Timothy Noah, surveying the literature on the white working class and its voting behavior in the wake of Obama's San Francisco fiasco, tiptoes close to an important point about the roots of culture-war politics but doesn't quite get there. Citing a fascinating new paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, he writes:
Although [Teixeira and Abramowitz] found working-class whites more likely to oppose abortion than upper-class whites ... the working-class whites were far less likely than upper-class whites to abandon the Democrats over the abortion issue. Only 57 percent working-class whites opposed to abortion identified with the GOP, compared with 92 percent of upper-class whites opposed to abortion. Abramowitz and Teixeira also lean toward the DLC and away from [Thomas] Frank on the question of whether economic populism can save the Democrats, mainly because working-class Americans, like Americans as a whole, tend to harbor unrealistically grim notions about how bad life is for everyone else while simultaneously harboring unrealistically sunny notions about how good life is for themselves ... "The white working class today is an aspirational class," they write, "not a downtrodden one." In promoting economic security, they conclude, Democrats would do best to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don't mess with Mr. In-Between.
Obama, being a quick study, will note that none of these theories suggests that it's ever a good idea to tell a person whose vote you want that you find him "bitter." But the bitterest people, these studies suggest, aren't the proles. They're the very ones who, judging by economic circumstances, have the least to be bitter about.
Okay, but let's push this analysis a bit further. If well-educated voters are more likely to base their party ID on culture-war issues than are voters without college degrees, then what's happening within the non-college educated contingent? Which working-class voters are most likely to base their party ID on culture-war issues? Well, given that the working class has trended away from the Democratic Party overall, even as - pace Thomas Frank - the relationship between party affiliation and income has grown stronger, not weaker, it seems like it's the more prosperous members of the working class who are responding to culture-war issues and trending GOPward. (And yes, much of the working class has grown more prosperous during the long GOP ascendancy, contrary to what you may have heard.) In other words, both within the no-college/some-college demographic and in the country as a whole, the Obama line has it exactly backward: Voting on issues like "God, guns and gays" is an artifact of (relative) prosperity, not immiseration.
Now why would prosperity make people "bitter"? One can spin all sorts of theories on this front, but the most plausible answer is that it doesn't, and that embittered, troglodytic reaction is simply the wrong lens through which to view the culture war. The right lens - or so Reihan and I argue - is the lens of rational self-interest, albeit self-interest considered with greater nuance than Thomas Frank (or Barack Obama, apparently) is willing to apply to it. In this reading of the culture wars, middle-income voters privilege culture over economics because they perceive the breakdown of "traditional values" - manifested in everything from divorce, marriage and out-of-wedlock birth rates to what's shown on television and taught in schools - as a greater danger to their well-being than, say, the specter of outsourcing or the spike in CEO salaries. In a robust economy, most Americans - yes, even most blue-collar Americans - feel like they can control their own economic destiny; even now, on the cusp of a recession, huge majorities of American will say their own financial outlook is relatively rosy. Which means that their worries, not implausibly, turn to sociological and cultural questions. Are my streets safe at night, and will my neighborhood still be a good place to raise a family in ten years? What are my kids watching on TV, or being taught in school? Will my daughter's marriage break up, and will my son do the right thing by his girlfriend if he gets her pregnant? And, more broadly - does my government reflect and promote my values, whether in marriage law or welfare policy or what-have-you?
Now, some of these concerns are beyond the ability of any politics to solve, and prioritizing the social issues over a stronger safety net doesn't require voting for the GOP. One can argue, plausibly, that the Republican Party's response to these cultural anxieties of late has been insufficient or misguided, more concerned with finding scapegoats than solutions, and that the country needs a pro-family agenda that goes deeper than opposing gay marriage. But Obama didn't make an argument along these lines. Instead, he said something that wasn't just politically dumb - it was analytically dumb, as well. And that, pace Ezra and Andrew and sundry others, is why these comments matter: Because they suggest that Barack Obama buys into a narrative of American politics, and American life, that simply isn't true.
Is this a joke? Obama never criticizes Republicans on families, education, neighborhoods etc.?
do you feel like you might have some kind of responsibility to consider the entirety of Obama's position, rather than a single sentence? That'd be great.
Posted by berger | April 15, 2008 1:16 PM