Voting on the American Dream

In between the Republican and Democratic conventions, I was asked to review an article concerning the attitudes of displaced workers toward their plight. The study suggested that cultural narratives shape the social and political consciousness of those suffering economic distress in both positive and negative ways.  The article made me think about the convention speeches and the impact that they may have on working- and middle-class listeners whose lives have been disrupted by the Great Recession. How might they use the words and cultural narratives suggested in the convention speeches?

The New York Times actually tracked how often the Republicans and Democrats used certain words at their conventions. Other than the names of the presidential candidates, God, and taxes, the most common terms at both conventions were work, jobs, families, opportunity, economy, and success. All of these terms are closely associated with the American Dream, which was also mentioned frequently.

The frequent use of these words is to be expected, given that the American Dream has been the most dominant aspirational and cultural narrative in our county. Among other things, the American Dream suggests that through hard work and education individuals could improve their standard of living and that improvement would continue for each successive generation.  But that narrative has become contested because of declining socio-economic conditions and downward class mobility. A question now being heard, as noted in an NPR story last spring, is whether the American Dream is still viable, or has it become a nightmare?

To answer that, it helps to consider the political uses of the American Dream.  Political economists have suggested that it has served hegemonic purposes, allowing small but powerful groups to exercise political power with high levels of popular consent. In the case of the American Dream, they suggest, elites have used this powerful narrative to create a social and political consciousness that would not threaten the privileged.  For example, some elites argue that success is the product individual effort and not government or collective support.  A recent example appeared in the Republican convention, which emphasized the claim that “We  Built It” in response to President Obama’s suggestion that businesses don’t build the roads and infrastructure that allow their enterprises to succeed.

But what happens when the American Dream becomes discredited?  Does it lose its ability to shape political consciousness? As the Occupy Movement has shown, the American Dream has been betrayed, and today the story of America is characterized by injustice, inequality, and unfairness.  But that movement created what’s called a counter-hegomonic narrative, a story that made clear that the Dream is no longer attainable.  A narrative emphasizing the betrayal of the American Dream could play a powerful role in shaping social and political attitudes and in deciding the election this year, as the study I mentioned earlier suggested.

Of course, candidates still insist on citing the American Dream in their speeches.  But while some people still find hope in that narrative, others recognize that their own situation reveals the Dream’s contradictions. So what will be the dominant influence?  Hope?  Or a change in the way we think about the American Dream?

I suspect that people will look more critically at the limitations of the American Dream narrative than they have in most previous elections. A recent Pew Research study shows that Americans increasingly define themselves as lower class. The greatest shifts occurred among adults under 30, especially whites and Hispanics and those without a college degree (whom pollsters often consider working-class), though many who have college degrees also identified as lower class.  The pattern holds across political affiliations, among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. More important, those who identified as lower class also supported the idea that hard work doesn’t guarantee success, and they expressed little optimism for the future.

Given that, politicians would do well to go beyond embracing the American Dream and instead identify clear strategies for renewing its viability.  Unfortunately, neither party has been able to suggest anything except increased education,  and they offer few concrete plans to help more people attain that.  Most of the time, the best they can do is make oblique references to raising the standard living and improving trade and manufacturing policies.  Despite their fervent statements of faith in the American Dream, what we’re hearing is mostly aspirational political rhetoric.  And many Americans just aren’t buying it anymore.

That skepticism might, eventually, provide the foundation for broader discontent, which could take many forms.  As Election Day gets closer, perhaps the biggest threat to both parties, but especially the Democrats, is apathy and resignation from voters who no longer believe in the American Dream.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

On pasties, poshness and petrol: The new language of class in the UK

On both sides of the Atlantic we have become used to the deployment of proxies for class in political language, but in the UK just recently this has taken a new turn with the political scandal that is ‘Pastygate.’ Now this isn’t a scandal to rival the break-in at the Watergate building, nor is it one to bring down the UK government. Pastygate refers to decision taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to impose Value Added Tax (VAT) on Cornish Pasties when they are heated above ambient room temperature. I know what you are thinking: Sherry has uploaded the wrong blog this week.  But bear with me.

The uproar around Pastygate centred on the fact that this was widely seen as another attack on the working class, insofar as it is they who tend to buy the humble warmed pasty. With VAT running at 20% this was an inflation-busting rise on a working-class fast food staple.  Politicians of left and right have been falling over themselves to be seen eating pasties in the last month, or struggling to remember when they last consumed one, in order to demonstrate their common touch.

At the same time, the budget also saw a widely criticised cut in the top rate of income tax. The Treasury viewed this measure as simply tidying up tax anomalies, but many have read it as part of a bigger narrative of a government of the elite out of touch with ordinary people. Taken together the two tax moves have been woven in to an emerging story that has at its heart class, which we will pick up later.

But first, petrol! British petrol tanker truck drivers have balloted for industrial action over their conditions of service, health and safety fears, and concern over a race to the bottom in terms of wages.  The big oil companies have outsourced the delivery of fuel to gas stations, and the competitive market has seen a wide deterioration in working conditions. Government ministers, while condemning the looming strikes, urged motorists to fill up their tanks while they had the chance, and one even suggested filling up jerry cans to store in the garage.  Roundly condemned by the fire service and the media, the minister involved was portrayed as elitist and out of touch, in part because of the assumption that everyone in Britain would have a garage. The advice caused a fuel shortage as the pumps ran dry as well as a run on jerry cans.

The cumulative effect of these and other stories – apart from the humorous relief it has given to people struggling through a double dip recession and dire unemployment figures – has been a sense that this is a government run by an out of touch elite. Indeed, one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s own party rounded on him and the Chancellor just last week. Maverick Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Nadine Dorries described both Cameron and Chancellor Osborne as “Two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk” with “no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others, and that is their real crime.”

