Pandagon

Refocus debate on economic matters and increase class and economic consciousness. How, exactly, is that different from Tom Frank's subscription?

Refocus debate on economic matters and increase class and economic consciousness. How, exactly, is that different from Tom Frank's perscription?

huh?

Franks isn't wrong on his solutions, but he's dead wrong on some of his critiques. I didn't mean to conflate the two above. He's also very broad in his solutions -- I think he's wrong to emphasize what we could do for them, power lies in emphasizing what Republicans have done to them. I want my backlash politics, baby.

Franks is completely wrong and Ezra you are not really right either. We are dealing with rural voters in the main. You know, the one group of voters who always do get their welfare payments in the form of farm subsidies. They are against welfare. Well gerenal welfare. This dislike land use requirements and many environemntal regulations. They are voting what they see as their economic interest.

As Kevin Phillips recently said on PBS, step one is showing that all these supposed defenders of traditional American values are busy hanging out with Rev. Moon and others.

Well that's an interesting question. There's a lot more working-class white males in the Northeast then there are in the farm states. Do they break in a similar, anti-Democrat way?

I'll have to respectfully disagree with the last poster -- although Frank's book does talk a lot about rural voters, much of his writing deals broadly with what used to be called "Reagan Democrats," who by-and-large live in cities, inner-ring suburbs, and small towns. Even if we're talking exclusively about rural residents, how many of them really directly receive farm subsidies? Of course, rural people do tend to receive more government assistance than urbanites on average, but I'm not sure that a huge percentage of that is farm subsidies (most of which wind up in the hands of large landowners and agribusiness giants anyway).

Ezra's point is kind of a weird criticism to hear, because for years I've been reading about how all Tom Frank does is criticize cultural trends and doesn't offer any policy solutions. (Sorry if I'm coming off like an old hipster who goes ballistic when some kid starts talking about his suddenly popular favorite band... "I've been reading Tom Frank since BEFORE he got all big!")

Sorry, tatere... at the time I started typing, the "last poster" was rob... You gotta act fast in this Internet biz!

BLS.Gov Statistics
Posted at:
http://marceau.blogspot.com/

This is what the Kerry campaign should be hitting Bush with.

Maybe I'm having tense issues. Are the last two paragraphs your summary of Franks' ideas or your own ideas?

Since less than 2% of American workers are farmers, I don't think that they could possibly make up the bulk of working-class people voting Republican out of real "economic interest."

I e-mailed this to J&E;, but it fots on this thread so I will post it as well.

You know that bothersome meme: Dems are toast without the black vote? There always has been a logical response: The Republicans are toast without the racist vote. If you need empirical evidence, look no further than Tennessee.

Want to send a cracker who campaigns in a bullet proof vest, gun in hand, and bases the bulk of his platform on EUGENICS? Hey, what the eff.

The cracker in question is James L. Hart the Republican candidate for Tennessee's 8th Congressional district who defeated write-in candidate Dennis Bertrand 8-to-1.

Last Friday--- at almost exactly the same time two mass e-mails were sent out to Shelby County Republicans. The first came from the hosts of Democratic Talk Radio in Fayetteville, TN, and was extremely critical of how the Republicans were responding to Hart's run. The other e-mail was a newsletter from Shelby County Republicans containing a letter from Dennis Bertrand. Here are the choice excerpts, Enjoy. Or vomit. Both responses are appropriate.

From DTR: "Republicans need the racist vote to carry Tennessee. His views are not that uncommon among the local Republican leadership in many counties in the state. They have to at least mildly condemn Hart to keep their moderate voters. They cannot condemn Hart with the vigor his view require without losing their white racist base."

