LETTERS
Editor: I must confess that I become annoyed at the not infrequent efforts to refute my writings on "workingclass authoritarianism" which attempt to do so by setting up a straw-man target in...
...This is not to suggest that we should not be concerned about our special duties to the dead, the problems of ecology, or the rights of future humanity...
...The "authoritarianism" of any social stratum or class is highly relative, of course, and often modi fied by organizational commitments to democracy and by individual cross-pressures...
...Further, despite the invocation in his letter of "complex multivariate arguments," a glance at his article's tabular data reveals none...
...If Lipset now believes that such a view of the worker is a straw man, I am willing to take him at his word...
...He thinks I exaggerated the importance he attributed to personality in influencing politics, thereby creating a straw man...
...Would you now publish the enclosed picture of a 16 week fetus and let your readers decide for themselves if his analogy is correct...
...The specific propensity of given social strata to support either extremist or democratic political parties, then cannot be predicted from a knowl edge of their psychological predispositions or from attitudes inferred from survey data [pp...
...But to decide our own destinies, to control our body, to get what we want or avoid unwanted problems—is one thing...
...That I should be chastised for its collapse under the weight of evidence strikes me as somewhat bizarre...
...CHANDLER DAVIDSON replies: In sorting through Professor Lipset's generous documentation of his past and present views, I find little that is relevant to my essay...
...In spite of the workers' greater authoritarian propensity, their organizations which are anti-Com munist still function as better defenders and car riers of democratic values than parties based on the middle class...
...to kill our own baby in pursuit of these goals is another...
...91-92...
...But as should be clear to anyone who has read me on the subject, I seek to explain political behavior as a result of a complex multivariate pattern...
...Yet in tone and substance Lipset's article dramatized both the alleged pathology of the workingclass personality and its dire political consequences...
...But as I have argued in my book Biracial Politics, if one takes each of them seriously they limit so narrowly the circumstances under which the thesis applies that it is impossible to test...
...The poorer strata everywhere are more liberal or leftist on economic issues...
...they favor more wel fare state measures, higher wages, graduated in come taxes, support of trade unions, and so forth [p...
...Lipset did indeed mention qualifications, onlysome of which he refers to above...
...A more charitable interpretation is that they are conventional disclaimers, of minor importance to the main theme...
...Or, is this Nazi reference merely a maneuver aimed at shifting the argument onto different grounds in order to appeal to fear...
...In Germany, the United States, Great Britain and Japan, individuals who support the democratic left party are more likely to support civil liberties and democratic values than people within each occupational stratum who back the conservative parties...
...128 LETTERS...
...In specifically discussing the appeals of authoritarian movements, I point to the fact that in some countries, the Communists draw their support disproportionately from the better educated, while in others their predominant base is among the workers and other poorer strata (pp...
...My essay cited Lipset's article as having contributed to the stereotype of the worker as more prejudiced and hence more predisposed than other classes to support racist politics...
...Since, as far as I know, I have never written anything to the contrary, I have never understood what relevance Hamilton's research on the correlates of opinion on war has to my work...
...In our Iengthy analysis of the Wallace movement, we document in detail from survey data the way in which the trade union movement undermined much of Wallace's working-class support in the North, while he kept most of his middle-class base there...
...Any single factor such as the propensity of the less educated, the poorer, those more isolated socially, those in less complicated jobs, to accept simplistic "either/or" authoritarian or extremist approaches is only one factor, which is more often not determinant of party or candidate choices...
...116-21...
...he compares a fetus to an acorn...
...Unfortunately, there are Americans today who acknowledge the presence of human life in the womb and yet still remain adamant in their support of abortion—as an expression of a woman's right to decide for herself, to control her own body, or to bring into the world a wanted child...
...His subsequent insights he dwells upon in his letter are consequently immaterial, as they were not mentioned by me...
...But Davidson ought to learn to read complex multivariate argumentscarefully...
...I can only demonstrate this by quoting myself (the citations are from the most easily available source, the Anchor edition of my book Political Man...
...I think not...
...I adduce a variety of attitudinal data in this article and subsequently in Lipset and Raab, Politics of Unreason (Harper & Row, 1970) to show that "the lower strata are least tolerant" in their attitudes, but I repeatedly stress "the fallacy of attempting to suggest that political behavior is a necessary function of political attitudes or psychological traits" (p...