George Gideon Oliver Osborne used to be just Gideon Oliver.  He describes his decision to change his name to George at age 13 as “his one act of rebellion.”  Osborne is the son of a baronet and Felicity Alexandra Loxton-Peacock. A multimillionaire, Osborne, like Cameron, enjoyed an elite education at private school followed by Oxford University, where both enrolled in the Bullingdon Club, an elite university dining club founded over 200 years ago. Membership elections are held twice a year. Successful new members are visited in their rooms and expected to consume the contents of an entire tin of Colman’s powdered English Mustard.  The rooms are then “trashed” as a symbol of their election. Club members dress in sky blue and ivory colored tailcoats, the whole ensemble costing in excess of $5700. A now infamous picture shows Cameron and other members of the club posing on the steps of a grand building at Oxford.  This image reemerges from time to time and has haunted “Dave” as an unwelcome reminder of his far from ordinary background.

At the beginning of his premiership, Cameron notably said that “we were all in this together,” referring to the collective struggle to endure the greatest peacetime recession in living memory. Deliberately invoking the spirit of the Blitz, he attempted to conjure up a society suffering in equal measure – one with a degree of classlessness. In contrast, the furor over pasties, petrol, and poshness has popularized an image of a group of wealthy elites waging a class war on those below them. The effect, I think, has been – like 1 percent versus the 99 percent slogan of the Occupy Movement in the U.S. — to separate off the elite from an admittedly very diverse mass  – the middle and working class and the unemployed who perhaps share little in common apart from not being part of this uber-elite. And despite Cameron’s effort to invoke classlessness, the language of class has re-emerged in popular discourse, whether it refers to the upper class or to the working and middle classes who perhaps see themselves as having more in common than has been assumed for decade or more.

This new class discourse is driven by the cumulative effect of cuts in government spending, which are causing a huge retrenchment in all kinds of state services provided by central and local government.  While the impact has already been profound, conservative estimates suggest that so far we have experienced just 10% of the full cuts, meaning many more jobs in the public sector as well as numerous services are still to be lost over the next few years. Crucially, this impact is being felt by working and middle class families – either directly in terms of  lost jobs or in the form of public services once assumed to be safe.

At the same time, because of the economic situation, being working class is no longer a pariah state. Equally important, serious questions are being raised about growing and profound income inequality in the UK. In the local elections held at the beginning of May the Conservatives did very badly and commentators in part explained this through the government being viewed as out of touch by the electorate. While pasties aren’t on the menu of the Bullingdon club it seems we are (almost) all pasty eaters now!

Tim Strangleman

Tim Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of the  textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods.

How Obama Can Win Ohio

Note: This week’s blog is a repost of John Russo’s column from Friday’s Opinionator blog at the New York Times.

The decisive referendum vote to repeal the bill that would limit collective bargaining by public sector unions has changed the political landscape in Ohio. Tuesday’s vote on Senate Bill 5 could and should be a harbinger for the 2012 presidential election. By mounting a direct assault on public sector workers and the unions who represent them, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio may have done more to help Barack Obama win re-election than anything Obama’s political team is likely to do over the next 12 months.

With Ohio’s continuing high unemployment rate (9.1%!, just like the rest of the U.S), it had seemed unlikely that President Obama could win Ohio, and without Ohio, he’d have difficulty getting re-elected. The same factors make re-election a challenge for Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democratic and one of the most pro-labor members of the Senate. But Kasich, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature and outside conservative financers and think tanks like the Buckeye Institute, may have done Obama and Brown a big favor.

Karl Rove described Senate Bill 5 as a much “more extensive reform” to public sector unions than was enacted in Wisconsin, in part because the Ohio version included firefighters and police officers. While the protests in Columbus were smaller and received less national attention than those in Madison, unions and community groups in Ohio organized a ballot initiative with 10,000 volunteers circulating petitions in all 88 counties. Over 1.3 million Ohioans — more than five times the number required to put the initiative on the ballot — signed the petitions.

Despite a large influx of money from conservative organizations like Citizens United, Freedom Works, and Restoring America, Ohio voters repealed Senate Bill 5 by an overwhelming 22 point margin — 39% yes, 61% no (a no vote was pro-union). Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly against the measure, and, if pre-election polls are correct, 30% of Ohio Republicans also voted to reject Senate Bill 5.

This should be good news for Obama. While Ohio is notorious for swinging back and forth between supporting Republicans and Democrats, its 18 electoral votes are especially important for Republican candidates. It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidential election without Ohio, and that means winning significant support among union household voters.

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

This gives Obama the opportunity to score a big victory in Ohio, but that won’t happen solely on the basis of Senate Bill 5. The president must offer a positive economic vision and a program for economic change. The American Jobs Act – even if it must be pushed through piecemeal — is a good start, as are the president’s recent actions on mortgages and student loans.

Such positions will also help Senator Brown’s chances of re-election, but in 2012, in Ohio at least, the usual pattern of members of Congress benefiting from presidential coattails could be reversed. Brown’s solid support for organized labor, community groups and those who have been most hurt by the continuing economic crisis — positions that resonate with the millions of Ohio voters who overturned Senate Bill 5 — may help Obama more than anything Obama has done will help Brown.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. In order for the battle over Senate Bill 5 to influence the 2012 election, those who have organized so effectively to defend unions must continue to work together. Unions will have to keep educating members and reach out to those outside of the labor movement. They will also have to work closely with community and neighborhood groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which played a pivotal role in community organizing around Senate Bill 5.

None of that will be easy. Competing interests within and between organized labor and community organizations make the coalition very fragile. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is relatively weak in Ohio, and some tensions exist between public and private sector unions. Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to put parts of Senate Bill 5 through in a series of smaller bills next year. Without solidarity across labor organizations, the coalition that fought so well against one big bill could fracture. It may be that other issues won’t have the unifying effect of Senate Bill 5. After all, the same voters who overturned that bill approved a constitutional amendment barring the implementation of the individual insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act.

