Now It’s Official: Democrats Abandon White Working Class Voters

Although there have been hints before of a new Democratic strategy of abandoning lower class whites, Thomas Edsall makes it all but official today in the New York Times, the virtual megaphone of the Democratic Party:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

The Democrats’ new path, Edsall writes, follows the path laid out by analysts Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, and Stanley Greenberg.

“Heading into 2012,” Teixeira and Halpin write, one of the primary strategic questions will be:

Will the president hold sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials, single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white working-class voters?

For his part, Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist and a key adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, wrote a memorandum earlier this month, together with James Carville, that makes no mention of the white working class. “Seizing the New Progressive Common Ground” describes instead a “new progressive coalition” made up of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”

Edsall points out that the new Obama coalition lacks the “economic coherence” of the New Deal coalition, which was based on “unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals” and “received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.”

That is a good point, including as it does the obvious incoherence of having to tax one large component of the coalition —the affluent suburbanites and upscale professionals — to support the large component of the coalition dependent on government support, but I think it misses the larger import of making a class dependent on government largesse such an important part of the new electoral base of the party.

What the new Democratic Party is built on now consists of a large class whose major economic interest consists in ever more generous government benefits and another large class, the affluent suburbanites and educated professionals (many of whom, such as the librarians, social workers, teachers, many professors, etc., work for government), whose economic policy preferences are based largely on an often guilty sentimental compassion to do things for those oppressed by corporations and the capitalist system that has treated them so well.

Add to that mix the upper reaches of Wall Street, whose contributions have proved so important to the Democrats, and one has a powerful combination of interests dedicated to increasing, not reducing, government spending. As the shrewd and perceptive historian Fred Siegel has pointed out, Wall Street and the Democrats are joined at the hip (and probably elsewhere as well). Of the Wall Street bankers and the Wall Street Occupiers, he notes:

“They’re on the same side of the street politically,” he says. “They’re both in favor of big government. The Wall Street people I talk to, they get it completely.” What he means is that the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the large banks, and that economic stimulus and near-zero interest rates kept them flush.  “Obama’s crony capitalism has been very good for New York’s crony capitalism,” he says….

One can appreciate why the “we are the 99%” militants might resist Mr. Siegel’s logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today’s crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it.

A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 “The Future Once Happened Here.” He calls his hometown “the model for cross subsidies” in America. “Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York.”

Anyone who believes the Obama Democratic Party has any interest in restraining government spending or reducing the deficit, please get in touch. I have some nice, if damp, Florida real estate and a large bridge in Brooklyn that I’d sell to you at a bargain basement price.

ADDENDUM [29 November]

There is another matter of glaring significance about the current composition of the two parties that went unmentioned in the Edsall article. (Actually, aside from abandoned white working class voters, nothing about who the Republicans are was mentioned at all.)

Over the course of American history the two parties have occupied different ends of a shifting number of axis lines: geography (south and west vs. east, urban vs. rural, etc.); occupation (farmers, laborers vs. merchants, producers, etc.); ethnicity; and others. One of the most enduring ways of describing the two parties was to regard the Republicans as the party of business and the Democrats as the party of workers, with the winner in any given election being the party that most appealed to the middle class. These divisions often overlapped with, and led to, differences over economic policy: farmers wanted low tariffs for cheap imports vs. producers who wanted protective tariffs, etc.

With these sorts of historical divisions in mind, note what’s missing in the new Democratic Party made up of upscale white professionals and downscale poor minorities: producers, of just about anything except services … and more often than not services provided by government.

If Edsall et al. are correct, the Democrats have ceded not only whites and males to the Republicans but also business large and small, the productive elements of American society that produce not only goods but private sector jobs as well as the people who work in them. A party made up largely of people dependent on government services and the professionals who provide those services is not only a party bereft of producers; it also embodies a particular, and disturbing, vision of how the entire society should be organized, a vision nicely if frighteningly captured by Fred Siegel in the Wall Street Journal article I linked above:

…. By 1980, half of all delegates to the Democratic convention worked for the government. Government-employee rolls kept growing through the Reagan years. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the number of government workers who belong to a union surpassed the number of unionized private workers.

Mr. Siegel observes that public-sector unions have “become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it’s the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there’s no connection between effort and reward. You’re guaranteed your job. You’re guaranteed your salary increase. There’s a kind of bureaucratic equality.”

In turn, he continues, “this vanguard becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get.”

If the idea of an America reconstituted as the SEIU writ large, serviced by “professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists” appeals to you, then by all  means vote for Obama and his new Democratic enablers.

ADDENDUM II [30 November]

Now James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has noticed the same dog not barking in the new Democratic coalition:

[C]onsider Edsall’s list of “voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment”: “professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists.”

Notice anything missing? This list excludes not only blue-collar workers but also most private-sector businessmen and white-collar employees. The only group here that comes mostly from corporate America is “human resources managers”–people whose job consists largely of complying with government employment regulations.

In other words, the economic group that is most pro-Obama consists of those who make their living, directly or indirectly, off government….