What follows is another guest post from VidaLoca, who will be along to answer questions shortly.
Introduction
I wrote the following article as the first of three retrospectives on the lessons learned from the WI governor’s race (a previous article about the hail-mary pass we took to win that one is here). John agreed to publish the new article on Monday morning, and the news from Ferguson came Monday night. And in the wake of that I was debating whether to delete this article entirely because it didn’t seem too important any more, or rewrite it massively. In the end I decided to leave it intact.
In many ways this was a disappointing, depressing, even terrifying month. While neither the outcome from the elections nor the outcome from Ferguson was exactly unexpected, the elections were a major blow and Ferguson was much worse. I don’t have the words to sum up Ferguson, to talk about lessons learned; others can do that better than I. I do know something more about the elections in WI and the political situation here so I’ll offer up the following with the thought that the lesson from the elections is the same as the lesson from Ferguson: we are on our own here. Nobody has our backs. We have to figure out our own path forward. To do that we have to figure out where the current path is going wrong.
Right-wing populism and the “tribalism” myth
I don’t know why I got such a laugh out of these signs. I saw them all over the place here during the last month or so of the campaigns, from the west side boundary of the City of Milwaukee all the way out through the blasted bourgeois hellscapes of Waukesha. One of them was 1/2 block over the city line in Wauwatosa, in a decidedly working-class and racially-mixed neighborhood of houses that could use at least a little work. The other was just inside the Milwaukee city limits about 4 blocks from Scott Walker’s (rather modest, actually) personal home. Neither of these are wealthy neighborhoods by any means — but somebody there bought and erected these tacky 4′ x 8′ monsters that always made me think me of a big old pair of Truck-Nutz hanging off the bumper of an Escalade. These specific cases are both rental properties and that probably helps to explain something, but they fit right in among all the other adjacent and more conventiionally-sized declarations that “We Stand With Walker” that people proudly plant like dog turds on their lawns (Brad Schimel is the former Waukesha Co. DA who’s now going on to be the state Atty. General. The current Atty. General is going to run for the WI Supreme Court. There’s not much reason to doubt that he will win, and then the current right-wing majority on the Court will become a lock).
One of the reasons Walker did as well as he did is he’s put together a coalition of white workers; nouveau riche strivers; and the truly rich, truly pathological, greed-driven and power-hungry base of the Republican Party. These folks are convinced that they won something in 2010 and they are fighting to protect and extend it now with spirit, passion, and a sense of purpose. Far from being some kind of “astroturf” front group they are in fact a broad-based right-wing social movement. They won’t be going away soon; in fact now that Walker has shown an ability to win three elections in four years his model will likely be replicated in other states — such as your own. So it’s important to try to understand what’s going on.
Let’s begin by dumping the idea of “white workers voting against their interests”. I see this analysis used a lot here, on other liberal-ish web sites, and among liberals in personal conversations. It’s both counterproductive and just plain wrong.
It’s counterproductive because the only way you can explain the (I repeat, falsely perceived) phenomenon of white workers voting against their interests is by adopting the conclusion that white working-class people are stupid. I see that done here, both explicitly and implicitly (with words like “tribalism”, “cult”) quite often. And it’s fundamentally a lazy, arrogant, and thoroughly bankrupt analysis. Assuming you’re interested in social change[1], you have no choice but to reach out, talk to, and organize white working-class people. How you think you can make any headway in that project while holding the premise that the people you’re organizing are stupid is beyond me. Because stupid they are not: they’ll realize what you’re doing even before you realize what you’re doing and once they realize it, your game is over.
A more subtle but related point. I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about “messaging”. I have friends among the liberal activists here who are very focused on “messaging” these days but their idea of it seems to be that the voters they need to “message” to are sort of backwards and not too bright. So they have to “explain the issues to them”, they have to do “voter education”. The level of noblesse oblige is pretty dramatic.
More fundamentally though, the “white workers voting against their interests” theory fails because it’s wrong on the basic facts. White workers do have an interest in voting to support the right wing and its agenda. That’s one of the reasons that “white privilege” is called “white privilege”: if there weren’t real interests at stake there would be no privilege involved and the whole enterprise would have collapsed years ago. The fact that white privilege is alive and doing very well should be a clue that there is something material going on, otherwise you’d be left with nothing more than some kind of “privilege of the mind”.
Let’s walk through an example. I own a house in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee. It’s assessed at around $225,000. I pay about $6500/yr. in property taxes, plus $1400/yr. for water, sewer, and snow removal, plus $1000/yr. for insurance. So my basic expenses come out to about $8900/yr. Every year, Scott Walker brings in some kind of a tax cut — reduces the state income tax, increases state aid to local governments which reduces property taxes[2], etc. For the average taxpayer it works out to $100-$200/year. To me, that’s trivial: I have the privilege of being able to sneer at it. So I do.
However, for many other families in neighborhoods to the south and west of me, it’s not so trivial. If you’re a married couple where one income covers the mortgage, one income covers the health insurance, you split the cost of groceries and try to keep a couple of cars running and pray the kids don’t need braces — it’s not so trivial. If you’re retired and living on a fixed income, it’s not so trivial. If you’re counting the weeks until your unemployment runs out, it’s not so trivial. If the good job you had ran off to the Pacific Rim and now you’re a greeter at WalMart, it’s not so trivial.
I have the privilege of sneering at these people too. All their trivial little concerns, why don’t they focus on their class interests? Why don’t they listen to me when I try to explain the issues to them? Why are they so tribal? So stupid, they are. It’s all just so frustrating…
I can point out, until hell freezes solid, that the $100-$200 break they’re getting from Scott Walker will be more than eaten up in the coming year by increased costs and declining services.
I can point out, until hell freezes solid, that the $100-$200 break they’re getting from Scott Walker is dwarfed by the much bigger breaks that richer people and corporations get. Scott Walker will organize rings around me — by saying “here’s a $100 tax break for this year — and I’ll give you the same next year”. All I can say is “vote for a Democrat — things will get better”. My neighbors don’t believe that and I don’t believe it either because we’ve all seen enough Democrats to know it just isn’t a claim that you can make with a straight face[3]. If you believe it, persuade me in the comments or face the fact that we’re talking about a whole lot more than just “tribalism” here: this is lived experience. And I’ll grant any claim you might want to make about Obamacare because I think, like most of you do, that it’s a great reform and long overdue. But talking about Obamacare just will. not. cut it.Now there’s no question, $100 is not going to change anyone’s life [4]. So let’s do a quickie historical review for some context (and I’ll keep this brief because it don’t think it will be controversial here):
The history of the last 40 years or so has been the transformation of the economic system from national to global capitalism. Read the praises in the works of Thomas Freidman.
With this, the transition from industrial capitalism to financially-based capitalism has meant a complete reorganization in the way profit is generated and how it is realized. You may have noticed this yourself, unless you were sleeping through 2007-2008.
This reorganization of the economy has meant a complete reorganization of the working class. The working class has not done well in all of this. We see an increasing concentration of wealth among an ever-shrinking sector of the population and an increasing concentration of misery among an ever-growing sector of the population. So, Occupy Wall Street.
Along with the economic changes we also see the rise of a crabs-in-a-bucket model of social organization where the two dominant principles are “I’ve got mine, fuck you” and “I don’t have shit so you shouldn’t either”. It’s the latter that drives the parable of the sparrows and the curtain-rods. This model reinforces the inequality while it makes its effects a lot worse. What used to be called the “social safety net” is on its way right down the shitter. So is any kind of working-class solidarity or consciousness (not that those were ever big forces in the past). It’s every crab for themself. No doubt you’ve noticed that the Republicans are the chief architects of this vision but the Democrats have done precious little over the last 40 years to put forward, much less fight for, an alternative.In this context anything that helps you keep the house, keep your head above water, keep your family together becomes kind of a big deal. The $100 from Scott Walker is Scott’s way of reaching out to help families like yours — by making government smaller, helping you keep your hard-earned tax dollars, offering opportunities to people like you who are willing to work hard to achieve their dreams. Scott keeps his promises, too, because that’s just the kind of a guy Scott is [5]. Middle-class, like you. Like us [6]. It’s true that Obamacare will help many people too, no question. But Obamacare is a one-off exception in the pattern of the last 40 years and while you may need better health care coverage than you’ve got before the year is out, you will have to pay your taxes.
It’s an oversimplification to call this a bribe but that’s how it works. It’s an oversimplification to think that the whole system of white privilege boils down to $100 on a tax bill because there’s a lot more to it than that, it ignores the whole dynamic of political and cultural dominance. But it’s also an oversimplification — and a profound error as well — to think that white working-class support for reactionary Republicans like Scott Walker is based on stupidity, or racial prejudice (though there is plenty of that and Walker is quite skilled at using it to leverage his message), or “tribalism”, or the false consciousness brought on by Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. If it were only prejudice/tribalism/false consciousness then maybe it would be more reasonable to think that the Democrats could improve their outcomes by just tweaking their slogans until they were serving up more appealing sound-bites than the Republicans are. But it’s not that easy.[7]
There are material interests, as well as the history of the last 40 years of de-industrialization and the deconstruction of the working class, involved. So you want to trump a bribe? Begin by offering a better bribe. Your Democrats need to begin by offering a better deal economically, and they need to begin to show even a slight passion about the re-construction of the working class that goes beyond economics. If that’s going to mean anything, it’s going to mean shifting wealth back from the 1% to the 99%. It would mean class warfare.
Anyone thinks the Democrats are up for class warfare, raise your hand.
