycle. Earlier this year, Stephen Rose, now a senior economic fellow with the center-left think tank Third Way, infuriated many to his left with a short paper called “The Trouble With Class-Interest Populism,” in which he pointed out that as little as 23 percent of the American population “can be categorized as having a direct personal interest in supporting the social safety net programs that most of the public strongly associates with the Democratic party.”
For Rose, the economic story of recent decades is not one of immiseration but one of dramatic gains for both middle and working-class families. His most striking finding: When you average-out family incomes over 15 years and capture only the peak earning years–from age 26 to 59—fully 60 percent of Americans will live in households making over $60,000 a year, with half of these households making over $85,000. This has meant that more and more workers feel like beneficiaries of the changing economy rather than victims of it–and as a result, feel comfortable voting for the GOP.
So what happened in 2006? Why is left-wing populism suddenly resonating? What’s masked by Rose’s averaging, and by the general picture of working-class success, are the tremendous fluctuations in annual income created by the globalized economy. This has made economic security, not poverty or prosperity, the central concern of today’s working class — whether you’re talking about the small business woman who can barely afford health care or the autoworker who’s just discovered that his corporate pension is a mirage. And the bad news for the GOP is that the left has begun to figure out how to speak their language. In cutting-edge polemics like Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift, the smartest liberal voices are focusing on voter anxiety about health care and income volatility—anxiety that the GOP hasn’t even begun to find a way to address.
The good news for Republicans, on the other hand, is that the left’s preferred solution—making America more like Europe through a vast expansion of the tax-and-transfer state—is still extremely unpopular with most voters, which is why Democrats talked up economic security in 2006 but were thin on policy detail. To working-class Americans struggling to figure out how to get ahead in a more competitive economy, when you can expect to change jobs several times in a decade let alone a lifetime, the “Lou Dobbs Democrats” don’t have much to offer—a minimum wage increase, a critique of the alleged inequities of small-bore trade deals, and tough talk on border security that will be drowned out in a caucus that’s eager to liberalize immigration laws and increase the influx of low-skilled laborers. Once the artfully named bills pass and the signing ceremonies fade into the past, working class voters will probably wonder, as Walter Mondale once put it, “Where’s the beef?”
This gap between what the Democrats are promising and what they can deliver offers a renewed opportunity to the GOP. To date, Republicans have failed to come to grips with the issue of economic insecurity, offering table scraps and tax credits in place of real solutions. This signal failure is the reason that the Bush-Rove vision of a lasting Republican majority has hovered just beyond the GOP’s reach. It’s easy, however, to imagine a renewed “ownership agenda” focused on spreading capital ownership, freeing workers from employer-based health care, rewarding low-wage work, and defending the interests of hard-pressed parents. The question is whether Republicans, in their present state of drift and disarray, will be farsighted enough to embrace it.
[emphases mine]
As I noted yesterday, the advantage, when it comes to issues that turn on perceptions fueled by anxiety, tends to fall to those who are promising “change,” and who can peddle government largesse while disguising its costs, both budgetarily and to the national economy at large.
And with the help of a progressive-leaning mainstream media, which dishes out the emotional appeals like soup kitchens once dished out gruel on the outskirts of ramshackle Hoovervilles, the Democrats have been able to align themselves with the paleocons, both of whom have learned (or in the case of national Democrats, re-learned) to market artfully what amounts to disastrous protectionism, playing to the fears of those who worry over the potential loss of their newfound economic gains, be it to “outsourcing,” to illegal immigrant labor, or to corporate giants who promise to crush smaller businesses under their enormous weight.
Lou Dobbs Democrats? Perhaps. But I think what we are seeing here is more akin to “Pat Buchanan / Archie Bunker Democrats.” Because hey—if the neo-isolationist and nativist shoe fits…
Yep. There’s security, and then there’s security. The sad truth about Americans is that many of them like to work, because somehow they don’t feel as alienated from the means of production as most Europeans do.
Guys,
Remember the novel, “Lord of the Flies?”