But if the organizers of the campaign against Senate Bill 5 can hold together and if the Obama campaign can tap into the anger and solidarity of that fight, Tuesday’s vote could turn out to be the turning point in the 2012 election.

 

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Now’s the Time: Organizing in the Face of the Class War

Despite inspiring and massive rallies and protest campaigns, the two most visible attacks on America’s working class – the anti-union bills in Wisconsin and Ohio – have both been signed into law.  While the attack on public sector unions is, in itself, just the latest salvo in an ongoing class war, its effects will go far beyond the workers directly involved.  These bills will lead to restructuring of a variety of public services, from education and home health care to government offices and police stations.

Over the last 30 years, many of the economic battles have been fought on a local or regional level, and in many cases, only the most-directly affected workers got involved. In Ohio, for example, struggles over deindustrialization and organized labor occurred primarily in steel and auto factories in the northern part of the state, making statewide organizing against economic restructuring difficult because many workers  were not directly impacted.

But things might be different this time.  In most states, new limits on public sector bargaining will affect people in every city and town, as well as people in very different situations – workers, students, the elderly, families with young children, and others.   That creates opportunities for organizing cross geographical boundaries.  Similarly, these bills create potential new constituencies as students, younger workers, women, and people of color recognize that they will be disproportionately impacted. While blacks comprise 15% of all adult workers, they are 18.5% of the public sector workers, and Ohio Policy Matters found that of the 700,000 Ohio public sector workers more than 400,000 are women. Women comprise an even higher percentage of teachers in K-12 education, especially in traditionally Republican suburban areas. As Natasha Vargas-Cooper noted in yesterday’s New York Times, this attack helps create the potential for coalitions that will link the traditionally weaker unions representing female service workers with the more respected safety workers unions, dominated by men.

The latest battle in the class war may even draw some unexpected allies.  In Youngstown, one the nation’s fastest growing technology firms, Turning Technologies, has withdrawn from the Regional Chamber of Commerce in protest of its support  of SB5, as have two other local companies.  All of which is to suggest that mobilizing around public sector ballot initiatives and recall campaigns could be both wide and deep.

Getting thousands to show up for rallies or write letters in the fever of the initial public sector skirmishes hasn’t been that hard.  Over the last two months, people have been angry, and they wanted to take action.  And while making the drive across the state to be part of a crowd of tens of thousands is a significant commitment of time and energy, it’s also exciting.  As the videos showing witty signs and costumes remind us, protesting can be fun and even aerobic.

But now is the time for on the ground organizing, and the work ahead will be less dramatic and in many ways much harder than showing up for a protest or writing a letter.  Going door-to-door to get signatures can be thought of as hand-to-hand combat where individuals have to be informed and ready to perform in a sometimes hostile environment. But it’s also essential to the political process, especially given the amount of money corporations and conservative business interests will be spending on political advertising to defeat repeal/recall initiatives.

To make matters worse, organizers will have to overcome the effects of the dashed hopes of the  Obama presidency.  As Chris Hedges writes in The Death of the Liberal Class, progressives understand that the party they once counted on to advance their interests has sold out to the big money that controls so much of the political process.  Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson review the political and policy decisions of the last few decades in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, tracing how corporate influence has pervaded Democrat Party politics and caused growing inequality in America.

At the end of their book, Hacker and Pierson suggest several key elements for changing the trend toward inequality, including “facilitat[ing] broader participation among those whose voices are currently drowned out” and “encourag[ing] the development of groups that can provide a continuing, organized capacity to mobilize middle-class voters and monitor government and politics on their behalf” (303).  For decades, working people – including those who did not belong to unions – counted on the labor movement to fulfill both of these functions.

With shrinking numbers and new legislation limiting its capacity, the labor movement can’t do this on its own. Nor should it. While the laws being passed now focus on public sector unions, the war won’t end there.  In Ohio, bills are being proposed to ban overtime and institute “right to work” rules.  State budgets across the country and the House’s proposed federal budget all undermine support for working families and the poor, while refusing the challenge subsidies to business or to hold banks accountable for the financial crisis.  As we wrote last month, the working class is under attack on multiple fronts, and we need to stand together to fight back.

We need to build a movement that crosses boundaries – between public- and private-sector unions, the traditional working class of industrial, blue-collar workers and the new working class of retail and service workers, between the working class and the middle class, cities and suburbs, and among diverse types of organizations.  We need community organizers, churches, students, and others to work together.  In Youngstown, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative has organized its 44 neighborhood groups together with labor unionists, community faith-based groups, local non-profits and social service agencies to form a revenue coalition to fight state budget cuts.

And much of that collaborative effort must focus on the political process.  In Ohio, opponents of SB5 have to collect more than 230,000 signatures to get a referendum on the ballot, and then we need to do everything possible to get people out to the polls.  We need to mobilize the kind of engagement in the political process that put Barack Obama into office.  As a popular T-shirt from 2008 stated, we need to “be the change.”  Neither Obama nor the Democrats have done it for us.  It’s our turn.

We also need to take a page from the Tea Party.  Their efforts have contributed significantly to blocking the progressive possibilities of the 2008 election.  They succeeded by channeling their anger and fear into significant pressure on politicians.  We need to do the same.  That means we have to find the energy and commitment to keep on protesting, to challenge our elected officials – even those we think are most on our side – to truly represent us, and to get our share of the media spotlight.  We also need to keep in mind that despite the infusion of thousands of dollars from wealthy contributors, the Tea Party engaged in plenty of grassroots organizing.  We have to do that, too.  We need to be out there knocking on doors, talking with friends and relatives, gathering signatures for ballot and recall initiatives, and doing whatever it takes to put pressure on our elected leaders to support workers and our communities.

Here’s one place to begin: the National People’s Action “Showdown in Ohio,” May 16-17, to demand that businesses like J.P. Morgan “clean up their own mess.”  Join us in Columbus to show the world that the American working class isn’t going to back down.  And then go back to your neighborhood, your church, your gym, wherever it is you talk with anyone who might not be convinced, and tell them the story of how the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are losing our grip on the American dream.  Better yet, tell them your own story of how the war on the working class is making a difference in your community.

