The Democrats won't learn from Kansas

...The problem then became how to put together a stable electoral majority to replace the New Deal coalition...

...Most Democratic politicians tried to find a middle way...

...A simple thought-experiment exposes the flaw in the false-consciousness argument...

...Or it could pursue what was called the New Politics, a coalition of minorities with a newly radicalized stratum of students and the educated...

...The challenge to Frank's facts comes in a widely circulated paper by Princeton political scientist Richard Bartels, who cites polls showing that Democrats have lost more votes in the last fifty years in the upper third of the income distribution than in the lower third...

...Meanwhile, the party's noneconomic appeals were diminishing...

...In recent decades, education and income have come to work at crosspurposes...

...What are you, a sociology professor not in the habit of giving stock-market advice, to do...

...It's not as if Democrats can talk about economics and simply ignore culture...

...When high education is coupled with less than extravagant income, as for example among college professors and social workers, the vote is overwhelmingly Democratic...

...That's why Hillary Clinton's foray into foreign policy is so futile...

...Today, the pattern has reversed, and religion influences voting much as education does...

...And in the hands of Bill Clinton, a politician of exceptional genius, it became the recipe for a nearlandslide reelection...

...The New Politics strategy, in its pure form, was quickly discredited by George McGovern's crushing defeat in the 1972 election...

...DISSENT / Winter 2006 11...

...Together with union members and distressed farmers, it covered a spectrum that included southern whites, from tenant farmers to plantation owners, and Irish Catholic businessmen alongside their working-class coreligionists...

...Is Hillary Clinton right to identify the root cause as the party's lack of credibility as a protector of national security and to seek a remedy in a hawkish approach to foreign policy...

...Repeated election defeats have demonstrated that the constituency of the well-schooled and open-minded, even when allied with racial minorities, is too small to win elections...

...The Republican advantage on foreign affairs represents a cultural preference much more than a policy preference...

...With policies trimmed back to rec10 DISSENT / Winter 2006 oncile opposing interests, class politics lost vigor...

...It also demands a greater sensitivity to the cultural preferences of Middle America, both in style—it is no accident that for forty years every Democratic president has had a southern accent—and in substance on issues such as gun control...

...High school dropouts who own real estate or fast food businesses probably go Republican by similar margins...

...Bill Clinton won no points among voters who are supposedly looking for a more robust foreign policy by intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo...

...But it still tells only part of the story...

...But their real enthusiasm was for noneconomic issues that primarily interested the middle class...

...Results don't matter, so no one has the right to judge other people's voting choices...

...Both rightwing and left-wing advocates of cultural pollDISSENT / Winter 2006 9 tics pursue this line of argument, with the main difference between the two versions being that leftists dress up their argument by accusing Frank of having an elitist theory of "false consciousness...

...By the 1984 presidential election, former McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart was able to run as the conservative alternative to Walter Mondale, his critique of the dessicated liberalism of New Deal interest groups no longer directed at the desiccation, but at the liberalism itself...

...Thirty-five percent were retired, and substantial numbers were disabled or unemployed...

...The constituency of the educated quickly deradicalized and became .. . simply middle class...

...As an election issue, national security is mostly a code word for other things...

...To mobilize their educated middle-class constituency, a new generation of centrist Democrats turned to cultural issues...

...Frank's subject is, of course, the latter species of fraud...

...He thinks wages matter...

...As the sixties generation moved rightward, the New Politics coalition underwent a rapid metamorphosis...

...John Kerry bettered Al Gore's showing in the upper Midwest, where today's mainstream Protestantism and the isolationist past might both be at work, and along the Quebec border, where the Republican jihad against all things French could not have played well among voters of French-Canadian heritage...

...it is politicians who promise it and do not deliver whom he despises...

...The pragmatic working class had false consciousness, so a student vanguard took action in its place...

...A vote by Senator Sam Brownback to deregulate radio ownership was "a choice between protecting corporate profits and actually doing something about the open cultural sewer he has spent his career deploring...

...The charge of condescension is normative rather than empirical...

...But it's much harder to be the voice of the common man and woman and speak at the same time for the more educated and more cosmopolitan...

...To do this requires a willingness to attack economic unfairness, for which the plutocratic Bush administration has created all too many targets...

...Bartels's figures are for white voters outside the South...

...the "generally accepted assumptions" are that upperclass denominations are liberal, while Baptists and fundamentalists are conservative...

...Voters who seek cultural traditionalism have his respect...