If some Americans mistakenly interpret the unpredictable dynamism and unregulated fluidity of the American job-market as a threat – just as the quarreling, marooned school-boys in the novel mistook the fluttering remnants of a parachute caught at the top of their island-refuge as a threat – then, the allegory argues that the anti-capitalist factions in the rancorous, American electorate will construct crude, horrific totems, a-kin to impaling a rotting pigs-head on a stake, to focus this primal fear and capitalize on it.
Not to worry, though. It’s nothing that a couple generations of Econ 101 and 102 in high school won’t cure – that is, if the teacher’s unions ever let macro and micro-economics in the public-schools’ education agenda – oops, I mean, curricula.
Happy Thanksgiving to the PW gang!
-Steve
Happy Thanksgiving!
And yeah, I’m glad I busted out this post on a holiday. I’m a bit rusty.
Lou Dobbs Democrats? Perhaps. But I think what we are seeing here is more akin to “Pat Buchanan / Archie Bunker Democrats.â€Â
I was going to say that I don’t think very many real working-class people watch Lou Dobbs, or any other show that involves talking heads droning on about serious matters.
Me, I think it was simply a matter of “We’re sick of that one party; let’s see what the other one’s got,” and I’m continually amused at the efforts of various tea leaf readers to wring Deep Meaning out of it.
…the advantage, when it comes to issues that turn on perceptions fueled by anxiety, tends to fall to those who are promising “change”…
Um, but you just said that people were fearful of change. “We’re going to change back to a time when there was no change!” That’d be a great Democrat slogan.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
I didn’t say they were fearful of change, Angie. I said they were fearful of the prospect of losing gains under the current system, and so they vote for things that promise to address that perceived anxiety: a change in trade agreement policy; a change in the minimum wage; a change in immigration policy, and so on.
I’m also not looking for “Deep Meaning,” nor am I reading tea leaves. I’m trying to understand what happened and why, and I’m positing what I believe to be what happened and why.
Which, that’s what I sometimes do here on the blog. Otherwise, all my posts would be expository. And my ironic tagline notwithstanding, anybody really can summarize the news.
Sample Post, under the revised paradigm:
“Democrats Win Congress”
The Democrats won Congress. Bummer. Maybe next time they won’t. Or maybe they will. Depends on who receives the most votes.
Developing…
* Families and marriage promote economic security. Democrats are unlikely to jump on that message.
* 69% of households with kids shop at Wal-Mart.
* Pro-growth polices remain a sine quan non in addressing feelings of economic insecurity.
* The media will deemphasize issues of economic insecurity when a Democrat is president.
qua
Yeah, Angie. For instance, even I can summarize the news. The trick is the way you frame it, which is, in a way, a little bit like giving specs to the Hubble.
The best way, in my lazy opinion, is to allow it to comment more or less on itself by extracting the really good bits.
Anyway, dog or not, Angie, you’re a hot presence on the internet, so best to you and yours.
As far as understanding what happened, I’m not one of those who thinks it’s somehow unseemly to assign *plenty* of credit to the media.
Are we pretending China’s economy isn’t growing at 11% a year while America’s economy is currently gowing at only 1.6% a year, and most likely is heading for a monster recession when all our borrowing catches up to us?
What worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future.
It may turn out America’s post-WWII economic boom owes more to the terrible condition our competitors were in during that period…than any economic style we choose.
Is it possible that a constantly reiterated message playing on fears of economic insecurity like Monkyboy’s could have the absolutely perverse effect of causing households to emphasize debt reduction and savings, thereby ameliorating feelings of economic insecurity?
happyfeet,
If American households stop buying things on credit, the economy will slow down and businesses will start laying people off…and America plunges into an even bigger recession…
Quite a conundrum.
The 1.6% number is an unadjusted number for one quarter, not representative of any long term trend. However, when your purpose is to deceive… America’s post WWII economic woes? What planet are you from? The one where European style planned economies overtook us, or the one where the Japanese left us in the dust?
I held my nose and voted for the “R” in my district, who won. There was no anti-pork, let’s win the war candidate running in my district.