[1] If you’re not interested in social change, or if you think you can just sit back and count on the Democrats to do it for you, you might want to consider the recent events of this month as a wake-up call. [2] A side note on property taxes: they involve an inherent privilege as well. You could imagine a completely different set of economic supports directed at, say, renters — who don’t see much of the effects of a property-tax offset. But think about who rents vs. who owns their property. [3] At least in Wisconsin. The Democratic Party here is just the dog’s breakfast and that also helps to explain Walker: the Republicans are successful in part because they are just filling up a power vacuum. If the Democrats in your state exceed the standards of the Democrats in my state, please mention and explain why in the comments. But don’t conflate your state D.P. with the national D.P. and don’t conflate your state elected officials with Pres. Obama. State government has a lot of impact on peoples’ daily lives and a lousy state Party organization (such as we have here) can do a great deal to undermine both the hard work and the credibility won by national elected officials. Given that, it’s completely credible to me that Wisconsin could vote for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Walker in 2010, 2012, and 2014. And that’s even before you compare OFA to the Democratic campaign organizations in the latter 3 races. [4] It’s not like the millions you could win playing the lottery (which is why a lot of people who don’t seem to have two nickels to rub together will throw more money than seems reasonable into that exercise in taxation for the mathematically challenged: how else are you going to turn your life around? Working sure isn’t going to do it). [5] This horseshit almost writes itself — but he has kept his promises. Boy, has he kept his promises. Granted, they’re a pretty destructive set of promises but he’s kept every one of them and even people who disagree with and don’t like him will give him credit for that. [6] Walker is no fool, he beats this drum endlessly. And it’s actually a true fact. Sort of. But not immaterial in the political scheme of things. [7] Another point about “tribalism”, directed specifically at the people who use that word. “Tribalism” is not well-defined. Other people are “tribal”, while we are broad-minded, knowledgeable. Sophisticated. And aware of all internet traditions. But it may be more worthwhile to engage with white working-class people who may be savvy enough to see multi-racial unity as a means to solving their own problems even though they maintain some prejudiced notions about people of color, than it is to engage with white sophisticates who in spite of all their broad-mindedness are too well-off to be willing to do much of anything — even though it’s a lot easier to have sophisticated conversations among sophisticated people like ourselves. In other words, how much of what you dismiss as “tribalism” is just your own class privilege and prejudices shining through? And furthermore, how does the “tribalism” analysis help you do anything to change what you’re bitching about? If you can’t answer that question then in the end your “tribalism” analysis is just a cheap way of blaming the victims while letting yourself off the hook.
Baud
Thanks for all of your efforts in Wisconsin. I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way we would have all liked.
JMG
That’s an exceptional piece based on facts that are in play everywhere. All I can say is that the problem for the Democratic message, given the evidence of my state Massachusetts, is that it takes a relatively long time for the economic benefits to display themselves. We KNOW that the high tax (again, relatively) — high service economic model works better, but that’s because we’ve been living it for 40 years or more. And rest assured, people hate all taxes and fees and bitch about them mightily.
VidaLoca’s basic point, however, is dead on. The most primal political question is “what’s in it for me?” The best answers are short ones.
Omnes Omnibus
Walker is basically pushing an American version of Poujadisme with the backing of billionaires.
raven
My dad was the football coach in Wauwatosa in about 1955.
tybee
great write up.
so we’re screwed.
Tyro
We KNOW that the high tax (again, relatively) — high service economic model works better
MA taxes are not especially high even in an absolute sense. Compared to MA, $6500/yr in WI property taxes on a $225,000 property is obscene, particularly for the sort of person who can only afford a $225,000 house.
David Fud
Agreed – the core of the “moderate” Republican messaging is an economic message. It is simplistic, but it works because the middle class, treading water, is happy for any help, even if it comes in the form of climbing on top of other sinking swimmers. In translation it is racist, but they don’t really care whose back they are climbing on, as long as they don’t drown.
If Democrats won’t sharpen their economic message, they will not be able to compete for a good long time to come in Congressional races and in state level races. This is the turnout piece that they are not internalizing because apparently, they like the megabucks from rich donors. Why should these folks vote for Dems? In the end, they need to offer a narrative of who wins, who loses, and why they are getting screwed before they can hope to take it back. Edwards worked a significant part of that script well in his campaign. You would think someone would notice that it works fairly well, but it seems a bit too much for our squeamish Dem politicians.
Tyro
@David Fud: . It is simplistic, but it works because the middle class, treading water, is happy for any help
What that means is that the republicans have a vested interest in keeping the middle class treading water, because any kind of “relief” can be very cheap.
Baud
@tybee:
Sounds like it. I’m not sure how Democrats can both be more liberal and win more elections. As was explained upthread, liberalism tends to focus on current investments for long-term gains.
JMG
@Tyro: It’s not what the numbers are, it’s what people think they are. People in Massachusetts believe their taxes are high because they pay state income and sales taxes. Next door in New Hampshire, people who pay confiscatory property taxes and fees on every activity from birth to death know their taxes are low because they don’t pay state income or sales taxes.
People aren’t stupid. They are irrational.
Omnes Omnibus
One of the big problems in Wisconsin is that the Democrats have allowed themselves to be equated with Madison (hippies and pointy-headed intellectuals) and Milwaukee (minorities). There are a few pockets of Democratic support elsewhere – the counties on the Lake Superior shoreline and few others.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
What does that mean?
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
@Baud:
Pretty much. The take away I ended up getting is that the only way to win left is to be just as penny-wise, pound-foolish as the GOP, damn the long term because short term is all that matters. Or else the ‘what have you done for me lately’ effect will continue to bowl us over ad nauseum. And that’s no fucking way to run a railroad.
That just screams ‘intractably screwed’ at this point.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Well, we’re fucked. Nice to have known all of you.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Obama gave Democrats a blue-print how to win, they should run with it. He didn’t do that by cowering in the corner and playing Republican lite.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: The local Republicans have spent a lot of effort making people think Madison/Milwaukee when they hear Democrat. The local Democrats have not be able to find a way to say, “No, we stand for the people of Wisconsin, not business interests,” – at least, they haven’t been able to do it in a way that resonates.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
@schrodinger’s cat:
But that seems to be the exact strategy most of our Dem leaders now have decided to run with, damn how little success it’s brought. And like I keep saying, activism and enthusiasm has to come from the bottom, but the franchise comes from up top. How do you build the brand when the top of the card keeps going in the opposite way of what it should stand for?
Tyro
@Kryptik, A Man Without A Country: damn the long term because short term is all that matters
Except that this is kind of true. You have to win in the short term so you can enact policies that effect things for the long term.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s what the Republicans have done just about outside of solid blue states. Instead of “Madison/Milwaukee,” it’s browns and poors and sluts and elitists and corrupt union bosses and pointy-headed intellectuals.
Citizen Scientist
Great analysis, VL. My state’s dems have not been that great of a bunch since 2008. I took a look at our ballot in November and was pissed that they didn’t bother to run a D in several races. Why not give people an alternative or at least build a longterm message? they’ve gotten lazy.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
@Tyro:
But when you try to win in the short term in a way that inevitably screws, or even runs the exact opposite way, of the necessary long term, what happens then? The only way we can win in the short term is to sell out all the viable long term solutions?
schrodinger's cat
I think people are reading too much into the results of one midterm election with an extremely low turn out.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
Have you seen the final turnout numbers? I was curious how they compared to 2010. In 2010, the GOP did well in turnout. I don’t know if they did well again in 2014, or if our people just fell off a cliff.
NotMax
Pigeonholing is fine and dandy.
For pigeons.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: It has been particularly effective here, I think.
@Citizen Scientist:
I’ll counter by noting that several Democrats were running unopposed in Madison. The same thing happens in some wards in Milwaukee. If a candidate knows that s/he is going to lose by 50 or so percentage points, what is the motivation for that candidate to put in the the time, money, and effort?
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: No I didn’t see the party wise breakdown, but I remember reading that the turnout was really low the only lower turnout than the last election was during an election held when WW II was going on. It was somewhere in the low 30s.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t know how to counter it, without throwing all those groups of people under the bus. That seems to be the litmus test these white, middle-class Republican voters are looking for.
burritoboy
Uh, no, you’re wrong and even worse, completely incoherent. The definition of stupid is supporting somebody who is offering you tax cuts without knowing where the tax cuts are coming from. Remember, a government by definition of being a government has taxing power – taxing power over its own citizens’ future cash flows. This scenario is no smarter than handing your teenage son a credit card and pretending he’s giving you additional money when he comes back with some cash that he got at the ATM with your credit card. Nobody would believe that their teenage son is giving them an actual profit – he’s just running up more debt on your balance sheet. Everybody knows that. That somebody would believe the claims of Walker as you laid them out here is, by definition, simply gullible and yes, just plain stupid at the end of the day. Worse than that, they’re gullible for trivial amounts of money.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: As you know, it’s been doom and gloom here since the election.
VidaLoca
@tybee: @Mnemosyne (iPhone):
No, I don’t think so. This is a great (though I’ll admit, scary) time to be an activist, there are so many things going on. John has been gracious enough to publish two of these articles so far (the first one I did was back at the end of October); I have three more in mind and in one of them I want to address the point you’re raising. But for the moment let me just say that no, I don’t think we’re fucked; I think we need to come up with new models and part of that process is involves looking critically at what doesn’t work with the models we’ve got.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodinger’s cat: all politics is local and such, but I still don’t understand the Gardner/Hickenlooper split tickets in CO. Hick won by very little but still did 5 points better than udall. I’ve met a couple ticket-splitters and they were like “we need a senator who offers hope and optimism” but couldn’t tell me what legislative agenda they wanted Gardner to pursue.
Five points is a big split in CO.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’ll admit to being disappointed. I thought we had learned some lessons since 2010.
ETA: Especially given that, since 2010, the GOP has shown us their full ass.
raven
@VidaLoca: Like screaming that cops need to be offed?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Well, In Wisconsin, I say that you simply write off the voters in Waukesha County. The hardcore right wingers are unreachable. Then, you offer a message that we are all in this together and work to stifle everyone’s urge toward a crab bucket mentality. The specifics probably mean a lot of repetition and advocacy of some small ball legislation that obviously benefits people.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@VidaLoca:
Voters refuse to give Democrats more than 2 years to fix entrenched problems of the past 30 years. They would rather have $100 in their pocket today than have their kids get a free college education 15 years from now.
Sorry, but we’re fucked. New models aren’t going to do a thing to fix short-term thinking that terminal.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sounds fair to me, but I’m neither in Wisconsin nor someone that the Democrats need to work hard to convince, so what do I know?
VidaLoca
@burritoboy:
No, they’ll happily take the benefits, small though those may be, in the absence of any alternative and as long as they believe the costs are being externalized onto someone else.
But if you want to believe that white working-class voters are stupid, based on whatever logic you want to use to reach that conclusion, go ahead. I can’t stop you; all I can do is point out that it says a lot about your own sense of class privilege and entitlement. And that it gives you no way of doing anything more effective than bitching and that isn’t doing much.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@VidaLoca:
Also, keep in mind that I live in California. We’re doing okay at the moment, but we are also the state that recalled a governor over a $20 increase in car registration fees, so I’m fully expecting us to plunge right back into short-term thinking mode as soon as Jerry Brown leaves office.
VidaLoca
@raven: ???
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah I know, it drives me crazy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Writ large, I think there is little sense in engaging at all with the proto-fascists on the right. Kay’s suggestion of addressing security is probably a good direction to pursue to engage others. Emphasizing community and interconnectedness is probably a good direction as well.
@schrodinger’s cat: Me too.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was kind of okay until reading this. But now I know we’re completely fucked.
Major Major Major Major
It was really weird this spring when I was in munich, seeing the mayoral campaign literature and signs. The socialist’s campaign was “keep munich munich”, and the right-winger was “let’s move munich forward.” Socialist won.