Sherry Linkon and John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Empathetic Indifference: Why the Democrats Lost

In 2008 white working-class voters in Wisconsin and Iowa gave Barack Obama 52% of their vote – and that was pretty important because in both states, working-class whites were a majority of all voters.   In 2010 they were even larger majorities, but they gave Democratic candidates  only 40% of their votes in Wisconsin and 32% in Iowa.

Though especially striking, these huge swings are pretty typical of Midwestern states – where, except for Illinois, whites without bachelor’s degrees (the reigning definition of the electoral “working class”) constitute a majority of all voters.  In the Great Lakes states over the past two decades, there has been a slow but substantial drift of white voters, including working-class whites, toward the Democratic Party.  That drift halted (or at least paused) big time this year.  Why?

First, as Democracy Corps has documented (see “Graphs,” p.7), nearly every demographic group swung against Democrats in 2010, including declines of 3 and 4 percentage points among the core of the Party – African-Americans, Latinos, and union households.  The swing was just larger, more dramatic, and potentially more damaging among working-class whites in the industrial Midwest.  Given the ubiquity of the swing, any explanation needs to focus on large overarching causes that affect the entire electorate but have special force in the Midwest where the working class of all colors is such a large majority.

The consensus causal explanation among analysts and pundits on this score is, of course, the state of the economy.   But there are several variations of this explanation with important differences.

One variation is arithmetical mechanics:  an official unemployment rate of nearly 10% automatically leads to whoever is in charge being thrown out by voters, regardless of what they have or have not done.   With the inauguration of President Obama, the Democrats were clearly in charge in January 2009.  The official unemployment rate then was “only” 7.7%, and it steadily rose to 10% by the end of the year, where after a very slight improvement it has remained.   That economic number and its trajectory are highly predictive of electoral outcomes.  Period – end of story.

There is wisdom in the simplicity of this mechanistic explanation, and it should not be forgotten.    I am among those who think that Democratic economic policies in 2009 averted a much worse economic situation than would have occurred had the Republicans been in charge – or if there had been complete, instead of partial, gridlock.  That’s why I voted for Democrats, but I can understand why the “wisdom of crowds” might see voting as a kind of thumbs up – thumbs down affair, and not a comparison.  Indeed, as I voted for Democrats (a few of whom, like my Representative Danny Davis, are actually very good),  it felt like I was saying “everything is okay.”

Another variation of the it’s-the-economy explanation holds that the Obama administration was simply ineffective in explaining its various economic policies.  Endless punditry about “messaging” and “narratives” ranges from the mildly insightful to the disgustingly superficial and manipulative, but there is undoubtedly truth to the general proposition.  In particular, the President bragging on his accomplishments (which, as Rolling Stone has comprehensively summarized, are many) as life got palpably worse for workers and homeowners, not to mention the poor and unemployed, was certainly counterproductive when it was not outright maddening.

The third it’s-the-economy analysis points to the actual Obama macroeconomic policy, the “stimulus plan”: it was not big enough and too much money was spent on the wrong things to get the economy growing vigorously enough to bring down unemployment.  This is tricky territory, and I’m not competent to make the kinds of combined economic and political judgments that politicians have to make.  But if the mechanistic relationship between unemployment rates and electoral outcomes is as important as decades of statistics indicate, then a President and his party have to actually move the numbers – or at least try.

They did try in 2009.  Indeed, the Obama mistake was not in the original stimulus plan, which we now know averted a Great Recession but was not sufficient to move the economy forward.  Rather, the key mistake was later, in the President’s first full budget at the beginning of this year. After promising “to focus like a laser” on jobs and the economy when health care reform was passed, the President presented a budget that accepted 9% or 10% unemployment as the best he could do.  Eschewing a second stimulus plan, he rejected an economically robust and politically shrewd stimulus plan that was developed for him by the labor movement and its allies.

That plan would have invested $400 billion of borrowed money in job-creating activities, paid for over time by a permanent Financial Transactions Tax designed to reduce the kinds of speculative activity on Wall Street that helped drive our economy into the ground.  After the $400 billion stimulus was paid for, that tax on Wall Street would have produced more than $100 billion a year in government revenues, which could have been used to reduce the national debt.

It was not too late then to make a significant dent in unemployment, and it is not too late now.  The President could pursue a similar plan outlined by some of his most important allies.  Even the Federal Reserve Board is now pleading for a large deficit-financed job creation program in the short term that will reduce government deficits and debt in the long term, in part by growing the economy faster and stronger.

It’s true that Republicans will form a phalanx of opposition to any such plan, and even with a full-throated, whole-hearted effort by the President and his party, the chances of passage are well south of 50/50.  But the alternative for Democrats is to do what they did this year: to do next to nothing about unemployment and to be seen again as doing nothing as the jobless rate edges down to a projected 9.2% by the end of next year and not much below that in 2012.

The white working class, in the Midwest and elsewhere, swung decisively against Democrats in 2010 for pretty much the same reasons as almost everybody else did:  As they went to vote, there were not enough jobs for one of ten people who want to work and need to work, and the governing politicians in charge, all Democrats, didn’t seem to give a shit.  It’s not just the fact of such outrageously high and painful rates of unemployment.  It’s the passive acceptance of them, the serene, if empathetic, indifference.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies

 

 

 

Base Jumping: The Democrats and the Working Class

I have to admit that I am somewhat amused at the intellectual poking and prodding being done by pundits–particularly Democrats–as they analyze the results of the November midterm election.  It’s as if they’re a gaggle of pathologists standing around a corpse in a morgue unable to agree on what caused the death of the unfortunate soul lying on the slab in front of them.