From the Bertrand, the “Real Republican” who lost to “An openly racist Republican.”:

“We have two choices now, 1) keep our mouths shut and let Mr. Hart gather more votes in the general election from the uninformed, or 2) step up and organize to get the word out that Mr. Hart is not a Republican...Our country is in great peril. President Bush is the right man to deal with terrorism. John Kerry would get many more of our citizens killed, both military and civilian, at home and overseas.
May God Continue To Bless Our President and Our Great Country.
Thank you,
Dennis Bertrand”

I guess there’s really not much too all of this, but for me it resonates well against the “Dems need blacks” crap that pops up time after time. I think it also has something to do with why white voters break against the Dems: because there is a degree of lingering racism even among moderates who resent the loss of economic power--- whether they will admit it or not.

SORRY for the long post.

Generally, the idea of bringing up a nostalgia about the "Democratic" aspects of the past that are getting trampled today is pretty good. I don't care if it plays directly to this or that demographic, it is right, and that should be enough.

We Dems can't let go of the one fundamental we've got that the Repubs don't... Our policies (in general) actually make sense. We should be pounding away at the fact that we make sense (rationally) while they are peddling snake oil that just sounds good but is completely crap when you take a real look at it.

BTW: where did the "Repubs are better on national defense" come from? Didn't Dem presidents win the two world wars?

As a (ugh!) middle-aged Okie, I remember when Republicans started taking over. They wrapped themselves in the flag, God, and mandated busing. Which, everybody knows, is segregationism in prettier clothes. It doesn't matter if actual policies hurt them, as long as they keep saying the right things.

*ROLLS EYES*

fots=fits.

Damn fingers just don't do what I tell them too.

Dems may have a prob with working-class whites do to the racism of working-class whites.

Now bare with me: As a white public school teacher with over 20 yrs on the job, I have seen many examples of white flight. Black, Asians, Latinos break into to a school of neighborhood and a significant number of white families up and leave.

Might this happen in political communities as well? The mere fact that minorities play such an important role in the modern Democratic party means that there is a certain population of whites who will stay away no matter how much the Dem party works to their benefit. Is this something that others have recognised as well?

Praktike -- Mine, but they have similarities to Frank's.

Dear Pandagon,

Sorry to be a stiff-butt pedant, but calling NAFTA the antithesis of economic liberalism isn't quite right. Economic liberalism means roughly the same thing as laissez-faire economics does, that is, the government allows companies to behave "liberally" - i.e. with freedom, or some might say impunity. I know what you meant - "liberalism" as a catch-all for policies that Democrats have historically supported - but if we harp about people not being "real conservatives," we have to remember all the different things that "liberal" actually means, too.

Yrs in faith and persnicketiness,
Tracer Hand

Just as the racism of working-class whites has started to seriously fade, their homophobia has become relevant. We really do have to stick to economic issues to build a coalition with them, since we have every intention of ignoring their bigotry.

Favoring and passing welfare reform was bad politics and hurt Clinton's standing in Kansas? No way.

The GOP had spend 15 years bashing welfare as a giveaway of taxpayer money, implying that your hard earned dollars were subsidizing the life of lazy blacks. Of course, no one bothered to let evidence get in the way of this theory. As a matter of politics, Clinton's favoring welfare reform almost certainly helped his score with white working class voters.

NAFTA was of course terrible politics, because when there is economic hardship, people are mercantilists. But on the flip side, if a second term GHWBush had passed NAFTA it would have had much weaker, if any, labor and environmental standards.

Clinton being a "fiscal conservative" in the sense of wanting to balance the budget probably didn't hurt him. He was competing with votes for Perot, who's obsession was balancing the budget, so he made the calculation that he had to supp. Clinton was hurt by, in order, gays in the military, NAFTA, no middle class tax cut, and "big government health care".

We also need to stop using the term "fiscal conservative". Or we need to be more clear about distingushing "fiscal conservatives" -- people who want to balance the budget, from "economic conservatives" or as I like to call them "crackpots" -- people who believe the progressive income tax was invented by Karl Marx [Delay, Hastert, etc.].