SatanicPanic
Who knows, maybe she’s got a good point in Wisconsin. Other areas, I say stop chasing after these racist fools.
Omnes Omnibus
@VidaLoca: I think he has momentarily confused you with someone else.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m not sure what that means. I’ve seen Dems be too centrist and blue doggy for my taste, but not seriously trying to win over the hard-core conservative crowd.
John
There are different facts on the ground now and it’s a different era, but Franklin Roosevelt won repeatedly in a country that had suffered through an economic catastrophe in part by ensuring that the blame for that catastrophe fell at the feet of the GOP. The Depression belonged to Herbert Hoover, fairly or unfairly, because of messaging that ensured people would associate his name with it. The term Hooverville didn’t start as some anonymous meme, it was introduced by the head of the DNC at the time. Economic populism and class warfare are winners for the Democratic party, but they require Democrats with the fortitude to step up and use the language. Who is doing that, outside of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?
Dems should have started referring to the 2008 crash as the Bush Crash consistently and constantly six years ago.
beltane
@Baud: I’ve read that turnout was the lowest it’s been since 1942 and that 2014 saw the oldest electorate ever. The left, the middle, and the young simply tuned out completely. Our side cannot afford to serve up stale pablum in 2016 if they expect anyone to show up at the polls. It reminds me a bit of last year’s election in Spain, where the left, unhappy with the ruling Socialist party’s implementation of austerity measures, simply sat out the election and let the right come to power.
Pogonip
Everybody go read “Deer Hunting With Jesus” by Joe Bageant, then re-read this article.
VidaLoca
@Omnes Omnibus: Pretty much this. Strategically we’re stuck with the fact that Walker has successfully persuaded a lot of white working-class people that their interests align with supporting him. Because that’s an incorrect conclusion this coalition on which Walker depends can’t last forever — how do we hasten its destruction? Try to do what the Republicans do, use class politics as a wedge issue to split them off.
raven
@VidaLoca: There have been a number of people expressing the idea that violence is the way to deal with the shit that is going down. I just don’t see that path as a way to “engage with white working-class people”.
Baud
@John:
It helped that the country suffered under the Depression for three long years under Hoover before FDR came along.
burritoboy
I’m not the one who got bribed by a hundred bucks and fooled by a con that’s so old the Pharaohs thought it a moldy oldy. Look, people who can’t do basic financial math on this level, are simply gullible and stupid. Now, that doesn’t mean they should be left to the predation of whatever random con artists decide to fleece them. But that does mean that they’re stupid, and both they and we need to recognize that fact.
gussie
@VidaLoca: “I can point out, until hell freezes solid, that the $100-$200 break they’re getting from Scott Walker will be more than eaten up in the coming year by increased costs and declining services … My neighbors don’t believe that.”
Is it true that the $200 is more than eaten up by increased costs and declining services? If so, and if bright and well-informed people, voting in their own interest, believe–or purport to believe–otherwise, why? I agree that people are voting their own interests. I just think that they would be stupid if they thought that they were voting their own *economic* interests, instead of their (perfectly real) psychological ones.
Arclite
The state where I live the Democrats dominate the legislature, and have the governorship most of the time. We’re also only 25% white. I think there’s a connection.
Baud
@beltane:
Agreed. We need fresh pablum for 2016. ;-)
greennotGreen
I don’t think we’re fucked, but I also don’t agree that the working class members who are voting Republican aren’t doing a pretty good imitation of stupid…or at least making some very poor decisions based on small, short term rewards. Now, it’s true that if you need that $100 right now to stay afloat, that may change your calculation – in which case the Dems should include some sort of short term help in any policy proposals. But by voting for the Repubs and that $100 working class folks are voting for a party that will (and in Wisconsin has) fought against any pay raises for the working class whether it’s union-based or based on a rise in the minimum wage. After all, a 25 cents an hour raise for a full time worker over a year isn’t $100, it’s $520.
VidaLoca
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree with your basic point, but who are the proto-fascists?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Basically, I would write off a few areas for the short term. Fight hard in the R+5 or less areas but don’t bother too much with the R+10 or more areas – unless a scandal or something puts them in play. The democrats should make sure they win on friendly turf and fight hard where things are winnable. Then work to solidify any gains. Then look to expand a bit again. It’ll take time.
beltane
@VidaLoca: Instead of “Makers and Takers” the focus should be “Workers and Takers”. I live in a white, working class town and the hatred towards Wall Street and contempt for rich people in general is very real. Unfortunately, today’s Democratic party are the last people I would expect to harness this resentment.
VidaLoca
@burritoboy: I hope you can do better than that when you go to knock on their doors then. You won’t get far with the argument you’re making.
Walter
I am wondering how much credit Brownback will get when Kansas starts falling apart from the smaller and smaller budgets. There comes a point when services and infrastructure cannot function.
Trentrunner
@VidaLoca:
“…all I can do is point out that it says a lot about your own sense of class privilege and entitlement.”
Well, that sounds pretty fucking entitled and condescending to me.
My family (and extended family) are these white working class folks. And they ARE ignorant, close-minded, tribal, blameshifting, racist, IGMFYI assholes, politically speaking.
And now they have a whole media ecosystem to legitimize their lizard-brain hatred. They really don’t give a shit if someone who gets cancer loses their house because it’s not their house and if they get cancer without insurance, well whose fault is THAT?
Fuck them. I’m happy to stay on the right side of the issues and let demographics help us out, however slowly.
I expect what you think you’re doing here is tough love, but it also sounds an awful like you’re doing to us what you’re telling us NOT to do to them, and I’m not interested in listening when I see ample evidence in my own life that you’re wrong.
So in that sense, you’re right: People don’t listen to people who talk to them like they’re ignorant assholes.
Welcome to Balloon Juice.
Omnes Omnibus
@VidaLoca: Walker’s hard core base. The Waukesha County Republicans. There is a core of pro-business, anti-intellectual authoritarians in the GOP who I think can be fairly described as at least vaguely fascistic.
Baud
@beltane:
So, what exactly would have Democrats say to those folks that you think would convince them to vote for Democratic candidates?
Hunter Gathers
@VidaLoca:
Here’s the problem – white working class voters, even the educated ones, are fucking stupid. Here in Illinois, we just elected a vulture capitalist who is going to hand off the state’s pension fund to his Wall Street buddies, who are going to straight up fucking steal it. He’ll get his tax cut as well, which will come out of the hides of teachers and people who work for the state. A lot of whom voted for him. Do you know who’ll they’ll blame when the bill comes, and it costs them their job and their retirement? First, it’ll be ‘The Blacks’. Next, it will be ‘The Welfare’, followed by Hispanics, and the city of Chicago. These people are fucking idiots. I refuse to feel any sympathy for these dumb fucks, even though I belong to same group as these corn-fed fucking dipshits.
The best thing the Democratic Party could do is tell us White Working Class voters to go fuck ourselves. We’re already half way there. Most of us voted for Sarah Palin back in 2008 anyway. Nothing says ‘Dumber Than A Bag Of Dogshit’ like voting for Sarah Palin. 55 percent of white voters pulled the lever for her. I have looked in my hard drive, and my sympathy file no longer exists. Fuck white people. Fuck all of us.
Major Major Major Major
@VidaLoca: which is why you don’t say it to their faces. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to tell people, and just because it’s false doesn’t mean you can’t campaign on it. Politics is a blood sport, after all. That said, the Dems did have a real record to campaign on–tax breaks and health insurance for millions of Americans, just like you and your neighbors, etc. Not in Wisconsin maybe, since the state is run by the GOP, but everybody ran from liberal ideas all over the country this time. It was only when it wasn’t a liberal presenting the idea (like all the minimum wage ballot initiatives) that the liberals won.
beltane
@Baud: If the crash had happened in 2005 and the US experienced Greece-like misery due to Republican mismanagement, there is a possibility the GOP would be dead for a generation. However, the Democratic party in general is too beholden to Wall Street to make me think they would be willing, under any circumstances, to drive a stake through the vampire’s heart.
VidaLoca
@beltane: Yeah. In the US we don’t have much of a sense of class solidarity, it’s more the exception than the rule. But class anger? Class resentment? We do that here.
Problem is, where does that anger and resentment get channeled? A few people will want to dig in their heels, fight back. A lot more people will be persuaded by the explanations and “solutions” that they get from Fox, from Limbaugh, from the real fascists like the KKK. That’s where their anger will get channeled. Not a good situation.
One lesson from the elections is we need to get out ahead of this somehow or we’re going to get rolled.
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: To be honest a lot of the blame for the crash of 2008 could be laid at Bill Clinton and his neoliberal cronies like Rubin and Summers’ feet. The policies they enacted made the gambling OTC derivatives trading possible.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hunter Gathers: There is a difference between seeking white working class voters by signalling a willingness to fuck over minorities and seeking white working class voters by offering a platform that benefits them as well as other people. One doesn’t need to shake a lot of them loose. The racists won’t come (and fuck them anyway), but the economically insecure might.
VidaLoca
@Hunter Gathers: How are you going to make this fly politically though? As a campaign slogan, “Fuck all of us” has some shortcomings. You (we) have to organize these people you’re writing off if anything is going to change.
Anne Laurie
@greennotGreen:
The GOP has very successfully turned Joe Hill’s ‘pie in the sky‘ meme backwards. They’ve spent at least forty years, since Nixon, convincing “Joe Average” that his choice, at the ballot box, is between a tiny short-term benefit from the beneficent GOP (a tax credit, a new anti-“vice” law, a stronger police response to protect smallholders from rampaging Others) and the Democrats’ long-term “maybe someday” strategies (a better education for their kids 15 years from now, “training” for new & better jobs that may or may not exist, global improvements that will eventually rebound to “our” benefit). We Dems have to do a better job of explaining why the Repubs are lying about those bread crumbs they’re holding out, and how all of us can move into that Better World without “punishing hard-working individuals” today.
beltane
@Baud: Our local high school has an inadequate, poorly ventilated auditorium. A couple of years ago, right at the beginning of the holiday concert, the music teacher got up on the stage and thanked everyone for putting up with the uncomfortable conditions. Then she said, “You know, just one single Wall Street bonus would be more than enough to give us a whole new auditorium.” The audience, mostly made up of “rednecks”, cheered loudly. Maybe simple, direct messages like this would be good place to start.
Baud
@beltane:
I guess I don’t see it. I have no doubt that “rednecks” hate Wall Street. I have my doubts about whether enough of those rednecks can be convinced to support a D candidate based on anti-Wall-Street rhetoric alone. It would be nice to see some examples of that succeeding somewhere among the billions of elections we have in this country.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: Exactly. A Democratic party that is committed to neoliberal economic policies will have a hard time benefiting from a focus on class warfare.