...In other words, it was culture...

...The Republican advantage on national security arose during the Vietnam War, and it persists to this day in the conceptual shadow of that war...

...Democrats must take up the challenge posed by Thomas Frank and reclaim the populist heritage of the New Deal in a new environment...

...ASECOND GROUP of critics claims that Frank ignores the issue of national security...

...They see it as condescension to say working-class cultural conservatives are being swindled by leaders who talk about religious values but deliver tax cuts for the rich...

...You might say to yourself, "I have no right to stigmatize my neighbors' sincere beliefs as false consciousness" and tell them that any investment choice they might make must be in their true interest as they understand it...

...BENJAMIN Ross is a community activist who writes frequently for Dissent...

...In Democratic-leaning areas, this was a workable formula for survival...

...Hawkish gestures remake her image about as much as Paris Hilton's sojourn on an Arkansas farm makes her seem folksy...

...Among voters with the same level of education, those with more income are more Republican...

...This call for a renewed populism has aroused a storm of objections...

...Other issues such as gun control—which is favored most enthusiastically in suburban neighborhoods where violent crime is rare—were popular less for the concrete improvement of a voter's life than for the feeling of moral superiority it allows the voter to enjoy...

...In the New Deal coalition, the party's sectional support from two relatively disadvantaged groups, Catholics and southerners, reinforced its populist economic appeals...

...But these are exceptions...

...The "white backlash" provoked by the civil rights legislation of the sixties unavoidably drove southern segregationists out of the party, and fading ethnic identification made a loss of Catholic support, especially among those of higher income, inevitable...

...This is, as Frank asserts, the way to rebuild a liberal majority—and more than that, it is the democratic way...

...Sometimes, as with abortion, this represented a continuation of the politics of the sixties and early seventies...

...It is easy to produce analyses that seem to measure education when they really measure income or vice versa...

...Where Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency had unfolded in an atmosphere of populist mobilization, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society had a managerial flavor that inspired assent rather than enthusiasm...

...They tell you that they want their Social Security contributions to go into a private account...

...With Democrats unresponsive to the economic troubles of Middle America, Frank asserts, cultural anti-elitism becomes the outlet for resentments engendered by growing hardship...

...A disproportionate shift of votes toward Bush along the mid-Atlantic coast from southwestern Connecticut to Delaware (an area that went heavily for Kerry) may reflect the absence of a Jewish candidate from the Democratic ticket as well as the direct impact of September 11 and the area's historic internationalism...

...If Democrats were to remain a majority party, something new was needed...

...Others accept the reality of the shift, but take issue with Frank's diagnosis of the cause...

...Class voting patterns are hard to sort out because income is only one determinant of social class...

...By its nature, this mixture had a limited lifetime...

...in the mean, education and income go up together, and that correlation makes statistics a tricky business...

...Bartels's argument is based on a flawed definition of the working class...

...Still others, the most numerous, do not dispute Frank's account of the facts, choosing instead to challenge the legitimacy of any effort to change those facts...

...A reasoned rejoinder might assert that religious conservatism has indeed changed the culture or that outside forces have overpowered its best efforts...

...It could, as Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington had suggested a decade earlier, become a genuinely class-based party with program to match, along the lines of European social democracy...

...Suppose your next-door neighbors, a retired couple in their eighties, tell you that they have decided to invest their life savings in a penny stock that a stranger recommended over the telephone...

...It bore the fruits of a European-style class party, but its branches were grafted onto the trunk of a nineteenthcentury American party organized around sectional and ethnic allegiances...

...His politics is about results, in economics and in culture alike...

...Why did voters turn against antiwar Democrats...

...Or is it simply that Democrats have pursued an economic agenda of free trade and deregulation—against the interests of working people—leaving the party defenseless in the face of Republican demagoguery on whatever issue comes to hand...

...WE COME FINALLY to the largest group of Frank's critics, those who accept Frank's facts but deny the legitimacy of his argument...

...among those with similar income, the more educated are more Democratic...

...The oft-cited "traditional Democratic" electoral appeal based purely on economics is a myth—and one rather recently hatched...

...Lipset observed that these data "confirm the generally accepted assumptions . .. that the general political set of a Protestant denomination is determined largely by the average socioeconomic status of its adherents...

...Education, religion, occupation, and residence all matter...

...If voters like your position on the issues and dislike your cultural affinities, you win votes by making people focus on substance...

