Unnecessary Gloom: The Class v. Culture Clash
Teixeira, Ruy
ALTHOUGH Thomas Byrne Edsall's review of my and Joel Rogers's America's Forgotten Majority is both thoughtful and perceptive ("Why Class Doesn't Trump Culture," Dissent, Spring 2001), some of...
...Consider education, the single issue most cited by voters during the campaign as their chief concern and perhaps the quintessential "new economy" issue...
...My primary disagreement is with Edsall's argument that Al Gore's "populist" campaign provided a reasonable test of the book's claim that forgotten-majority voters could be mobilized by Democrats committed to attacking the problems these voters face in the new economy...
...But what should we conclude from this...
...Getting the right answers will require all of our efforts...
...Well, perhaps of the claim that this could be done easily—but that wasn't really what the book said...
...This was a dynamic that intrinsically favored Bush, as his advisers well knew, especially among the forgottenmajority voters we are discussing here...
...And they certainly should not fear that existing cultural conservatism makes a strong program on economic issues moot...
...Then, consider the fact that the country continues to change in ways that fundamentally favor social tolerance, new roles for women, protection of the environment, and an entire cultural ethos stemming from the movements of the 1960s and bound up with the emergence of the new economy...
...ALTHOUGH Thomas Byrne Edsall's review of my and Joel Rogers's America's Forgotten Majority is both thoughtful and perceptive ("Why Class Doesn't Trump Culture," Dissent, Spring 2001), some of his points aren't quite fair to the book...
...Edsall's view seems to be that class has become irrelevant and economic-related issues that interact strongly with class have lost their ability to disproportionately attract working- and middle-class voters, including, of course, members of the forgotten majority...
...Education was also the economic issue (beside taxes) on which voters most consistently failed to give Gore's approach much, or any, preference over that of George W. Bush...
...In fact, there's a good case to be made that, given the right kind of appeals, an emerging Democratic majority should dominate the early part of the twenty-first century...
...Whatever else Gore's populism may have DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 85 ARGUMENTS been (and in many ways it was quite popular), I think it's fair to say that it didn't constitute this forward-looking approach...
...Start with the observation that some significant part of this cultural drag on the Democrats is probably episodic...
...In a post-election poll conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Institute for America's Future, these were the most frequently cited doubts about voting for Gore...
...In a situation where there was such confusion among voters about the issue differences between the candidates, and little else to inspire them, it was inevitable that many would choose the candidate they felt more comfortable with in these other areas...
...That's exactly where the kinds of factors emphasized by Edsall come into play...
...For many forgotten-majority voters, the Democratic approach may have failed to excite for precisely this reason...
...It simply insists that the economicsvalues interaction is crucial to understanding this group's political behavior, a claim that seems reasonable to me...
...This suggests that defending and extending social insurance— that is, Social Security and Medicare— the Democrats' chief emphasis in the 2000 campaign, may not be the way to go in the future...
...Second, the book emphasizes the changes in the white working class...
...The Democrats, as younger voters replace older and as the new economy transforms more and more areas of the country, tend to benefit, on net, from these changes, even though it is possible in an election like 2000 for an unfortunate conjuncture of circumstances to temporarily derail them...
...First, the book doesn't say that the voting decisions of less well educated white Americans are "determined by gains or losses in median wages and family income...
...It was also an election in which, as Edsall reminds us, class patterns in voting were frequently difficult to detect and sometimes went in unexpected directions (a pro-Gore tilt among women in the upper middle class, for example...
...The book emphasizes that a return to steady wage and income growth has been an important factor in softening "forgotten majority" attitudes toward government and generating some openness toward the active use of public resources...
...If true, this would certainly put a damper on both Democratic prospects and any possibilities of a progressive revival...
...In contrast, and significantly for this discussion, problems based on cultural conservatism— chiefly gay marriage, abortion rights, and gun control—were notably stronger among non-college-educated whites and among those with incomes under $75,000 per year...
...The argument was rather that the Democrats' best shot at reaching these voters— and reversing their crippling deficit among them—is to convince them that the Democrats have a reasonable, effective, and forward-looking plan for promoting their welfare in new economic circumstances...
...All this suggests that the Democrats and progressives need not fear identification with this cultural ethos...
...The result, as detailed in the sources previously cited, was the swing toward Bush among these voters that gave him the election (or close enough for a decisive Supreme Court assist...