Woodrowfan
@Omnes Omnibus:
“at least vaguely”?? you’re being kind.. :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Woodrowfan: Well, they don’t have uniforms yet.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I paid a visit to Fry’s in your new city of residence. On the tailgate of the pickup parked in front of me was this in large block letters: “IF SHE CAN’T SATISFY HER HUSBAND – HOW CAN SHE LEAD THE NATION”. There were also some bumper stickers on the back window of the cab(pro second amendment, something about Holder and Weiner…)
VidaLoca
@beltane: This. Politicizing simple, direct messages like this one is exactly the place to start.
schrodinger's cat
There are also many in the squishy middle who buy all the crap that MSM is selling, mainly that both sides do it. The MSM peddles every nonsensical right wing meme from we are all going to die of Ebola or killed by ISIS. In the Obama era the Dems have had to fight to opposition parties the Republicans and the MSM.
Fair Economist
As a Californian, where the Dems are doing very well, my impression is that the lynchpin of Democratic success is – high taxes on the rich (edit: make that: reasonable taxes on the rich). Middle-class people in California actually don’t pay high taxes, mainly because our top rate is almost 10%. The deal we need to offer these working-class voters is: we’ll lower your taxes and fix your roads by taxing your boss. And yeah, the 1% will whine about “class warfare”, to which the response should be laughter. A 5% increase in income tax isn’t even remotely class warfare.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry too fat for uniforms. Judging from all those tea-party rallies.
beltane
@Baud: I don’t think it’s ever been tried. However, it is interesting to note that Bernie Sanders won his Senate seat by a very large margin against a mini-Romney in a year when the Republican governor was reelected by a similarly large margin.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Goering had lots of uniforms – each more garish than the last.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure, but the rank and file was not as fat as Herr Goering.
ETA: Wouldn’t it be quite uneconomical to sew those XXX large uniforms, no?
Woodrowfan
one small gripe, I hate hearing the republicans called the GOP, (Grand Old Party). There is nothing grand about them and they’r the younger of the two parties. It was created as a term of affection by republicans for their own party. fuck’m.
For that matter, I liked the old nickname for the Democrats, “The Democracy.”
Now, did I mention how I had to wear onions on my belt when I went to Shelbyville. They were yellow, not white onions, cause of the war… (stops to yell at a cloud)
raven
Demise of the Southern Democrat Is Now Nearly Complete
beltane
@Woodrowfan: GOP=Greedy Old Perverts. Works for me.
Woodrowfan
@Omnes Omnibus:
give it a while. By September 2016 there will be. ;)
Baud
@beltane:
Interesting. But Vermont is a very liberal state and I’m assuming that the Republican was a typical Northeastern liberal Republican (and was the incumbent). I’m not sure what that tells us.
As far as never been tried, that does not fill me with optimism that the strategy will suddenly be successful.
I don’t mean to be negative. I really am at a loss at what will work (as opposed to what I would like to see work).
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: BTW India’s fascists (RSS) have uniforms and a kind of a salute too. I think it just makes them look ridiculous.
Mike J
Program alert: You may be interested in the short that starts on TCM in 20 minutes (at 10 til 7). It’s about women taking charge of the government for a day. Imagine how silly that would be!
Baud
@raven:
The solid South is still once again the solid South.
raven
@Mike J: But then I couldn’t record the THREE HOUR Peter Pan and the second half of the Bears-Pokes!
JMV Pyro
@raven:
Southern strategy has worked like a charm. It just took longer then we thought.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: They have also been offering the revolutions in Russia and in France as models, apparently they were wonderful for the ones that survived.
VidaLoca
@Baud:
Well, if you’re willing to broaden out the terms of discussion beyond strictly electoral campaigns (“D candidate”) and “anti-Wall Street rhetoric alone” I can come up with something that may be in beginning of an example.
The Milwaukee Bucks were just bought up by a trio of Wall St. hedge-fund geniuses who think it would be a great idea to have the taxpayers help them build a new BB arena in the middle of our downtown. The local bourgeoisie is completely enthralled with their plan, pointing out how much revenue it will generate (mostly proven hogwash), the jobs, the development, blah blah. People in the community are barely lukewarm to strongly opposed to the idea — their demand is for more athletic facilities for young people. Nobody wants the tax bump, we got screwed when the Brewers built their stadium back in the ’90s and we’ll be paying for that one for years. Cost of Bucks tickets is far beyond the ability of average people to pay anyway, this will just be a playground for wealthy people from Waukesha County.
It’s too early to tell how this will ultimately play out but the opposition is broad enough (even including conservative white working-class types) that it could be stopped.
Local anti-fracking mobilizations are another example. Opposition to Keystone XL pipeline is a bigger example. I’m not holding my breath waiting for the Democrats to take up this fight (esp. in Milwaukee) but that doesn’t mean that other people aren’t finding ways to fight back, outside of the limitations of the Democrats and the context of campaigns.
VidaLoca
@Pogonip: Read that one about six months ago. Agreed, a very good read.
Holden Pattern
@beltane: Sanders also consistently wins in heavily Republican precincts.
So you’ve got a couple (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
1) Vermont Republicans aren’t as bad as the Fundie Racist Authoritarian Assholes that you get further South and West.
2) Actually fighting for the interests of all working people at the same time may be effective.
Omnes Omnibus
@VidaLoca:
One should also take into consideration that the Democrats are likely to come around if there is an actual movement. A lot of them don’t want to make a move that might be dangerous. If there is electoral cover, I think more of them will be willing to do the right (that is, the correct) thing. It can snowball.
Baud
@VidaLoca:
That’s all good and worthwhile, but my comment was focused on getting Dems elected. Issue-specific activism is necessary, but it’s not a substitute for representative government.
@Omnes Omnibus:
And this.
Jay C
@Fair Economist:
The big problem here being that “The 1%” are probably going to spend vast amounts of money on major ad campaigns in whatever political market that said “deal” is being offered – trying to convince the voters that
a) “class warfare” is Un-American Commie Hippie “redistributionist” Eeeeevvvilll!!!!!
b) “The Bosses” are God And Jesus’s Own Privileged Elite; and that any attempt to fix them as otherwise is Un-American Commie Hippie Eeeeeevvilll!!!
c) “Economic” arguments about public political issues are just so much deflection from the “serious” issues, i.e.
ABORTIONIZING BABY-KILLIING ATHEIST SLUT FAG-MARRIAGE N****ER-MUSLIM THUG LIBERALS-PUKES
TRYING TO TAKE OVER “NORMAL AMERICA” !!11!!!!!1!!
Stupid shit, to be sure, but unfortunately , still (apparently) a political winner…..
hoodie
This is the wellspring of the problem and the actions of the Democratic party over the last three decades have contributed to it, but there is an emotional aspect to it that you seem to discount. The working class that has done well (relative to where they were) is in China, Taiwan, India, etc., and a professional class in the US that lives off of rent collection in that global system. No doubt that crab-bucket politics is possible because the liberation of global capital has thrown US workers into a worldwide crab bucket, which was helped in no small way by the free trade advocacy of people like Clinton (and even Krugman in earlier years). But the emotional result of that is the working class white is faced with the prospect of being just another chinaman (except probably not as well trained), rather than an Exceptional Citizen of the Exceptional Country with an Unlimited Future. The Walkers offer an illusory promise of self-fulfillment by identifying someone to blame for your plight and a tangible downpayment that suggest more is on the way (“you’d be rich but for all those taxes you pay to feed shiftless layabouts who hold up liquor stores and pointy head professors who research the sex lives of moths, here’s a downpayment on changing all that”). The cherry on top is that the GOP also gives them the fantasy of putting their boot in some A-rab’s ass. Those Walker voters are not going to turn to Democrats to get back at Wall St. when they see Democrats snuggling up to bankers. But more importantly, a whole bunch of them aren’t going to flock to Democrats who will not tell them they’re the salt of the Earth and blessed by God to rule the world.
Democrats have to figure out how to make white working class people feel better about themselves without resorting to the Dark Side politics used by the right. Obama tried to do that to some degree by arguing that the country’s best hopes lie in unity and inclusion, but that’s where the legacy of race stepped in to plug their ears, with a lot of help from Fox and the GOP. I get a sense of working class whites regressing emotionally by becoming extremely reactionary (older whites fearing what they might lose) or withdrawn (younger whites pessimistic about their future). Progressives don’t know how to deal with that.
kindness
Here’s something I don’t see addressed in the messaging department. With the advent of Fox News and the unlimited money the gazillionaires can now spend there is no way in hell that any message a Democrat, even a moderate one, can put out and not be shredded by people who will plaster every surface, every radio and TV & most the press with complete and utter lies.
Look at what Republicans pushed. It wasn’t about their policies. It was about what cannibals Democrats are. And I’m not sure any message will get through the lies outside eye openers like the 2008 economic collapse.
Now, not to be completely negative we do have one thing going for us. That is the Right over-reaches huge every time they get power and the results are usually economic calimity. It’ll happen again and probably soon, because look at the make up of the House & Senate. Vetos will help us but not for everything. What kills me is that we all saw the results of the Great Republican Experiment 6 years ago and the people (with the help of a complicit media) forgot what brought it on and now all agree it was Democrats and liberals fault.
danielx
@VidaLoca:
Great write-up and great analysis, if all too depressing.
@John:
Yes, they should have, but not much chance of that with the likes of Charles Schumer (D-Wall Street), for example, sitting on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Can’t knock Schumer too much; as senators go he’s a lot better than, say, Jim Inhofe – at least when he talks about Wall Street he at least has some faint hint of what he’s talking about, and he’s just playing the same as any other pol. However…
Obama, along with other Dems, wanted/needed that sweet, sweet Wall Street cash too much for his first campaign, wanted to be a technocrat post-political president, and didn’t want to have people start screaming class warfare!, so he acted like Herbert Hoover instead. Hell, he didn’t even act like George Bush; at least Bush’s DOJ sent a few plutocrats down the river. I’ve gotten a certain bitter enjoyment out of reading about corporate and Wall Street types snarling about soshulism and class warfare. If Obama was a class warrior..but he’s not. If he was, his Attorney General wouldn’t have been Eric Holder and wouldn’t have whined about how it was just toooo haaard and tooooo daaaangerous to the ecoooonomy to come up with enough evidence of fraud (let alone money laundering and christ knows what else, see HSBC) to send some fucking bankers to jail. (Yes, I’ve heard it from various attorneys, including some here, about inadequate evidence for convictions, etc etc. Do.Not.Tell.Me that the Department of Justice, with the statutes, resources and techniques available to US Attorneys, couldn’t make a provable case against one fucking senior Wall Street type, if motivated to do it. They’ve used those resources and techniques to put away people who have done a lot less. End rant.)