...But that analysis is conducted within the same theoretical framework that Davidson thinks he and Hamilton have refuted by showing that the way to counter racism among workers is to make a class appeal...
...Interestingly, one judge of the Court of Appeals ruling upholding the constitutionality of New York's "liberalized" abortion law stated, in his dissenting opinion, that the arguments used by the lawyers defending the current law were similar to the arguments used by Nazi lawyers defending their clients at Nurenberg...
...To reiterate one of a number of points made in my original discussion, uneducated workers or other poor people, though more predisposed than the better educated and the more affluent, on this score alone, to be more intolerant, have repeatedly been attracted to more democratic liberal noneconomicissue movements, on grounds of economic and class self-interest, much as Davidson describes in a number of Southern cities...
...Editor: I must confess that I become annoyed at the not infrequent efforts to refute my writings on "workingclass authoritarianism" which attempt to do so by setting up a straw-man target in the form of propositions which either I never enunciated, or which are presented as a simple-minded statement of a supposed invariant monofactor relationship...
...Concerning his article I wrote: "Lipset argued that the allegedly greater prejudice of the working class and the poor significantly affected their political behavior...
...Thus, Richard Hamilton, whose work Chandler Davidson cites approvingly as dealing my work "a fatal blow," has sought to refute it by publishing data which show that in some situations workers have been more antiwar than the middle and upper classes...
...2) Is my argument similar to those used by Nazi lawyers defending their clients at Nurenberg...
...I note further: Despite the profoundly anti-democratic tendencies in lower-class groups, workers' political organiza tions and movements in the more industrialized democratic countries have supported both economic and political liberalism [p...
...And if not, why not...
...Editor: Your Fall 1972 issue carried an article on abortion by Marvin Kohl...
...3) Do we as democratic socialists want to claim that a moral society is obligated to meet the needs of the born and unborn equally...
...His tables present only indices of class as they relate in a most uncomplicated manner to tolerance or support for extremist politics...
...Our correspondent encloses a photograph from Life of a fetus that bears a clear resemblance to a baby.— ED.] Those who hope to promote democratic socialism I would imagine are compelled to fight against abortion...
...Each of these terms is Lipset's not mine...
...The issue is solely whether I misrepresented the content of his 1959 article, "Working Class Authoritarianism...
...He also adduced, by rough count, 45 pieces of evidence that such personality traits predispose people to join all manner of "extremist" political groups, which is plausible once the portrait of the worker as brute is accepted...
...Organized social democracy not only defends civil liberties, but influences its supporters in the same direction...
...But it is to claim that actual human beings are of more consequence than nonextant or potential ones, and that when there is a conflict of rights between born human progeny and animals, dead human beings, or future humanity, the rights of born human progeny take moral priority and ought to be maximized...
...I would end by noting that as an extension of his argument, Davidson makes points about nonvoters which are identical to those made in Political Man, and about Huey Long, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace, which were made atlength by Earl Raab and me in The Politics of Unreason...
...Davidson, himself, assumes showing that Southern (or other) workers back antiracist candidates in higher proportions than middle-class whites because of economic class interests challenges my analysis...
...MARVIN KOHL replies: Ann Stewart's letter raises questions of considerable interest: (1) If someone were to submit a photograph of a germinating acorn would she (or her sympathizers) claim it was an oak tree...
...After quoting at length from an article, "A Short Talk with a Fascist Beast," based on an interview with a British worker, he went on for nearly 40 pages to describe the working class as disproportionately: prejudiced, undemocratic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, xenophobic, uninformed, productive of "the 'hard core' of 'chronic knownothings,' " isolated, insecure, frustrated, aggressive, unsophisticated, suggestible, lacking "a sense of past and future," unimaginative, unable to "take a complex view," having a "dense and concrete life," "logical powers that are relatively undeveloped," and so on...
...And the basic thrust of my discussion of political behavior invarious parts of Political Man and other writingsis an insistence on the primacy of the class factor...
...But it is a straw man of his own creation, not mine...
...The evidence which Davidson presents concerning the behavior of Southern workers is congruent with, not contradictory to, my discussion...
...Welcome to the Club...
...That is precisely what I wrote 14 years ago in "Working Class Authoritarianism...
...What, I believe, we want to say is that the rights of humans between birth and death take moral precedence over the rights of other beings...
...See my chapter on elections, beginning with sucha statement on p. 230...
Vol. 20 • January 1973 • No. 1