Kimmitt, you are exactly right. On social issues, especially, gun control, Dems lose. Abortion, stem cell research, the Ten Commandments, immigration, gay rights, pre-emptive war...We might be correct about all of these things, but apparently people of the red states disagree. But as far as economics, we can make a substantial case as well as our case against the Iraq war. These people aren't stupid, simply uninformed and ill-informed.

The biggest Dem concession of the last generation is Clinton's assertion that "the era of big government is over" which implies we ever had it in the first place. The DLC's willingness to bash the government is their worst trait. I believe that the reason people discount enomomic policy in favor of "social issue" policy is that they don't believe the government can solve economic problems -- if I lost my job, it's just the way the free market system works. That's bullshit, but the Dems are afraid to attack the "free market" and people simply don't believe the govenment will help.

Dems need to get back to attacking corporations in fundamental ways -- FDR said (I think in his last inagural) that competition based on cutting wages was illegitimate. What Dem could say that now? When Dems really show belief in government, in concerted public action, they can start persuading voters to reject the 19th century politics of the GOP.

Folks,
Straight-up class-based politics does not work in this country and never has in any sustained way. The best example of true, successful working-class politics - FDR's New Deal coalition - started to crack in the 1940s with FEPC and with Truman's desegration of the military. Read Tom Sugrue's "Origins of the Urban Crisis" for details of this phenomena in Detroit, a city that was absolutely dominated by white, working-class union Democrats through the mid-1940s but ended up electing a Republican race baiter in Cobo for mayor in the 1950s. This was the seed of the Reagan Democrats (or the Wallace '72 Dems to be honest). A colleague of mine just finished his dissertation (I'm a history Ph.D. student at Northwestern) on this same thing in Philadelphia where a massive transit worker hate strike paralyzed the city in 1944 in response to FDR's Fair Employment Practice Commission. The Republican Party found themselves a winner and captured these working-class whites for decades. Remember, blacks still voted overwhelmingly Republican through the 1920s (where they could vote, of course) and didn't start moving over to the Dems until the late 1920s (in northern machines) and the 1930s (FDR).

People vote on identity, not class. Identity is formulated by race/ethnicity, gender, region, education, religion, and only occasionally by class, depending on how it ends up culturally understood at a given time. There are, of course, other elements of identity too. It's ALWAYS been that way. In the 1868 election, for example, Democrats openly referred to themselves as the "White Man's Party", appealing to the uncertain whiteness of Irish and German Catholics as well as Upland Southerners in lower Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. Many were working class though many weren't. Meanwhile Republicans identified themselves with small businessmen and with the Union war effort; their support for Radical Reconstruction had more to do with hatred of white Confederates than it did love or respect for African Americans. Most Republicans were Protestant and native-born (with the exception of German Protestants). Many were also working class. Political identity was formed by religion, region, nationality, attitudes toward the War, and only partly economic class.

Moreover, any politician who wants to succeed at the national must appeal to the various identities of the electorate AND demonstrate a strong belief in fairness and opportunity, which are the bedrock political beliefs in America. Now identity (especially white racial) might get in the way of, you know, "fairness" or equity. But that's just the point. Old school white supremacist Dixiecrats used to talk about fairness for whites. It's very effective for politicians to capture particular identity groups - say black women - and touch THEIR conception of equality of opportunity. But it's much harder - probably impossible - to capture the identity of all major groups and convince them that you care about their chances in life. Clinton's myriad triangulation strategies helped him in this way but few have the same ability.

So trying to rescue a class-based politics in places like Kansas is doomed to fail because voters just don't think in purely "objective" class terms. Their religiosity and racial conservatism form the bedrock of their identity - not their relationship to the means of production. Just as here in Evanston, Illinois, where many very wealthy families are extremely liberal Democrats - they aren't voting their economic class either. They're voting their identity.