White working class voters detest criminal bankers as much, if not more, than anyone else. Obama had a golden opportunity to show working class voters whose side the Dems were on, and he didn’t pursue it, like he had an obligation to protect his Wall Street backers from the consequences of their criminal behavior. If he’d done otherwise, the Dems would have had a lock on the White House, and likely Congress as well, for the next twenty years.
Clearly he never read the late, great Molly Ivins….”As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can’t drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in office.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay C: A
But this is one place where we are winning, bit by bit, and every issue one which we win takes one of those opportunities to demagog.
VidaLoca
@Baud: No, I disagree. There were referenda in a number of states allowing voters to take a position on raising the minimum wage and as far as I know they passed in every case. Including Wisconsin. Candidates had the opportunity to support the referenda and here, Mary Burke did so though not especially enthusiastically. But there would be nothing in principle that would stop a candidate from really making income inequality a centerpiece of their campaign and building a social movement around it.
Kay had a post up a week or 10 days ago about employers screwing with employees’ overtime. That’s another state-level issue, perfect for a gubernatorial or legislative candidate to run on. But none of that throws anyone under the bus, on the contrary it helps everyone who depends on wages to get by.
Baud
@VidaLoca:
And she lost. That’s my point. It seems like it’s not enough to have a better economic policy if you’ve got a D next to your name.
VidaLoca
@hoodie:
Right, progressives have to get on top of figuring a lot of this out, and right soon. I made a vague comment above about “other models”; the best model I know of that addresses the point you’re making is the Moral Mondays movement in NC. They appear to be dealing with some of these issues, whether they’re succeeding or not is something I’d like to know more about.
beltane
@Holden Pattern: Religious fundamentalism plays almost no part in VT politics. VT and NH are the two least religious states in the country and even most of the teabagger types (yes, we’ve got them) belong to the church of “mind your own f*cking business”. Guns are a big deal here and Sanders doesn’t go near the issue. In VT, the Republican districts tend to be the dirt poor towns or a few of the very wealthy towns. Their is a weird kind of anti-hippie, anti-Burlington class resentment thing that hurts the Democrats in certain areas, but Bernie is largely immune to it. People like his straightforward message and his accessibility (he holds town meetings throughout the state on a regular basis).
Yes, it’s Vermont, but someone like Mark Warner might not have had such a scare on election night if he had bothered to get out there more and address the concerns of the people who elected him in a landslide six years earlier.
VidaLoca
@Baud: But Burke’s main thrust was to criticize Walker for the ridiculous promise he made in 2010 that he would bring 250,000 jobs to Wisconsin. Which of course he did not, it was a fair criticism. So Burke wanted everyone to know that she had a jobs plan that was much, much better. She’d bring in those jobs, for sure.
Well, as it turned out the Walker campaign figured out that the advisor who wrote her jobs plan had cobbled pieces of it together from other plans that he sold to other candidates. So Walker declared that Burke plagiarized her plan. And it didn’t help that she’s a top executive in Trek Bicycles, which does most of its manufacturing in China. It didn’t help that she’s a millionaire in her own right either.
It wasn’t the min. wage issue (that she supported only limply) that was decisive for Burke. It was the candidate and the campaign. I’ll be fair enough to give her credit for taking a chance while the rest of the Democrats were taking a pass but she was not what we needed.
Tyro
@Kryptik, A Man Without A Country: For Republicans, the long term doesn’t matter. They took a stand against gay marriage even though in the long term it was a loser. Doesn’t matter– they won the 2004 elections and could ride social conservative on anti-gay stuff for another cycle or two which got their candidates into office.
Sometimes Democrats need to realize that short term political advantage on something that is a long term loser is ok. Because elections are won in the short term, not the long term.
The Raven on the Hill
“One of the reasons Walker did as well as he did is he’s put together a coalition of white workers; nouveau riche strivers; and the truly rich, truly pathological, greed-driven and power-hungry base of the Republican Party. ”
You are describing a fascist party.
As for acting in your own interest–look at Kansas. The state’s economy tanked exactly as predicted, as the result of the same policies Walker is implementing. If voters are expecting that voting for the likes of Walker and Brownback is going to make their lives better, they are wrong. Considering how hard it is for people to admit they’re wrong, I think they’re screwed. They’re hugging a cactus and won’t let go. I have no idea what states like Wisconsin and Kansas will become in even four years. Violence seems likely.
VidaLoca
@danielx: Yeah I think this pretty much nails the class politics of the Democrats.
RSA
Following up on @gussie‘s comment, I think that yes, not paying attention to this is stupid and against one’s economic self-interest. It’s not rightwing or working class stupidity, though; rather it’s basic human stupidity. We all have the tendencies, rich or poor, to prefer the short-term to the longer-term gain, to want money in hand right now instead of paying for infrastructure and services.
The Raven on the Hill
@Anne Laurie: Yet people’s lives are already being made worse by Republican policies, and yet they want more. It seems to me very much like the sort of behavior one sees in many abuse victims: they stay and believe that, somehow, things will get better, only they never do.
jonas
Wait, can someone explain how Walker simultaneously *lowers* income taxes and other fees while also *lowering* property taxes and boosting local spending at the same time? I mean, as a homeowner in a high-tax state, that sounds awesome, but it usually works the other way around — you *raise* income or sales taxes to offset the fact that you’re lowering property taxes. Or is Walker just basically running up crazy deficits at the state level to woo working class voters? How is he financing this local spending?
Omnes Omnibus
@jonas: Deficits are going up.
beltane
@VidaLoca: Very interesting about Burke. In a competition between two corporatists, voters either seem to stay home or vote for the one who provides them with with an enemy/scapegoat. There is a lesson to be learned somewhere.
VidaLoca
@The Raven on the Hill:
Well it’s not quite at that point here yet but you have a valid point: if the left doesn’t organize these folks the right certainly will. Once they’re organized by the right wing — and I think this is one of the lessons of Kansas — it’s a lot harder to unorganize them.
p.a.
@VidaLoca: Yes. But we’re more likely to hear these messages from music teachers than from Democratic politicians. Wall St. toadies and piss pants cowards.
VidaLoca
@Omnes Omnibus: Ironic, because the whole brouhaha in Madison in the spring of 2011 was caused by this “deficit crisis” that we absolutely, positively, had to fix right now.
Steve from Antioch
I didn’t follow the Wisconsin elections closely, but did Walker make a commitment to put $100 or so in property owners’ pockets by property tax cuts?
Omnes Omnibus
@VidaLoca: Well, to be fair, Walker is screwing over schools on funding which, I am sure, helps the deficit.
VidaLoca
@Omnes Omnibus: True. To be fair.
VidaLoca
@Steve from Antioch: Actually the most recent promise (that I’m aware of, at least) was around income taxes not property taxes, property taxes was in a previous budget. See here (and note the date — 6 weeks before the election).
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
I haven’t read all the comments – sorry if someone made this point better already.
I don’t think the way to convince people to support your (our) positions is to tell them they’re stupid. But I also don’t think the only other choice is to give short-term bribes to voters that destroy the future.
As long as voting isn’t mandatory, the way to win seems to be to get your base to turn out and to disillusion the other guy’s base. That means continuous, hard-core voter registration drives and telling your voters what you’re doing and going to do for them. Don’t just beg for money 3 months before and buy masses of TV ads 2 weeks before the election. That means continuously telling your voters how you prevented the other guys from taking away their benefits, the infrastructure their parents and grandparents paid for, and the things necessary for their kids to have a good future.
I agree with someone above who said that raising taxes on the rich is a no-brainer and more than that – it’s necessary. The US is undertaxed as a country, but the poor are paying too much. Too many families are struggling while the rich take more and more. We can and must change that. Education is too expensive, and loans aren’t the answer – more loans is a big problem.
And the laws need to be enforced fairly. Hypocrasy is a killer. If you’re running for office for self-aggrandizement or to loot the treasury, we don’t want you.
Tell people you’re going to cut their taxes and raise the taxes of those who have benefited the most over the last 35 years and who can easily afford it. Show them you’ll balance the budget without letting infrastructure continue to crumble. Tell them all of the things that those taxes on the rich will buy and how they and their kids will benefit. And how the city/county/state will benefit so the rich will get richer, too. Laugh and mock the magic asterisks that the Republicans will propose instead. Make your base enthusiastic and mock and laugh at the stupid proposals from the leaders on the other side – nobody wants to support a fool and a loser. Disillusion their base for a change… Fight for votes – don’t take anyone’s voters for granted. Make them work for their votes, too.
Is it easy to do all of the above? Of course not. But it’s a way forward that will benefit everyone – even those who pay higher taxes.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
VidaLoca
Folks, I have to get up early in the morning so I’m off to bed. Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to respond to further comments tomorrow morning.
Omnes Omnibus
@VidaLoca: Thank you for writing this up. You really have done a good job of describing what has been happening here in Wisconsin. I appreciate it.
CONGRATULATIONS!
“If you’re white, you’re out of sight.”
beltane
I’m not an expert in these things, but rather than throw ashes on ourselves and cry “We are doomed!” we might want to seek out examples of movements that have succeeded and learn from them. Republicans showed up to vote last month, Americans by and large did not. How can a new left be formed that reaches that 65% of Americans who have tuned out?
jonas
@Omnes Omnibus: which, as I’m sure Walker would explain, is the fault of illegal immigrants and unions, amirite? Just like in Kansas.
Timurid
You see this same thing in academia, even though everyone is a member of the same “tribe.”
Nobody even tries to outrun the bear. They just make sure it stays well fed.
Linnaeus
Perhaps the Democrats could start with a simple message: security.
Social Security will be there for you when you need it. Period.
Your children will be able to afford to go to college. Period.
You will get the medical care you need and not go bankrupt. Period.
And so on.
Mr. Twister
Meh, it could be about $100 here or $100 there, or it could be about what it’s ALWAYS about in this country which is race. Since 1964 the Republicans have worked diligently to equate Democrats = niCLANG lovers in the minds of the white working class. They have an entire network which is nothing but an engine of white racism and resentment, All white voters in 2014 wanted to give the POTUS a big fat middle finger and they did. The prosecutors and grand juries of late, a big fat middle finger to the POTUS. You can analyze the white working class all you want but it is always about race and if they f*ck themselves a million times they don’t care as long as they think they’re sticking it to black folks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mr. Twister:
Quoi?
Mr. Twister
@Omnes Omnibus: All the white voters that voted for Republicans, whether it was for Senator or sewer commissioner were flipping off the POTUS in their minds.