...This suggests that at least part of what turns workingclass voters against the Democrats is a worry that the party is unwilling to use force when needed to keep America secure...

...Some critics doubt that working-class voting habits have changed...

...Debate on these questions was reinvigorated by Thomas Frank's best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas?, which asks why attitudes of ordinary Kansans have shifted so far to the right...

...Gopoian and Whitehead point out that only 40 percent of whites with less than a college education voted for Kerry in 2004...

...More generally, rank-and-file religious conservatives have gotten "lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and, of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years...

...Now suppose your much younger neighbors on the other side have been enticed by a different, but not dissimilar, investment scheme...

...After thirty years, however, it produced a Democratic Party that was a minority in the nation...

...Surely it was not because they liked the Vietnam War...

...In this case, though, it cannot be accepted...

...Indeed, polling experts David Gopoian and Ralph Whitehead found that only 19 percent of the bottom third voters in Bartels's sample were over thirty years of age and actively working...

...You must tone down cultural appeals, identify issues that affect everyday lives, and sharpen differences over those issues until people pay attention...

...As this dilemma became clear in the seventies, the party faced a choice...

...it presupposes that politics is an arena for the assertion of identity rather than a means of collective action...

...But the neighbors are convinced of its merit because, they say, the president who recommended it is a godly man...

...Is the problem primarily cultural, a feeling that liberal elites are hostile to the values and religious beliefs of ordinary Americans...

...Whether one seeks the working class of Marxist theory or the ordinary people of American populism, they are to be found in the middle of the income distribution and not just at the bottom...

...This plan is no more likely to yield the advertised financial returns than the penny stock...

...The electoral map of 2004, when George W. Bush ran as the invader and democratizer of Iraq, showed little change from 2000 when Bush opposed nation-building and called for a humble foreign policy...

...Frank stands with the pragmatists...

...This is the dilemma that Democrats evade when they say the party's problem is weakness on national security...

...Or you might suggest to them that although the investment sounds very attractive, the stakes are so high that they ought to take a little extra time to make sure it is safe, and you might extract a promise that they not sign anything until you talk again next week...

...This is a closer approximation to the white working-class vote than Bartels's...

...They will remain a minority until they face up to it...

...But Frank's detractors make no such claims...

...Ever since the Vietnam War, voter preference polls have shown a strong Republican advantage on foreign policy...

...Frank's populism makes so many Democrats uncomfortable because it challenges the party's identification with middle-class cultural themes...

...The shifts that arguably reflect foreign policy were few and scattered, and often might equally well be ascribed to other causes...

...An argument so straightforward and grounded in such clearly established facts must be taken seriously...

...The term "false consciousness" is a red herring...

...The most Democratic of the blue-collar Protestants were the Baptists, of whom only 39 percent voted Republican, and the "other Protestants" —mostly fundamentalists—at 35 percent Republican...

...The party's problem is that its two appeals work at cross-purposes...

...They maintained at least modestly liberal voting records on economics and from time to time would run campaigns around something exceptionally popular such as family medical leave or protection of Social Security...

...ACOMMON THREAD runs through these seemingly different critiques...

...In reality, the New Deal Democratic Party was a hybrid...

...The return on a retirement fund matters more than the faith of its sponsor...

...But opposition to a class-based party was too strong for the alternative strategy to be chosen, and the party dithered...

...It is how the New Left of the late sixties described workers' preference for higher wages over the promise of revolutionary salvation...

...By what right, they ask, does Frank instruct others to think in the voting booth about economics rather than, say, sex roles...

...How much the class identification of the two parties has really shifted in the last half8 DISSENT / Winter 2006 century can be seen from a 1952 Roper Survey that S. M. Lipset reanalyzed in the 1960s...

...Among blue-collar workers outside the South, Congregationalists voted 73 percent Republican, and Presbyterians and Episcopalians were close behind at 67 percent and 60 percent...

...he rejects the elite that promises salvation...

...whites without college degrees make up nearly half the electorate...

...But he describes it in unvarnished language of the sort you would use to recount the everyday swindle against your elderly neighbors...

...The intensely polarizing cultural dimension of Senator Clinton's persona remains unchanged, sure to overshadow the substance of her platform and dominate voter attitudes toward her presidential candidacy...

...If this is the case, Democrats can win back support by imitating the hawkish Republican positions that voters like—thus the recent spectacle of Hillary Clinton positioning herself as an opponent of withdrawal from Iraq...

...It was because they didn't like the antiwar movement...