While they argue vehemently back and forth, an aged maintenance man mops the floor around them. Clearly a grizzled veteran of the place impressed neither by death nor doctors, he looks over the shoulders of the physicians, takes a peek at the body, shrugs, says to no one in particular,  “Somebody cut the guy’s head off,” and returns to his cleaning.

Mystery solved.

It’s the same with this election.  There’s no need to scrutinize the exit polls or torture the demographic data.  Anyone who didn’t immediately recognize what killed the Democratic Party this year just isn’t—and hasn’t—been paying attention.  That’s because we witnessed a copycat killing, an eerie replay of the 1994 execution of the Democrats at the Congressional and state level precipitated by Bill Clinton’s disastrous first two years in office.

It was, in fact a killing predicted in this space back in January, when I wrote the following in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s senate seat:

Instead, Democrats now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun held by members of a disenchanted electorate who are currently demonstrating a clear proclivity to vote for the party of no ideas—the GOP–over the party of badly executed ones.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

Barack Obama placed the Democrats in front of the firing squad by repeatedly deriding and ignoring the party’s base voters.  He did it during the health care debate by barring any discussion of a Canadian-style single payer system and then abandoning its watered-down cousin, the public option, in a futile attempt to attract Republican support.

He did it by ignoring progressives like Paul Krugman who warned that his economic recovery plan would fail because it placed far too much emphasis on re-inflating Wall Street and far too little on resurfacing Main Street.

He also did it by continually contending that a failure to communicate, rather than failed policy, was at the heart of the dilemma the Democrats faced as the election grew near.  In essence he was telling working and middle class Americans that they weren’t smart enough to understand all that he had done for them, when, in reality, they clearly believed he had accomplished very little.

That belief is reflected in the results of a survey the Center for Working-Class Studies conducted immediately before the election.  Although Mr. Obama continually tried to convince people that his stimulus plan was effective, 80% of the respondents who categorized themselves as “working class” believed the economy was bad or very bad, 64% said it would stay that way for two years or more, less than 40% believed the country was heading in the right direction, and 56% said they felt the American Dream was slipping away.

In short, they weren’t buying what he was trying to sell, something that would prove disastrous on November 2 because, while we can debate about the make-up of the party’s base and the definition of its  “working class” component,  two things are inarguable: first, that 2010 was the third change election in a  row and, second, the base, amorphous and hard-to-define as it may be, is critically important in such elections because it is the one group that can be counted on to stay the course.

That fact is underscored by the results of the CWCS survey. Although deeply pessimistic about the state of the economy and the future, 69% continue to have a favorable opinion of the president and more than 70% favored Ted Strickland over John Kasich in the race for Ohio governor.

Unfortunately, poll results aren’t ballots, and as happened in 1994, the disaffected members of base did what the disaffected and disappointed do: they stayed at home.  Voter turnout in traditional Democratic strongholds like Mahoning, Trumbull, Cuyahoga, and Summit counties fell well below 50%, depriving Strickland of the votes he needed in what turned out to be a very close election.  As a result Ohio, the swing state of all swing states, fell into the hands of the Republicans–bad news for the Democratic president who will almost certainly need to carry the state if he hopes to win reelection in 2012. As CWCS co-director, John Russo, said in March 2010, “working people are looking elsewhere for agency and voice.”

Finally, while we may have witnessed a copycat killing, the effects of this year’s election have the potential to be more wide-reaching and long-lasting than what followed the Democratic drubbing of 1994.  Unlike that year, this mid-term fell immediately before the redistricting process will begin across the country.  Mr. Obama’s failures have placed the redistricting pen—actually it’s more likely to be a computer mouse these days—in GOP hands in a vast majority of states.  That means the likelihood of Democrats regaining the majority in the U.S. House any time soon is extremely remote.

In addition, unlike Mr. Clinton, who recovered from the battering he took during his first two years in office by working with the Republicans on welfare reform and riding the economic boom of the mid-90s, Mr. Obama faces recalcitrant Congressional Republicans who are committed to driving him from office, a deeply troubled economy that is not expected to grow significantly over the next two years, and a Democratic base that will grow even more frustrated  if he follows what appears to be his natural instincts and compromises with the GOP on critically important issues.

As of this moment, the White House seems unconcerned about their dimming prospects for the future, apparently buoyed by their belief in the cliché that you can’t beat someone with no one, a reference to the currently weak field of Republican presidential hopefuls.

They would do well to remember that history has a way of repeating itself and that Bill Clinton was the “no one” George Bush was unconcerned about in 1992.

Leo Jennings

The Democrats and Social Classes

It’s more than a little frustrating trying to follow Democrats’ analysis of social classes in this country.  Most of the time now, there are only two classes – the rich (very precisely defined as those with at least $250,000 in annual family income) and the middle class, which includes everybody else.  But in the analysis of elections a “working class” shows up, one which is invariably “white” and, it seems, predominantly male.

Most Democrats, and especially the more progressive ones, know that moving the white working class away from its decades-long lopsided loyalty to the Republican Party is crucial to achieving a long-term governing majority.  But instead of appealing to this demographic electoral block directly, it seeks to lump them in with what Dems think is a universally beloved “middle class.”  This is a tactical mistake, as in many working-class precincts calling somebody “middle class” is meant as a put down and an insult – somebody who doesn’t live “real life,” lacks common sense, and yet thinks they’re “all better.”  Believe me, I’ve been on the front end of this insult, sometimes deservedly so.

Of all the ways of defining class in America the one that gets the least attention is how people self-identify – that is, what class people see themselves as being in.  In exit polls, for example, you get a choice of “White, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Other” in defining your race.  There is no such question for class.  Rather, pollsters ask questions about education and income, and then analysts assign people to various classes based on the analysts’ own definitions.  As is often pointed out on this site, the one national survey that consistently asks people to identify themselves by class has for decades found about 46% self-identify as “working class” and another 46% as “middle class.”  Nobody has any idea how voters who see themselves as working class have actually voted — ever.