Linnaeus
@Mr. Twister:
This can’t be overlooked, although I’d say it goes beyond the white working class, of course. The Republican Party draws its appeal from white identity politics, which gives it a certain structural advantage in that it doesn’t have to balance the interests of the kinds of constituencies that the Democrats do.
Bill D.
Great analysis, very instructive.
One comment, thought. There *is* very much of a tribal aspect among today’s hard-core conservatives. I don’t mean various and sundry people of modest means who may have been bought off by small tax cuts and targeted rhetoric, but rather the 27% hard core conservative segment of the population. This segment runs through the white working class, rural folks, small business owners, affluent upper-middle-class folks, and the rich but is likely not a majority of any of these groups.
The term “tribalism” may have been carelessly thrown around at the wrong folks by some, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nobody out there who’s being tribal in their attitudes and politics. That said, the conservative tribalists are entirely beyond the reach of progressives and not the subject of the headline post. These are true believers who don’t need tax cuts to get them to support the most conservative candidate possible.
Peter
This is called stupidity and voting against your interests. It is understandable stupidity and voting against your interests. But understanding what makes it happen doesn’t make it not so.
Betsy
@beltane: well fuck, essentially the entire population of the state is lily white, plus the entire state only contains less than half the number of people that of a single county (the second largest) in North Carolina, so … irrelevant to a national analysis. The factor of being able to do retail politics makes Bernie AND the VT Republicans total outliers as data points, not comparable to any state having a more normal demographic size or population. It might as well be fucking Alaska.
Dalunay
The Democrats lost my daughters, and my early-20s niece. Obama’s youth vote has left the Democratic party, but hasn’t gone to the Republicans… yet. Obama offered hope and change, but didn’t deliver enough over the subsequent 6 years: No decent jobs, only dead-end McJobs.
It’s time for the Dems to put the Hippie/Establishment fights of the 60s in the dustbin of history. They need to put up a post-Boomer candidate who will take on issues of the future; educational reform for an information-age society, breaking up/nationalizing the internet provider oligopoly thereby ensuring net neutrality, and fixing the intellectual ‘property’ laws. They also need to put up a candidate who’s not beholden to big business, whether it’s Hollywood, Silicon Valley, or Wall Street. Dems need to start talking re-regulation of predatory businesses — loan sharking payday loan companies, companies that cheat employees of their wages, re-implementing Glass-Stegall to rein in Wall Street abuses — and eliminating the gentle handling of big money with things like Deferred Prosecution agreements. Dems need to talk about regulation enforcement as protection for honest businesspeople from the unfair competition of cheaters who break the laws, instead of shaking in fear every time Repubs complain about regulatory burdens.
Answer this question: If corporations aren’t people, what are they? If you can make a convincing argument for classifying them as a kind of government, restricted (mostly) to economic matters, you have a big cudgel you can pound the Repubs with. If you can make a convincing argument that the ‘privatization’ initiatives of the Repubs are really just an argument for replacing our government institutions from civic democratically-elected governments to business-owned corporate government, opposing Republicans becomes downright patriotic.
Plantsmantx
Ta-Nehisi Coates, back in Jan. 2012:
Singular
@Plantsmantx:
That’s…. just breathtakingly to the point. And so depressing.
VidaLoca
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re welcome. There’s more to come, assuming John is willing to continue to publish it, in a couple of weeks.
@beltane:
That’s the discussion we need to start having and we might as well start having it here as anywhere. I have some ideas to get the debate started but what I really want to see if we can do is crowd-source and share some information. A socialist gets elected to the City Council in Seattle, what’s up with that? A multi-racial mass movement occupies the capitol in Raleigh, what’s up with that? etc.
@Linnaeus: Agree completely, but I think that any sentence that starts with “Perhaps the Democrats could…” is doomed. To me, that’s the lesson from what we saw go down in November (and now December): we’re on our own here. We have to start to figure out what that means. Reflexively we seem to think that the Democrats, like the cavalry, are going to come riding to our rescue. I think we have to give that idea up, and start considering the consequences.
@Bill D.: But look what you’re trying to do here: instead of using labels (“stupid”, “tribal”, “redneck”, “trailer trash”) to blow off people you disagree with, you’re trying to disaggregate the opposition to understand it better. Once you do that, you can ask, “are there political issues we could use to drive these groups apart, weaken their hold on political power, and not incidentally make society a better place if we win?” And the answer is, yeah there are a lot of issues like that, income inequality (or more generally “class warfare”) is just one of them. But as long as we stay invested in those labels we let ourselves off the hook of having to do the analysis. To me, the labels just lead to passivity and helplessness.
@Peter: OK if you want to call it “using flawed logic to reach an incorrect conclusion” I can go along with that. If you want to add in the point (as some commenters did above) that the logic is flawed because the cost/benefit long-term/short-term analysis doesn’t make sense, I can go along with that — although as I tried to point out, that analysis is highly class-specific. But “stupid” and all the other labels I’m criticizing do not do one thing to help you reach out, talk to people, win them over to your point of view, mobilize them to vote or even do any other damn thing. It’s not just semantics, it’s social analysis, it’s the way you approach people you need to have you your side.
@Betsy: But wait, there has to be some kind of history behind this. Bernie was not born in the Senate, he started out back in the day as mayor of Burlington, right? And probably on the city council or school board or something before that. So he kept on getting job promotions because his constituents like his work. I take your point about VT being a special place (but aren’t they all?) and retail politics being easier there than in, say, CA for sure — but let’s admit it: many (most?) politicians on any level are really bad at retail politics because they never learned it. They’ve never really tried it. The relevance of Bernie to a national analysis is that retail politics based on class-conscious policy can work, you just need to start on a smaller geographic base where it can be more easily done. So put off doing it in states other than VT for the moment, let’s figure out how to do it in school board elections, city council elections, etc. first.
@Plantsmantx: There’s some validity to the point that Ta-Nehisi is making but Ta-Nehisi is an analyst — so once he analyzes his job is done. If we’re going to be activists we have to start where his job ends and figure out how to turn it around. If we can’t do that we’re screwed, we might as well give up.
Sherparick
@beltane: Something to remember is that FDR was a Wall Street lawyer from one of the founding families of “Wall Street.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Roosevelt_%28politician%29
Hence, I simply will not dismiss a politician because he or she has Wall Street ties.
Because FDR knew Wall Street and Finance in his bones, he was able to stand up to them and reform it while maintaining at least some base of support in the financial community while doing such “radical” things as going off the Gold Standard (a very big fucking deal in 1933). One clue that Hilary is not quite as in awed of the smart money types that worked for her husband and Obama, although she will take their money, is that Robert Rubin’s guy in 2007-08 was Obama, not her. Rubin, Blankfein, and pals have doubts about their ability to control her.
Bobby Thomson
And they don’t listen/understand, right? Your entire thesis, shot to hell in one sentence.
People are really fucking stupid. It’s just not limited to the white working class.
Bobby Thomson
@Peter: Yeah, this.
Sherparick
@VidaLoca: I would like to add my thanks for a great piece. I posting links on Krugman’s blog. Hope you send an e-mail to Tom Franks. Dave Atkins who posts on Dighby’s Hullabaloo, has lot of pieces about how activists have reinvigorated (a still very flawed) Democratic Party and moved it in a more activist direction.
Sherparick
@VidaLoca: Basically I agree with you on starting to focus locally. Where I disagree is your dismissal of the Democratic Party at the state and local level as an institution. Activists need to move in and take over committee and precinct captain roles, run for local school boards, etc. and then run in primaries to replace hacks and careerists where they exist. But the fact is that other side is pretty malevolent, and that it not only a $100 tax break that moves voters. http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2014/12/03/the-long-arms-of-scott-jensen/
Betty Cracker
@VidaLoca: Very thoughtful discussion. Thanks!
VidaLoca
@Betty Cracker: You’re welcome, and thanks to all of you who contributed. I really enjoyed this; one of the real pleasures of writing a piece like this is that the feedback helps a lot to clarify my own thinking and point out weaknesses in the writing and the argument.
VidaLoca
@Sherparick: Yeah, I read that article on Jensen yesterday and it’s a big deal. We got some good people elected here in 2012, running against his voucher-school compadres and there’s no reason to doubt that he’ll come back at us in 2015 and 2016, loaded for bear. We can beat them in targeted races but they have the money to swamp us across the board.
On the Democratic Party. I have to keep in mind — and often I fail to do so — that it varies a lot from state to state. So I end up making over-broad generalizations. Kay writes a lot about the DP in Ohio and I gather from what she says that the situation is a lot more positive down there.
That said, I’ve given up on the DP in WI. I don’t see any hope. I have several friends who feel differently and they’re setting off to try something like what you’re talking about. And I wish them well but bless their hearts, I think they’re going to be outclassed; they’ll be bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. The people who run the DP in WI are proven failures at winning elections (== fighting for our interests) but I think they’ll be much more capable of fighting when their own jobs/perks/egos/interests are on the line. Even if that were not the case — my friends will be fighting for years against Democrats (nominal Democrats though they may be) when what we need to be doing is fighting against Republicans.
sandy
This is pathetically emotional and half-assed commentary from someone who I do not believe has the slightest insight into why people vote for Republicans. It’s not for the “$100.”
VidaLoca
Folks, I have to be mostly gone for the rest of the day. The company I work for has this crazy idea that it’s more important for me to be working on their stuff than to be arguing with people who are wrong on the internet. I’ll be back this afternoon if anyone is still around.
Again, thanks to all.
D58826
This reminds me of the ‘keeping your word’ plan of Christie Todd Whitman when she was elected governor of NJ an few years back. She campaigned on cutting the much hated income tax. Well when she was elected she did just that. Of course to fill the hole in the budget one of the things she did was to refinance NJ bonds from 15 year bonds to 30 year bonds. This resulted in lower current payments but increased interest payments over the life of the bonds. In other words NJ tax payers paid more in the long run than they saved in the short run. It’s not that the voters were stupid, just not well versed in the ins and outs of state bond financing. As with the home owners in the article all they saw was an increase in take home pay due to a cut in the income tax.
There were also cuts to state transfer payments to local school districts but the impact of making up those cuts fell on local school boards. They of course had the choice of raise taxes or cut programs. In most cases they chose the later as it was less painful in the short run. Unfortunately you can only delay replacing the school house roof for so long before it leaks like a sieve and has to be fixed.
Paul in KY
@burritoboy: I think they are basically gullible & naïve too. Problem is, you can’t really tell them that the Repubs are playing them for rubes. Pisses them off
Paul in KY
@beltane: Unfortunately, that was how FDR, Truman, and to a lesser extent Kennedy & LBJ won.