...America's Forgotten Majority goes into considerable detail about just these kinds of changes...
...I couldn't agree more...
...WHAT OTHER sentiments...
...I welcome his and others' suggestions for the most fruitful ways to approach this task...
...Edsall faults our account of recent economic developments for not considering that "[t]he benefits of rising productivity and growth do, in fact, finally appear to be moving down the educational ladder...
...The real strength of America's Forgotten Majority, after all—and perhaps Edsall would agree—was just to ask the right questions...
...His new book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, with John Judis, will come out in fall 2002...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 87...
...indeed, they should welcome it...
...It's simply too easy for the Republicans to astutely blur differences with the Democrats on a limited set of complex programmatic issues...
...Edsall is very much on track, however, in terms of the importance of cultural factors, even if he may be unnecessarily gloomy about the limits these factors impose on progressives...
...Convincing these voters that Democrats really have a vision for the future and their families will require a fresher approach that focuses on such critical areas as education, training, child care, work-family stress, scientific research and, of course, health and pension coverage...
...The 2000 campaign provides ample evidence of this, as Bush positioned himself close to Gore on issues where voters, including forgotten-majority voters, actually tended to favor the Democrats' approach—thereby bringing other sentiments to the fore...
...Problems of trust—for example "[Gore's] exaggerations and untruthfulness"—were strong among all white voters, a difficulty with roots in the Clinton administration's problems, but presumably exacerbated by the flaws in Gore's campaign style...
...This obviously doesn't say that values are unimportant and it doesn't even say that so-called "values issues," such as abortion or homosexuality, are unimportant...
...Of course, as Edsall points out "crafting such appeals will not be easy...
...This should allow the Democrats—given a forwardlooking program for the new economy and more deft campaigns that do not needlessly generate cultural antagonism—to develop the support levels they need among workingand middle-class, particularly forgottenmajority, voters...
...Rather, it argues that economic trends, as seen through the prism of their deeply held values, have had a central role in shaping these voters' attitudes toward politics and the role of government...
...As the Clinton administration becomes a more distant memory and as the country continues its economic and social transformation, that conservatism will be less and less decisive to voters', including forgotten-majority voters', decisions...
...Although defending social insurance should clearly remain a bedrock commitment by the party, it is difficult to argue that it constitutes a convincing approach to the unfolding problems of the new economy...
...As the memory of the Clinton scandals fades, it should be much easier for the Democrats to present an appealing face to disaffected forgotten-majority voters, especially if they can avoid running campaigns that reinforce and exacerbate cultural distrust...
...86 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 ARGUMENTS I think Edsall is unnecessarily gloomy...
...On the contrary, both in chapter two and the concluding chapter, the improved economic performance of the late 1990s is highlighted precisely because it did represent a return to broadly shared wage and income growth, even if that improved performance did not—and could not—make up ground lost over several decades (indeed, it took quite a while simply to make up ground lost in the earlier part of the 1990s...
...Further, I disagree with his claim that the 2000 election constitutes a convincing test case of one of the book's key messages...
...The broad point of the book, however, was to highlight the political centrality of this group of voters—a point Edsall agrees with—and the economic challenges that members of this group still face, new economy or not...
...Indeed, the book in no way purports to be a "theory of everything" in accounting for the political behavior of forgotten-majority—or any other—voters...
...Problems reflecting generic antigovernment sentiment—"[Gore's] support for Federal big government solutions" and the like—were weaker among non-college-educated white voters, even the men among them, and stronger among the affluent and well educated...
...Polling data from the campaign and election strongly suggest that the Gore campaign was severely hurt by problems of trust, of cultural conservatism, and of generic antigovernment sentiment...
...Lacking such a vision and program, the Democrats will have difficulty getting beyond trench warfare with the Republicans...
...After all, what is the future of the country—West Virginia, where the Republicans rode cultural distrust to an unexpected victory, or California, where the Democrats now have a statewide lock on the government...
...Despite the fact that voters have tended to favor Democrats on this issue by large margins in the 1990s, the Democrats netted only a modest 52 percent to 44 percent advantage on the issue in the Voter News Service exit poll...
...far more involved in technology, services and in types of work falling outside the boundaries of traditional class analysis...
...Rcpt TEIXEIRA is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation...
...Edsall is absolutely right to point out that white non-college-educated men are "exceptionally diverse" and that "[n]on-college-educated workers are far less blue-collar than in the past...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