Over the last decade, through what has often been a rich debate among political scientists, journalists, political operatives, and statisticians, the presence or absence of a bachelor’s degree has come to be used as a marker identifying voters as either “working class” or “middle class.”  Because having a bachelor’s degree correlates pretty strongly with having a professional or managerial job and because these jobs correlate with higher incomes, this is a serviceable marker for “middle class.”  Likewise, because the two-thirds of jobs that are not professional or managerial usually do not require bachelor’s degrees and have lower average incomes, the absence of a bachelor’s degree is a good-enough way of locating the “working class” among voters.  Until exit-pollsters provide voters with a range of choices on class, as they do now for race, this education marker is the best we can do in measuring how social class affects voting.

Problem is that in the last two elections, these two broad classes voted almost exactly the same way.  In 2008 both “college graduates” and “no college degree” voters voted for Barack Obama by a margin of about 53% to 46%, whereas both groups in 2010 voted 52% to 46% for Congressional Republicans.  So, there was a big swing in the last two years, but both the working class and the middle class swung exactly the same way and to the same degree. Thus, class by itself seems not to affect how people vote.

If, however, you measure class along with race, then class matters a bit more.  Neither class of whites gave Obama a majority in 2008, but middle-class whites gave him 47% of their vote, while working-class whites gave him only 40% of theirs.  Meanwhile, among non-white voters (lumping together all “Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian and Other” voters), there was a similar degree of difference by class but in the opposite direction – working-class non-whites gave Obama a larger majority (83%) than middle-class non-whites (75%).  A similar race-class pattern occurred in the 2010 Congressional elections, with working-class whites giving Republicans 62% while middle-class whites gave them 57%, whereas working-class non-whites were more decisively Dem at 77% than middle-class non-whites at 71%.

Two conclusions emerge from this breakdown:

One is that race matters way more than class.  In fact, very few large groups of whites have voted majority Democratic at the national level for decades.  Using only the exit polls, which do not cover all possible groupings, the only whites who gave Obama a national majority in 2008 were Jews (83%), whites with “no religion” (71%) or “other religion” (67%), and 18-to-29-year-olds (54%) – though it is important to add that Obama won white majorities in 19 states and in the Northeast as a whole.

The other conclusion is that the single largest race-class grouping, the base of the base of the Republican Party in America, is working-class whites.  Even though declining as a proportion of the electorate (as non-whites increase faster in the population and as more whites get bachelor’s degrees and are, therefore, no longer considered “working class”), working-class whites are still almost two of every five voters, and until 2010 they had been voting in the neighborhood of 60/40 for the GOP in national elections.

In parts of the country outside the South, however, the white working-class, like whites in general, has been drifting toward the Democrats over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 election when, for example, Obama won majorities of white workers in 14 states and got into the high 40s in four others.  That drift was reversed big time in the 2010 Congressionals.  According to the guru on these matters, Ruy Teixeira: “The most significant shift against the Democrats [in 2010] occurred among the white working class.  Congressional Democrats lost this group by 10 points in both 2006 and 2008.  Yet that deficit ballooned to 29 points in 2010.”

That’s a huge move toward Republicans who were against saving the American auto industry and who voted against infrastructure investments and jobs, (very) partial bailouts of state governments, extensions of unemployment insurance, and health care reform and tax policies that benefit working-class whites more than any other race-class grouping (in absolute numbers though not proportionately).  And this massive swing occurred nowhere more strongly than in the Great Lakes states, including strong union states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

What accounts for this swing of previously Democratic white working-class voters in 2010 will be the subject of my next blog.  Until then, I can do no better than recommend  that all Democrats look at a conservative Republican’s class analysis of “Midwest at Dusk.”
Jack Metzgar, Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies

Tea-partying while White

At a recent extended family gathering a relative of mine asked me, “So what do you think of your President now?”  I indicated my firm support, briefly explaining why I thought health care reform was really important and good, and then asked for her opinion.  “I don’t know enough [about policies] to say, but he just scares me.”  I asked why, expecting something about the deficit or “big government,” but she said, “I don’t know why.  He just scares me.”  I tried to probe for specific reasons, but she reported that she wasn’t sure and didn’t “want to talk politics.”

I teach my students in undergraduate critical-thinking courses that it is not legitimate to attribute negative motives to people unless you can credibly explain how these motives are related to what the person actually says.  This is a particularly important principle, I say, if you disagree with someone – and even more important if you strongly disagree.  By that standard, it would be wrong to charge Helen with “racial prejudice,” let alone “racism,” but in the absence of specific reasons to be scared of Barack Obama, it’s also hard to imagine that her fear does not have something to do with his being a black man.

Helen (not her real name) is a white senior-citizen widow living almost entirely on Social Security in a modest one-story house that she owns outright.  She never attended college and worked as a clerical worker after she helped raise her three children as a stay-at-home mom.  Her husband, who also had no college, was a front-line supervisor in a steel mill now long gone.  Later in another fleeting conversation she expressed interest in and sympathy for the Tea Party.

I’ve known Helen most of my life, and I have never heard her use explicitly racist language or express anything but a kind of paternalistic sympathy for the plight of African Americans, with whom she has had almost no experience.  There are many nonracial reasons why she would not and did not vote for President Obama.  She is a life-long Republican, a small-town Protestant, and in her early ‘70s, somebody who is rooted in a more traditional set of gender roles and family arrangements that Democrats seem dismissive of.  But she also lives in an atmosphere that is common among the white working class as I’ve experienced it – an atmosphere infused with a free-floating anxiety that any gains for black people will come at some loss to white folks like her.

This atmosphere is not specific to working-class whites, but my guess is the anxiety is more intense for the working class than among more securely affluent whites.  It is this anxious atmosphere of a racial zero-sum game that I suspect informs many of the “supporters” and “sympathizers” of the Tea Party movement, not the boldly explicit racism of the 10% who have told pollsters that “racial prejudice against Barack Obama” is one reason for their support of the movement.