Paul in KY
@VidaLoca: So, basically, there is no way to explain to them that the Repubs are playing them for fools or as ‘useful idiots’? Of course, not using those terms in the explanation.
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: We need to show/tell/explain to these folks that the GOP (Getting Ours Party) is baiting them with the crumbs, so they can raid their pension funds, etc.
GxB
Woah! Sorry I’m late to the party, but very well done VidaLoca! Some hard hitting stuff there that prods us where it hurts. I’ve ducked away from politics/social concerns as of late as the sheer aggravation (for lack of proper profanity) is really getting to me. I’ve resigned to this is the way things are now and the way it’s going to be.
I tried to find words to explain how Wisconsinites are in a sense voting in their “best” interests no matter how shortsighted, but could not find them. This post goes a long way, and I really can’t find fault with what you’ve said. Can’t say I know what the future will bring, but I can say that FYIGM mentality has a nasty history and has never worked out in the long run.
Paul in KY
@danielx: That last quote was also from late Sen Everett Dirkson of Illinois.
Paul in KY
@sandy: IMO, a whole lot of them are single issue voters. Whether that be anti-choice, guns, racists, etc. the Repubs really use well the politics of resentment.
Tom
@Anne Laurie:
The Bread Crumb party is a wonderful appelation for the Rethugs.
geg6
I just can’t past the whole idea that these people aren’t stupid. I’m sorry but I come from these very people and they are just. fucking. stupid. And the only self-interest for which they are voting is white self-interest. I deal with them every day. They are my neighbors, many of my friends, and the people who were my parents’ and brothers’ and sisters’ peers. I come from a working class Catholic family in a white flight town peopled by blue collar steelworkers and related industries. A bastion of the Democratic Party from FDR to Kennedy. LBJ’s civil rights and war on poverty started the fissures within the party and the Nixon and Reagan administrations, both of which presided over the death of the steel industry and union, had them flocking to the Republicans all due to dog whistles, region-wide economic disaster be damned. And it’s only gotten worse now that Western PA is forty years into it’s sad and seemingly never-ending ride at the bottom the economic barrel. You want to see stupid, come to western PA. I’m not going to pretend that they aren’t stupid. I want better for them than they want for themselves, but I’ve spent over forty years trying my best to convince them to want the same and they don’t want it if it means the blahs get any portion of it.
low-tech cyclist
Don’t have time to read through 160+ comments to see if someone has said this already, but I’ve got to take this on:
1)
Agreed. But despite that:
2)
I think this is bullshit. Messaging is essential. How else are you going to know you don’t have anything meaningful to say, unless you try to say it?
a) As Atrios says, the Dems need to tell a simple story: “you should vote for us because ___________” and fill in the blank. If the stuff in the blank sounds stupid or condescending, then either you need to include different stuff the Dems are doing in your message, or the Dems simply need to do better stuff. A quick search for that ‘different stuff’ should make it clear which is true.
b) And when the Dems do stuff, they need to stand up and defend it, not run away from it, whether it’s Obamacare or what. Instead, they dart back and forth like squirrels in the road as your car bears down on them. That’s bad for two reasons: (i) you never convince anybody that you’ve got anything good to sell them if they’re not proud of it, and (ii) the Dems actually have some good stuff to sell, even to working class whites.
Take one tiny thing from the Affordable Care Act: the free annual checkup. One minor detail of a huge bill, but it’s a real freakin’ benefit for people, especially for those of us getting up in years. (Who tend to be the ones the Dems are losing.) That checkup is free each year, no co-pay, no nothing, whether you’ve met your deductible already or not. Free. Totally free.
And you don’t have to worry about losing your insurance on account of what the doc might find, because the ACA says you can’t lose your insurance, or even have to pay more, due to pre-existing conditions. That checkup is a chance to find out about problems early, and fix them before they cripple you. They’re not a potential threat to your way of life. They’re a complete benefit.
Tell me that isn’t worth at least that $100 from Scott Walker. Tell me that.
This is what ‘messaging’ involves: standing up for the ACA and reminding your constituents that the
Dems are doing stuff like this for you. Reminding them that if your kid doesn’t have insurance, s/he can stay on yours until age 26. Telling them that due to Obamacare’s regulation of hospitals, you’re way less likely to get sick with something new while you’re in the hospital than you were five years ago, and that fact has saved 50,000 lives already. You’ll get better in the hospital, not worse. Because of Obamacare. Oh yeah: and you may or may not have saved money on your insurance due to Obamacare, but when you get sick, your insurance won’t be some hollow thing that turns out not to pay any of your bills: it’ll actually cover you now.
That’s messaging. Where’s the condescension, where is the noblesse oblige? If they’re getting a benefit because of something the Dems did, make damn sure they know it didn’t just materialize out of thin air. Take fucking credit.
Maybe people think what you have to sell is good, or maybe they don’t. But there’s nothing condescending about taking credit for what you’ve done for them, telling people what you’re going to try to do next, and then letting them decide whether they like that better or worse than what the other guy is promising.
And if what you’ve done for them, or what you’d like to do next, doesn’t sound like something you’d like to run on, then it’s time to come up with something better to offer the voters.
3) Class war: politics in America being what it is, that “something better” won’t be class war, other than really around-the-margins stuff. But as your Scott Walker example demonstrates, that around-the-margins stuff matters in the lives of real people. If you can get them $100 here, $200 there, and you make sure you know where it came from, then you’ve got something to run on. Make sure they get paid time and a half for OT. Make 2 weeks’ vacation and a week of sick leave a right, not a favor from your employer. Stuff like that.
lol
Love this article.
“Democrats are dumb for thinking Republicans are voting against their self-interest. They’re just voting for their economic self-interest. Of course, it’s not *actually* in their economic self-interest as I’ll explain in great detail. But Democrats shouldn’t call it stupid because reasons.”
Yes, there’s a strong point in there that liberals could stand to be less condescending and more cognizant of privilege when talking to voters. But jesus, you really do undermine your own premise by portraying Republican voters as easily bribed dupes who will trade a dollar today for a penny tomorrow.
LAC
@geg6: amen. And what you said is the crux of the problem: maybe they are that stupid and resentful. The money our family makes should make me be more of a republican, but I cannot and will not be a member of a party that exploits stupidity and gins up racial and ethnic resentments for votes. Frankly after 50 years and a month of bad news with these police shootings, I am tired of putting on my “magical negro” hat and trying to help some sheltered frightened white moron see that the affordable care act is the right direction for this country or that welfare recipients are not all lazy black folks, or that unions have been undermined by the very same party he or she votes for. We have the numbers in our favor over time- I would rather focus my attention on the changing demographics and less time intellectualizing why bob and sue of blah free town vote the way they do, because it is pretty obvious.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Dalunay: Dems promised and failed to deliver to the largest generation yet. I’m sure that will help us out in the long run.
Paul in KY
@low-tech cyclist: Excellent points! Never-will-be Senator Grimes wouldn’t hardly mention Affordable Care Act, etc.
If you give the people the choice between a fake Republican & a real Republican, they’ll take the real Republican every time. As true today as it was 70 years ago.
Linnaeus
@VidaLoca:
Let me clarify: I’m not obviating the need for activism outside of the party. I do some of that myself. I was speaking in terms of election time – like it or not, the Democratic Party remains the only real vehicle for enacting progressive policy, at least at the state and federal level. It’s different at the local level, where a lot of elections are nonpartisan (although even nonpartisan candidates are typically part of a political party’s network). I certainly agree that’s there’s plenty to be done and we shouldn’t wait around for the party, but actively try to move it in the right direction where we can.
Nick
Horseshit article. People in this country are so fucking stupid (objectively compared to other economically developed countries) and to deny otherwise is to deny our country’s greatest threat. The demise of public schooling.
Bottom line, money needs to start flowing back into schools, and education needs to become a priority again in this country.
Ps-And fuck all this “entitled” nonsense. My wife and I bust ass at the local elementary school that is 80% English second language. Raising money for supplies, musical instruments, field trips, that have been cut completely from the budget. Education is the key, all this other shit is window dressing.
gorram
I don’t want to deny the really important racial dimension to this, but there’s other elements in play as well. The working class of color is something *entirely* different from the White working class, not only because of the direct politics of race, but because racial inequality shapes their economic threats and opportunities. People are even less willing to talk about it, but there’s a similar different set of experiences for the LGBT working class (especially for trans women). I just keep thinking of this vox piece that when you look up the numbers was labeling households with 20K-30K a year the “LGBT middle class” when an unqualified “middle class” in general gets regularly defined as having six figure annual incomes.
I understand the point that an extra $100-$200 is a lifesaver to a lot of cisgender, straight, White working class folks, but there’s another side to it as well. That’s the small gesture it takes to win that group’s loyalty because of how otherwise secure they actually are. Sure, Democrats could try and beat the Republicans to supporting that specific demographic, but they’ve perfected the art of supporting them enough to keep things together and loudly messaged that they aren’t going to rock the boat on all the other socio-economic factors in their favor: White privilege, cis privilege, straight privilege, and even to some extent male privilege. Democrats can (and generally do) offer that group more direct economic assistance, but at a huge material and psychological cost of addressing the systemic inequalities that benefit it.
In short, why aren’t we trying to increase the really miserable turnout among communities of color and to a certain extent the LGBT community as well? Why aren’t we focusing on addressing the concerns of the hinted-at renters (overwhelmingly non-White and when White overwhelmingly LGBT) rather than leaving that discussion for another day? Why are we trying to capture the constituency that conservatives have built rather than create an alternative base? Why do we want (part of) the GOP’s base so badly?
Maybe there are valid answers to those questions that make this endeavor make sense, but at least to my eyes it seems kind of fruitless for all the reasons laid out by the OP: these people *are* calculating their best interest and probably aren’t actually all that far off. The fact that the GOP is selling them some minor relief with a poison pill of service cuts is awful, but also a feature not a bug when they perceive those cuts as giving them an edge in the market over other Have Nots. Some of them might even realize how much it’s going to hurt them and theirs, but they probably don’t care, because it’s going to hurt others who are already down a notch or few below them even more in the race for what few opportunities still exist. It’s a scorched earth plan, and those tend to be brutal but also effective.
Sorry for going at this for so long in the comments, it’s just such a key crossroads here for the progressive/Democratic movement or whatever. We have to make a choice about which working class we want to associate with and what’s more mobilize through support.
JoJo Dancer
I apologize in advance for the word explosion.
Sometimes the way working class white people vote can make me want to tear out my hair. I find myself wanting to tell the whole lot of them to go fvck themselves forever. However, based on the idea that some of those people might be necessary to win elections here and there and “Hey, you slack-jawed cretinous moron, vote for us!” is not a winning political slogan, I have tried to look at the situation from a different angle. So here it is.