I’m also not looking for “Deep Meaning,†nor am I reading tea leaves.
That part wasn’t specifically meant for you. I’ve seen half a dozen different analyses of why the Republicans lost by now, from people at all points of the political spectrum. Naturally, they all have different explanations. I think they’re mostly wrong.
I didn’t say they were fearful of change, Angie.
You wrote:
…the populist message was able to appeal to certain anxieties among a group that had conversely been moving upward, economically, but who feared the volatility that free trade can bring…
In other words, the working class is so fearful of volatility (i.e. change) that they’re going to vote for people who will claim to prevent it, even if it means that they cease to move upward.
Therefore, the working class voted conservatively, making the Democrats the New Conservatives—which I think is worth a chuckle, at least. Which is pretty much what you were getting at with your Archie Bunker allusion, so I’m not sure why you think I’m arguing with you.
happyfeet writes:
qua
I think we can all agree with that.
Monkyboy – I could see this playing out more at the margins… Households who do not wake up in the middle of the night worrying about fluctuations of the yuan-dollar exchange rate will keep right on spending, but if a percentage of those who ARE feeling economically insecure decide to not wait for Nancy and Harry to make happy laws that make them feel superduperifically impervious to those icky Chinese and start making choices that help them feel less insecure, we have a net reduction in feelings of economic insecurity no?
Also – consumer spending is more complicated than what you posit – If people spend $800 on a big fat check to Visa one month (decreasing the future percentage of income that will be devoted to interest), as opposed to spending $800 on imports at Target, the economy is not going to groan and shudder. Target will take a knock, sales tax receipts will fall, and retailers will be pressed to entice reluctant shoppers by offering better value.
To be honest, I have no idea what Visa does with its receipts, but I’m pretty sure they don’t look for the most least-productive place to park the money – they invest it in a way that’s going to generate a return, i.e., create wealth. My point is that looking to Harry and Nancy to soothe economic insecurities is fine as far as it goes, but insecure-feeling people who make choices that exacerbate their own insecurity are ultimately not going to be soothed by *any* act of government. I say again: qua!
Well…
Like a certain Democrat, I see two Americas:
Those who have to compete with the Chinese and those who don’t.
The ones who are safe from competition are the ones who push for free trade the most.
Chinese professionals: doctors, college professors, lawyers, soldiers, journalists, CEOs, etc. make far less than their American counterparts.
A low salary for working-class Americans wouldn’t be such a problem if a doctor’s visit cost them 50 cents, a college degree $1000, etc., like they do in China.
Rather than go for trade restrictions…we should push to expose all Americans to competition from the Chinese.
Free, unlimited visas for any Chinese and Indian doctors, professors, CEOs, etc. who want to come to America…maybe even pay them to come here.
The moment we implement that policy, I bet you’d hear a different tone from the pundits and CEOs who call for “free” trade now who would suddenly find their salaries exposed to the same downward pressure as the rest of us…
Um – ok monkyboy. I see that some of us are taking Friedman’s loss harder than others. But you’re drifting off-topic – it’s not economic policy that’s in question on this thread, it’s *perceptions* of economic insecurity. To review: countering/alleviating these perceptions is politically problematic, and even more so in the context of a healthy economy. From what I gather, you’re acknowledging that these perceptions are good for Democrats and that Harry and Nancy should enact policies that spread these perceptions as widely as possible? That’s positively monkyRovian!
What is economic insecurity but the fear you won’t be able to pay all your bills?
Ask anyone who has a sick parent or a child in college if they wouldn’t appreciate their tuition or medical bills slashed 70% or so…
Monky. I see your point: life can be damnably difficult and stressful even in these most enlightened times, but we’ve tried to kick that football before, only to have it cruelly snatched away. Liberals learn about moving goalposts in the cradle: 70% becomes 80% becomes 110%. Your “or so…” is very telling.
In case anyone else had no freaking idea what the title of this post alluded to, here ya go:
All in the Family Theme Song Lyrics…
“Boy, the way Glen Miller played.
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!