Of course, the class position of the Tea Partiers isn’t clear.  Recent polling has revealed somewhat contradictory notions of who they are, with a Gallup Poll finding, “Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics,” while a New York Times/CBS News poll proclaims, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated.” Both headlines, it turns out, are both true and deceptive.  Both polls show that Tea Partiers on average are whiter, older, and have higher incomes and higher levels of education than the population as a whole, though by somewhat different degrees.

The most widely used demographic class marker for electoral politics is whether a person has a bachelor’s degree – if they do, they’re counted as “middle class,” if not, then “working class.”  By this marker, self-identified Tea Party “supporters” are substantially working class, 68% for Gallup and 62% for the Times.  This is less than for the population as a whole (which is 70% for persons 25 years or older), but still “fairly mainstream.”  Thus, Tea Party supporters are disproportionately middle class, but the majority is working class just like the population as a whole.

Neither white racism nor racial zero-sum anxiety is class exclusive.  The real tragedy  is that many working-class whites like Helen do not have a clear sense of the actual policy alternatives provided by the Democrats and Republicans.  Part of the reason is that our public discussion is allergic to principled debate about public policy.  Not that it never occurs, but most often it is framed by politicians’ caricatures of each other’s policies.  Meanwhile, political reporters use their expertise not to explain the different policies and who might benefit or be harmed by them but rather to explain the different political tactics behind the caricatures.  In the absence of clear reporting about policies as if they might actually matter to real people, Helen can be satisfied to “not know enough” while forming opinions based on vague anxieties related to appearances and antique loyalties.

According to these polls, Tea Party self-identifiers (the vast majority of whom are not active participants in movement activities) are a demographically diverse group of mostly conservatives and Republicans.  At somewhere around 20% of the adult population, they are a decided minority of all voters, of all white voters, and of all working-class whites.  It is also worth noting that in all national polls, the attitudes and views of Southern whites disproportionately affect the national numbers.  In the 2008 Presidential election, for example, only 43% of whites voted for Obama across the nation, but 52% did so in the Northeastern states, 49% in the Western states, and 47% in the Midwest.  The national number is so much lower because only 30% of whites in the South voted for the man who scares Helen.

Jack Metzgar

No Tea Party Here: Obama, Democrats, and the Working Class

The Center for Working-Class Studies released the results of its latest survey last week.  As I look at the results, two things jump out: first, the President is paying a price for doing the right things the wrong way, and second, the conservative pundits like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hanitty, who continually characterize the Tea Party movement as a revolt fueled by a working class fed up with Obama and the liberal elite, haven’t quite been telling the truth.

Neither finding is really surprising.  Both may have a profound effect on the nation for decades to come.

To understand why, let’s begin with Mr. Obama.  For more than a year liberals have expressed frustration and disappointment with his inability or unwillingness to take advantage of the political capital he accumulated while capturing the White House.  His refusal to fully engage in the health care debate until the 11^th hour, the decision to focus the economic stimulus package on Wall Street rather than Main Street, his apparent abandonment of the Employee Freedom of Choice Act, and a number of other perceived failures have undermined his support among the Democratic Party’s base, including those who participated in the CWCS survey.

Since the first survey was conducted in May of 2009 the president’s approval rating has fallen from 87% to 68% among all respondents and from 87% to 59% among those who identify themselves as belonging to the working class.  Although his overall approval rating remains high, Obama and Democratic leaders should be worried about another number: the precipitous drop in the percentage of those who strongly approve of his performance.  Among all respondents it fell from 52% to 15%, while among the working class it fell from 48% to 11% — a 37 point drop for both groups.

Just as troubling is the fact that the percentage who strongly disapprove of his work to this point is now equal to the number who strongly approve.  For those who identify as working class, the numbers are only slightly more split: 15% strongly disapprove and 11% strongly approve.

The reasons for this considerable softening in Obama’s approval ratings are easily discerned from the responses to other survey questions.  While more than 80% of respondents have consistently rated the U.S. economy as bad or very bad, until this survey they also said by large margins that the country was moving in the right direction.  Their optimism in the face of the crumbling economy was based in large part on their belief that the President could and would turn the nation around.

That belief has clearly eroded over the past year.  Today, the percentage who see the nation moving forward has dropped more than 40%; more respondents now say that things are moving the wrong direction. The sense of unease is greatest among the working class, who now say things are going in the wrong direction by a two-to-one margin: 48% to 24%.

Why has the base’s faith been shaken?  More than 55% of working-class respondents say Obama has done less than they expected since taking office.  Three-quarters of them believe the stimulus package has been only somewhat or not at all effective, 78% say Wall Street and big business have too much influence over the White House, and only slightly more than 52% believe he cares more about working families than big business.

All of this bodes ill for Democrats because softening support and fading enthusiasm will undoubtedly equate to lower turnout among the base in an election in which the party cannot afford to leave one vote on the table.

Interestingly, though, the working class’s disenchantment with the first year of the Obama presidency has not, as some conservative commentators and pundits would have us believe, driven them toward the “Tea Party” movement.  Although Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Anne Coulter, and others on the right continually state that Tea Partiers are “real,” or “average,” or “everyday,” or “working” Americans who are fed up with Obama and the federal government, the results of the CWCS reveal a completely different reality.

For example, 72% of working-class respondents hold an unfavorable or very unfavorable view of the movement that conservative commentators would have us believe they enthusiastically support.  Eighty-one percent disagree or strongly disagree with the movement’s stand on political and moral issues, and only nine percent characterized themselves as Tea Party supporters.

And lest those on the right attempt to counter these results by saying the respondents to the survey don’t know or understand what the movement is all about, 93% said they had read about and are familiar with what the Tea Party stands for.  The fact is that working-class Americans know what the movement stands for and they resoundingly reject it.