As far as the suburban white male vote goes, it's not data, but my reference points are my older brothers (sample size of 5). We were raised hardcore Democrats, but our parents were bone-deep racists, too. Two of them have stayed Democrats and are pretty much in line with where the party is now. The three that went Republican all have some common ways of thinking:

- They are still racist as hell
- Everything bad that happens to them, economically, is someone else's fault
- They all think they're going to be rich some day

It's a pretty weird mix. They'll be bashing corporations as fiercely as anybody one minute, and then from somewhere it's also the Jews, the Mexicans, the blacks, and the government. What really strikes me, in light of the comments here, is that they have no sense of common purpose with other people in their situation. In their world view, it's not only true but right that everyone is out for himself and screw the other guy. They admire that. And since they fully believe they're going to make it big real soon now, they've argued with me against things that would have put money in their own pockets right then, because they didn't want to be stuck paying for those other schmoes later on.

I'm hard-pressed to think of how you'd get those votes without being Republicans in all but name. So I guess the question is, how typical is that kind of thinking. I don't know.

Final, separate note:

... the corridors of Washington were filled with people concerned about the working man, not about his boss. It's not that way now and we, not the Republicans, are the ones who'll change that for you.

I'd like that to be true. I kinda don't think it is, though. If you're putting that out as a goal, not a description of where Democrats are now, apologies and I'm right there with you.

So what did you cook for the dinner party, Ezra?

Tatere,
I think your siblings are typical of many Republicans. They expect to get rich some day. But their identity centers around the fact that they see themselves as part of a particular grouping (white) that's getting screwed and needs "opportunities". They believe that every attempt by Democrats is really to enrich somebody else - blacks, Mexicans, trial lawyers, etc. just not them. Republicans, however, tell them straight up that if it weren't for the blacks, Mexicans, trial lawyers, "big government taxes", they could be rich too. So they say "everybody's out for themselves" but they're less likely to tolerate black people getting ahead than whites because their identity is based on race.

This is combined with a weird faux-traditionalism that subtly moves these questions of economic power into cultural imagery, namely, the Buchananite reliance on the 1950's. The question is how we reverse this trend.

Generally speaking I think an effective counter to the repeated Republican hearkening back to the Glory Years of the 50s would be a reminder of which party was in charge during those years.

"Clinton campaigned as an unabashed free trader, as a supporter of NAFTA,"

Thats false. Clinton claimed to be undecided about
NAFTA. One of the most compelling incidents of the
92 campaign was when Jerry Brown confronted Clinton
over whether or not he supported NAFTA on the Donahue Show. As I remember Clinton claimed to be a "Fair Trader" during the campaign.

"Fair trade" is code for protectionism. It gets called for when it's clear that "free trade" isn't going to benefit the United States. See Japanese car manufacturing in the 80s - this exact semantic shift occurred.

Keith G: You've taught school for 20 years, and you can't spell yet??
I could read a newspaper by the time I was 3, in '66. My 10-yr-old great-nephew can barely read comic books. I wish it were easier to just emmigrate. Most countries aren't very liberal about letting foreigners pull up stakes and move in.

Whoever said that people vote based upon identity is spot-on.

You will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER get working-class Southern whites to vote their own economic self-interests if it means they have to identify with blacks. NEVER.

EVERYTHING is about cultural and racial identity to them. Their faith is about identity, not piety. Their music, their vehicles, their pastimes -- all of these have become overinflated parodies of themselves, because these people are wrapping themselves in their identity.

THEY are the reason the right-wing grassroots has gotten so much more savage over the past couple decades. Modern American society has provoked a fundamentalist backlash in the South and Southern-like rural areas elsewhere. You cannot prevail against this fundamentalist backlash through political appeals here any better than you can in the Muslim world. It is the same dynamic.

For now, at least, they are working within the political system, albeit with a disrespect for its rules and traditions which they do not regard as valid. But do not be deluded into thinking that these people will accept political defeat when the demographic trends inevitably prevail against them.

They will resort either to secession or terrorism.