Didn’t need no welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!
And you knew where you were then!
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
People seemed to be content.
Fifty dollars paid the rent.
Freaks were in a circus tent.
Those were the days!
Take a little Sunday spin, go to watch the Dodgers win.
Have yourself a dandy day that cost you under a fin.
Hair was short and skirts were long.
Kate Smith really sold a song.
I don’t know just what went wrong!
Those Were the Days!”
– http://www.allinthefamilysit.com/allinthefamily_theme_song.shtml
But I betcha I know *tons* of stuff about the Transformers that would totally go over your heads!
The right isn’t weened on moving goalposts, happy?
Why did we invade Iraq again?
What are we going to achieve by staying again?
Can American taxpayers get a refund from all the “capitalist” Republican front companies that have made a fortune off that fiasco?
It’s all been explained before, m-bot.
Go back and review the archives, and then come back with your “yellow peril” comments.
Man, the progressives these days are real regressive.
Hehe, “It’s in the archives” seems to be the latest ploy to hide a lack of facts…
“Socialism” is just a term Republicans apply to government programs they aren’t getting a cut of…
At least when it comes to some risk shifting, democrats are quite clearly against the GOP—and deliver—on one big issue: tort reform. Enterprise liability shifts risks to entire industries—consumers,workers and owners—and away from end users.
Of course, the other area where democrats deliver well on economic security issues is with labor rights.
Give up – monky is in feedback-Sinoloop.
Oh yeah?! I have a 7 year old son who says – bring it!
monkyboy – the topic, again, is *perceptions of economic insecurity* – and liberals constantly shift goalposts to exacerbate feelings of insecurity and deprivation. It wasn’t a year after the passage of the prescription drug benefit that NPR began trotting out vixen after hairy-legged vixen to murmur about how needy her doughnut hole was feeling. Sheesh – we’ve committed a kajillion and a half dollars and you people are already lining up the codgers for seconds at the trough.
actus piles on teh stupid too…
Yeah, ask the American shipbuilding industry how they absorbed risk right into Peter Angelos’ bank accounts… Or how Mark Lanier may torpedo a generation of progress in pharma. But hey, ATLA and it’s metastases inot the body politic give money to the correct party!
gah, back to the wineglass and TV. Nighty night all! (oh, and good to have you back more often, Jeff)
Yes Actus, the Dems sure delivered for GM’s workers. (That was a car company – my Dad had one of their cars in the 70s.) I bet you own lots of airline stock, huh?
I haven’t read that risk book so for now I guess you got me on tort reform – big time – gosh – is no tort safe from those tort-reformin’ Dems?
Major – um, I was just talking smack. One of them turns into a truck I think? (I saw the trailer for the new movie at work the other day, but didn’t get to see any actual Transformers.)
Hmmm, happyfeet.
Why are the Republicans always trying to scare people by saying a solid program like Social Security is in trouble?
Could it be because they want their pals on Wall Street to make some easy money pissing all of our funds away?
I think it is…
monkyboy, that’s just cynical. What say we compromise and require that funds from partial privatization be invested in the booming Chinese super-economy?
Higher rewards come with higher risks, happy.
Why take the chance we’re dumping our funds into China’s version of Enron?
Yeah, it’s all tucked away in a
RACIST!!!
Man. Who let the trolls in?
monky is sounding shriller, though. Very intersting.
Well, I think the Democrats are convinced (some) that they won on some kind of merit.
As if.
They won in part (can’t say a general statement, the whole of the thing is just too complex.) because of economic anxieties causing conservative voting. Protectionism really isn’t progressive, or whatever, but more conservative at heart. Not to say that I like it– but then again, I suppose, we would have to be protectionist to begin with for it to be conservative. If not, then it is just regressive.
Anyway, a generally poor performance of Repubs on issues like immigration and the WOT left the ball in the air– the Dems proceeded to win on a bunch of outlying issues like this economic anxiety (as Jeff was saying.)
Ignore actus and monky. They’re just trying to cloud the waters and hijack the thread.