The accuracy of the CWCS results is underscored by data derived from a recent survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by The New York Times and CNN, which shows that movement supporters are married white males who are wealthier and better educated than members of the working class.

This is not to say that the groups don’t share some positions or a discontent with where the country is heading.  Members of both groups believe the economy and jobs are the most critical issues the U.S. faces, that the economy is bad, and that the nation is on the wrong track.

Stark differences arise, however, when the groups are asked to identify the causes of the problems and their most likely solutions.  While a vast majority of Tea Partiers believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, they, unlike members of the working class, believe the economy is getting better.  Their discomfort with America’s future is based on their distrust of Washington.  Ninety-six percent say the federal government rarely does the right thing, 75% say Obama does not share their values, 56% say the administration’s policies favor the poor, and 73% would favor cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to reduce the size of government.

Most significantly, 76% of Tea Party supporters believe the government should reduce the deficit rather than spend money to create jobs.  More than 77% of the working class believes just the opposite—they want the government to fuel the economy regardless of the effect on the deficit.

With these findings in mind, Mr. Obama and the Democrats need not fear that substantial portions of the party’s base will join the Tea Party.  The ideological gulf between the two groups is far too wide.  What they should fear, as the latest survey clearly shows, is that,  in the immortal words of Pogo, the Dems have met the enemy and “He is us.”  Doing whatever is necessary to improve the economy between now and November in order to reenergize the party’s base should be the primary concern of the administration and Congressional Democrats.  Failure to accomplish that mission rather than opposition from an inconsequential movement like the Tea Partiers, will spell doom for the Democrats.

Leo Jennings

Missed Opportunities: On Limbaugh, Bush, and Obama

In light of GOP tea bagger Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race—a victory that cost Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, doomed substantive health insurance reform (the White House long ago stopped calling it health care reform), and made it virtually impossible for President Obama to propose or pass anything that even slightly resembles a pro-worker, progressive agenda for the foreseeable future– my first blog of 2010 begins with a tip of the hat to two people with whom I usually disagree: Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush.

Let’s start with Limbaugh. There are few people more willing to bend the truth to gain political advantage than he.

And that’s why it pains me so to agree with his take on Brown’s victory.  Bloviating from Florida, the great prevaricator said that 2010 is “1994 on steroids.”  Unfortunately for the scores of Democrat political activists who are whistling past the graveyard by willfully misidentifying the cause and minimizing the effect of the GOP win in Massachusetts, “Mr. All Drug Addicts Should Be Jailed Except Me” is exactly right.

That’s because he understands that what Democrats and their working class supporters just lost is much more valuable than what Bill Clinton kicked away in 1993—94.  Back then the party merely forfeited its Congressional majorities.

This year it lost the opportunity to change America and the world.  With 60 votes—the Dems only had 56 when Clinton gagged on health care in ’93—a principled, popular president can do just about anything he wants.  Reform health care.  Re-regulate the financial industry.  Reinvigorate the union movement.  Dedicate billions to job-creating infrastructure and green energy projects.  Change the rules that govern foreign trade.  Appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court. Pass real campaign finance reform.  Protect the environment.  Implement a rational, compassionate solution to the immigration dilemma. .

As Limbaugh’s remarks about the consequences of Brown’s victory demonstrate, he understands this better than many of the Democrats who have shrugged off the loss of the seat Ted Kennedy held in the U.S. Senate for 49 years as an anomaly or minor setback attributable to “tactical errors” and/or a poorly run campaign.  Limbaugh knows that by losing the opportunity to enact meaningful health care reform the Democrats have squandered the chance to prove that big government fueled by progressive ideas can solve the problems that beset America in the 21^st Century. Truth be told, Limbaugh and his cohorts weren’t afraid that health care reform would pass, they were afraid it would work.

And now they’re rejoicing over the fact that Americans will never know.

That brings me to Mr. Bush.  Despite his many failings, viewed in the context of the health care reform meltdown, he deserves grudging applause for demonstrating moral certitude and the willingness to act upon it.  As delusional as he may have been, apparently the 43rd President believed that going to war in Iraq and hanging Saddam Hussein by his neck until dead were essential and righteous acts.

That explains why his resolve never wavered even as his stated rationale for going to war changed repeatedly.  Whether based on Iraq’s complicity in the 9/11 attacks (not true), on the rogue nation’s development and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction (not true), or on the contention that Hussein was simply a bad guy (true, but certainly not reason enough for the U.S. to waste the billions of dollars and expend the thousands of lives required to depose him) Bush remained steadfast in his conviction that destroying Iraq in order to save it was both justified and necessary.  It also explains why he was initially able to convince the public, the media, and Congress that he was right.  Doubters withered in the face of his dogged belief.

President Obama could and should have learned a few things from Mr. Bush.  Had he approached the effort to reform health care with the same moral certitude that characterized his predecessor’s rush to war, a substantive bill would have passed six months ago because the American people would have accepted nothing less.

Yet, after declaring reform the top priority of his administration, Mr. Obama relinquished control of the issue to Congress and stepped off the stage.  Predictably, as House and Senate Democrats engaged in internecine warfare, support for reform waned, especially when the Administration was forced to buy the Democratic votes needed to pass a watered-down bill in the Senate member by reluctant member, interest group by interest group.  Clearly this unseemly public display of legislative sausage-making at its worst set the stage for Scott Brown’s victory and all the bad things that will flow from it.

If Mr. Obama had simply embraced the Bush model and relentlessly and spiritedly fought for what he supposedly believed in, no one would have forgotten that both the AARP and the AMA endorsed the Senate bill.  No one would have forgotten that groups as disparate as organized labor and the health insurance industry supported reform.  No one would have paid attention to Limbaugh’s rants.  No one would have voted for Scott Brown.

Instead, Democrats now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun held by members of a disenchanted electorate who are currently demonstrating a clear proclivity to vote for the party of no ideas—the GOP–over the party of badly executed ones.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

Leo Jennings III