I think when we talk about how the white working class is stupid or that they vote against their interests and that is a sign that they are stupid, we conflate a lack of sophistication of political thought with a lack of intelligence. In my experience (my anecdotal evidence is in fact perfect, ironclad fact for all time), this is not the case. I work as a teacher in a working-class suburb, dealing with many of the very same white working-class people that vote against their interests, as well as the non-white working class with whom they share economic interests. None of them are what I would call stupid. Not the students, not their parents, not the community as a whole. You can explain things to them, and they understand. They get it, just like smarty-pants liberal intellectual types like me. It isn’t hard to get them to understand how useless Walker’s little nickel-and-dime tax cuts are in the long term, or the medium or short term, and it can be done without condescension. When presented with a real potential alternative, they’re willing to listen and consider. But here’s the thing, in my experience. Most of them spend only a minimal amount of time thinking about the long –term and medium-term negatives of Walkerism or Republican policies. In fact, most of them spend very little of their time thinking about long-term economic and political consequences at all. For those of us that frequent a political blog, these subjects are not only something we consider important to America’s future, they are subjects we all like to talk about and think about. In a sense, it is both work and recreation. In my case, I’m also a social studies teacher. I enjoy these subjects so much I want to teach teenagers about them, which frankly makes me something of a crazy person. So of course, I know a certain amount and can make all kinds of smart sounding declarations about what is to be done. And this is true of all political junkies, regardless of where they stand in the socioeconomic spectrum. But most people aren’t like that. We all know from arguing with wingnuts that even college-educated wealthy white people–the self-appointed elite, or real Americans, or whatever–can believe a vast spectrum of stunningly dim or utterly false ideas. Furthermore, we all complain about the “low-information voter,” not without some reason. The thing is, that is most people. People with free time don’t usually spend it reading about political policy, because they only care about it at specific times, when it affects them directly. The working class families that I deal with barely have free time to begin with. And what time they do have, they don’t use to read about politics or economics. This isn’t to say that they don’t care about economic issues—they face all kinds of dire economic issues every day, so at that level, yes, they care about economic issues. However, they don’t read Keynes in their spare time, or peruse political blogs written by political scientists, or anything like that. They just don’t. For the vast majority of them, it’s not their thing. When I try to teach, say, economics, no matter how interesting or relevant I try to make it, when it starts getting at all technical, my students eyes glaze over. This doesn’t make them stupid, or their parents stupid, or the community they live in stupid—it makes them much like the majority of the country. (It may be that America in general is just unusually stupid, of course, but that doesn’t make the white working class ESPECIALLY stupid compared to anyone else). Their interests are elsewhere, and they only pay attention to the issues of the day if the issues in question have some sort of direct impact on their lives. This ultimately means that they miss much of the information that they might need to make better voting choices. Based on the information that they
are likely to read or to hear, Scott Walker’s bullshit policies will seem, if not great, at least mildly helpful during crap times. Scottie will save you a few nickels and dimes—what Democrat will do that? Obviously, that line of thinking is wrong, but again, based on the information they probably have in front of them and that they are likely to look at, it will seem decently logical to them. The working class people that I have talked to and dealt with that have typically been the best-informed and the least easily duped have been members of unions. I found out about Walker’s act 10 plans before he was elected by reading a bulletin board the SEIU had put up at UW-Milwaukee. The members of at least that union had a much more progressive, forward-thinking, long-term mentality. The SEIU went to great pains to engage and educate their members on the economics and politics they were facing with Walker, and the members I spoke with were very informed, just the kind of aware working class we would want. Not surprisingly, Walker tried to bust unions, as they are a source not just of money for his political opponents, but also as a source of education on politics and economics for working class people by working class people. But of course, unions no longer have either the strength or the reach they once did, which means that one very trustworthy source of worthwhile information for working class people is no longer as accessible for that working class. Instead, they’re left with the mainstream media, their friends, or worse, dingleberries that their friends listen to, like Mark Belling.
This is why, even though I am at times sympathetic to the claim that working class white voters vote stupidly or can act like they are stupid, because Christ on a crutch, sometimes it is true, I try not to think of them as actually being stupid people, no matter how frustrating it is that they vote for a worthless cur like Walker.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
It’s pretty simple.
Get the niggers out of the Democratic Party and poor whites may begin to vote for them.
They don’t give a shit about policy.
They give a shit about hating niggers. And hating God for creating niggers.
burritoboy
“In fact, most of them spend very little of their time thinking about long-term economic and political consequences at all.”
Which is the definition of stupid. Ok, let’s not call it stupid. Let’s be nice and call it “cognitively challenged”. Will that make things better and make them like the Democrats more? No, it won’t. Because they’ll still be cognitively challenged tomorrow and remain easy prey for con artists.
VidaLoca
@Paul in KY:
It would make more sense to me to start out by putting forward a political program that addresses the destruction that the last 40 years of deindustrialization have caused in people’s lives. What you’re talking about sounds like scolding, I don’t think it will work.
@geg6:
Given that the globalization and financialization of what had been an industrial economy spelled the end of the steel industry in western PA. The unions were never set up to deal with a situation like that, not from a legal point of view and not from the point of view of their standard operating procedure — which was to bargain the contract, service the grievances, collect the dues, and the the Democrats take care of politics. The Democrats had no solutions to the crisis and no explanation for what has happening. When people really needed the Democrats the Democrats were nowhere to be found. Into that vacuum moved the Republicans. Let me pose a hypothetical: would it have worked out differently if, instead of ineffectual resistance at best, or betrayal at worst, the Democrats had organized and fought back?
To your point about people being, in fact, stupid. How do you organize, how do you persuade, how do you win people to your vision of a better life and a more just society — while holding the idea that they’re as stupid as you represent here? How can that work? Have you ever seen anyone pull that off? I gather that you’re burned out any maybe you’ve given up but other people still have to go on and figure this out.
GR
Late to the game, but I am very confused by this from VidaLoca:
“To your point about people being, in fact, stupid. How do you organize, how do you persuade, how do you win people to your vision of a better life and a more just society — while holding the idea that they’re as stupid as you represent here? How can that work? Have you ever seen anyone pull that off?”
Of course I have. Have you never watched Fox News, never encountered any propaganda from other right-wing funded media outlets, never heard the speeches given by the Scott Walkers of the world? The first rule of playing a rube is keeping the rube ignorant of their role in the game.
Any reasonable reading of the bad guys’ playbook is that they not only think that their supporters are as stupid as represented by greg6, but they are actively and relentlessly doing everything in their power to nurture that stupidity. Do you actually read this differently? The Forces of Evil just have a different vision of what constitutes “a better life” (more money and power for rich white folks) and “a more just society” (same) than you do.
Chris
@LAC:
Dear God, this.
@gorram:
DEAR GOD, THIS! THIS! THIS!
So, another round of “woe is us! We’ve offended the white working and middle class with our heavy handed elitist city slickerism! Oh, how can we ever set this right?”, then? Is there any other group whose approval Democrats spend this much time desperately worrying about? Hispanics, blacks, the younger (and least white in history) generation? You know, groups that may not be wild about the Dems but also don’t have the knee jerk loathing of the party that White Working And Middle Class People Who Lean Republican have learned over the last fifty years? Why not? Why the continued obsession with winning back the people who left us instead of cultivating those we’ve ignored for so long? Why, in short, do so many Democrats insist on behaving like broken-hearted rejects, stalking and pining over the girl that dumped them years ago and has screamed herself hoarse ever since to explain that she isn’t interested in getting back together, and racking their brains to figure out how to make her like them again, because surely, this is all just a tragic and absurd misunderstanding?
I mean, yeah, sure, I understand why we did it for years by running people like Carter and Clinton – the country was simply far too white and too socially conservative not to. But now that that’s changing, Democratic strategy should change accordingly – and based on Obama’s electoral coalition, I’d say it has. Build on that, and maybe you’ll get somewhere. Keep pining over the mouth breathers who think Scott Walker’s on their side, and you’ll stay exactly where the Democratic Party has been since the late sixties.
And the hell with this bullshit idea that these voters are only reaching for the GOP because the Democrats are failing to lead. The exodus started in the late sixties, years and years before Third Way/DLCism took over the party. The 1966/68 backlash came right after Lyndon Johnson had pushed through more programs to help the poor, working and middle classes than any president since FDR thirty years earlier – Medicare and Medicaid came from that era. And they didn’t care, because the simple fact that he gave benefits to These People too instead of restricting them to whites trumps everything he did for them and their families.
Paul in KY
@Chris: I think it’s because there’s a shitload of them. Plus, a lot of them (or their parents) used to vote for us once upon a time.
VOR
Minnesota saw a lot of this story from 2002-2010 under Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty. He inherited a shaky budget from the 2001 recession and immediately had financial challenges. But he had promised the Taxpayer’s League, a local version of Grover Norquist, that there would be no tax increases. So instead Minnesota got increased fees. Every rainy day fund was drained. The annual payments from the Tobacco settlement were sold off to Wall Street for one time money. Local government aid was cut, which was a win for the Republicans because the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were both the largest recipients and Democratic strongholds. Financial games were played like refusing to account for inflation in budget forecasts. Higher Ed took cuts too, including changes (i.e cuts) to the traditional tuition reciprocity between Wisconsin and Minnesota colleges.
The result was relentless local property tax increases and local services cuts in things like Police, Fire, and road repair. Which of course, was cast as the Republican-run State being fiscally responsible while those local Mayors and school boards were tax and spend liberals. Transportation took a big hit too. One of the factors in the I-35W bridge collapse in 2007 was that they were using the cheapest possible method of monitoring the bridge even though it was known to be structurally obsolete. (Note: Nobody knew exactly how bad it was until after it collapsed.)
Pawlenty also spent much of his time after re-election in 2006 positioning himself as a VP candidate. The 2008 RNC convention in St. Paul was meant to be his showcase but he was shoved aside in favor of Sarah Palin. The I-35W bridge rebuilding picked the highest bidder, an out-of-state firm, in part because they promised to build the new bridge in time for the convention. But much like Scott Walker, it was clear he had larger ambitions after being re-elected Governor.
Minnesota dodged a bullet in 2010 by electing Mark Dayton, who ran on an explicit platform of tax increases on top earners. It was a close election. But the difference in the economy and job growth in Minnesota vs. Wisconsin since 2010 seems like a natural economic experiment.
MaxFrost
@Baud: @VidaLoca: The Democratic Party had no problem shipping out any job that could be “outsourced” in the name of “free trade”. They love their secret trade deals. And they love Wall Street as well. I suspect this lack of support has less to do with what Republicans offer and more to do with how Democrats sell out.