At least when it comes to some risk shifting, democrats are quite clearly against the GOPâ€â€and deliverâ€â€on one big issue: tort reform. Enterprise liability shifts risks to entire industriesâ€â€consumers,workers and ownersâ€â€and away from end users.
(read) Raise taxes
Of course, the other area where democrats deliver well on economic security issues is with labor rights.
(read) regulate industry
Hey, monkyboy thinks there’s a recession! Maybe a mile high balloon fence around the border can keep foreign debt out!
monkyboy, it is only a conundrum if you are an idiot.
…the populist message was able to appeal to certain anxieties among a group that had conversely been moving upward, economically, but who feared the volatility that free trade can bring…
This means that, in my estimation, they feared the volatility of an economy that stuck to the status quo.
And so they voted for policy change.
I’m pointing this out because you made it a point, Angie, to suggest I had contradicted myself.
Other than that, I agree with much of what you have to say, yes.
Just for the Balloon Fence Boy:
Taken from my previous numbers GDP comparisons to Defense Spending and Human Resource spending.
% GDP growth year to year:
2001 – 2002 3.31%
2002 – 2003 4.39%
2003 – 2004 5.89%
2004 – 2005 5.03%
2005 – 2006 4.12% (proj)
Now quite flinging arouind that 1.6% number as de facto economic growth when you should know dam well that our economy has consistantly grown 4-5 % over the last 4 years, years being more significant than one stinkin’ quarter.
The topic is the perceived economic anxiety of the voters and its impact on the election. Discuss.
Hard to say, labor rights have been reduced since the 70’s. But I do think the UAW is managing its winding up for its members. At least better than just having layoffs.
I’d bet i’m not wealthy enough to own ANY stock.
Me neither Actus, but a perusal of any study that looks at the demographics of blog readership suggests that we damn well *should* be. Does reflecting on this make me feel anxious that I’ve fallen behind where I’m supposed to be?
Maybe, but while this does not leave me “trending leftward,” I can definitely say that it leads directly to the fact that gay marriage and embryonic stem cells and flag burning and minimum wage increases and the vast majority of the thoroughly focus group-tested “issues” don’t carry a lot of weight in how I look at politics. It takes me a long time to even have opinions on these “issues” since they are “issues” only because, like Athena’s retarded younger sister, they are mature from conception, already representing as close to a “consensus view” as possible.
In the context of “perceived economic anxieties,” these issues add up to much less than the weight they are given in the national political conversation – they are mere markers for “change,” useful because they can provide fodder for lots of news-cycle yammer.
I think another way to look at how economic anxiety works in terms of the electorate is that voters are presented with dire scenarios – using whatever exponents are at hand – slowing housing market, rising gas prices, Arab port ownership, China – and the question is persistently left in the air: what has the party in power done to address these issues?
It’s a swinging pendulum, and it points to the difficulty of sustaining a majority. What has helped Republicans is that they have had success in moving the center of gravity to the right, and Democrats would do well to take notice that a “change” election perversely takes energy *out* of the system, pacifying the center and shifting the remaining energies to the single-issue special interests. This limits the apogee of the pendulum at the height of the next cycle.
One of the things I have most appreciated about the Bush administration is its persistent focus on the large and complicated – Social Security, rethinking the Middle East, nuclear energy, tort reform etc, and (in contrast with Clinton) eschewing a focus on small-bore issues that generate headlines like, from the archives: “Clinton Orders More Recycling”; “Clinton Tells Feds To Remember Kids”; “Clinton Wants Tougher Seat-Belt Laws” and “Clinton Expands Pollution War” – but make no mistake my friend, what the Democrats have won in the “change” election of 2006 is no more than the keys to a theme-of-the-day park – whose management are sticklers for the “daily message,” a message that inexorably trend toward reiteration of the comfortable and the familiar.
Clinton showed how this approach can be successful in the executive branch, but in Congress, it seems unlikely that this approach can work without substantially ameliorating the economic anxieties that affected the electorate this time around, and if I recall correctly, the flaw of soma was that it proved NOT to be addictive.