I was fascinated to hear over the weekend an audio clip by Shawn Fain, leader of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), that did something you hear more and more these days: conflating the working class--here, specifically the striking UAW workers--with rural concepts like rednecks. Here's what Fain said:
They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana. They look at you and see somebody they would never have over for dinner or let ride on their yacht or fly on their private jet.
* * *
They think they know us, but us autoworkers know better. We may be foul mouthed, but we're strategic. We may get fired up, but we're disciplined. And we may get rowdy. But we're organized.
The NPR story continues:
Fain was also eager to reassure UAW members that the union's unprecedented strike strategy is working. The union struck all three companies at once, but started with just a handful of plants.
While making these comments, Fain was wearing a t-shirt that said "Eat the Rich."
I very much appreciate what some would characterize as Fain's open class warfare. I think it's necessary. And I think it's honest. And I believe he is accurate in stating that the corporate leadership of GM and the other automobile manufacturers would not, in fact, rub elbows with the UAW's rank and file.
Greenberg writes under the headline, "Democrats, Speak to Working Class Discontent." My favorite thing about this piece for The American Prospect is Greenberg's focus on coalition-building among working-class folks, across racial and ethnic lines. Here's an excerpt:
Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers. The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics—a daunting 12 points off their margin since 2016, according to Ruy Teixeira.
* * *
After studying working-class voters for nearly four decades, I believe the trajectory can be shifted or reversed. But there is no room for error. There is no room for fools. There is no time for strategists who look down on or rule out voters who fail a purist civics test. There is also no room for sensibilities that keep us from clearly understanding our options.
* * *
The emergence of Barack Obama signaled a shift in Democratic appeals. During the 2008 primary, Obama became the “change candidate” because of his early opposition to the Iraq War, not because he spoke to working-class discontent. At the Democratic Convention four years earlier, Obama had told a unifying story as an African American who saw only one United States of America, not separate Americas divided by race and partisanship. In focus groups before the 2008 convention, I was surprised by how many white workers were open to what would be the first African American president. Many of them would have scored high on any “racial resentment” scale, but they were not blaming Blacks for their current condition. They were blaming high-paid CEOs for outsourcing American jobs, and they were blaming NAFTA. Many decided Obama was different from other Black leaders and might govern for the whole country, not just work for “his own people.” (emphasis mine).
If you govern for the whole country, you know that two-thirds of all registered voters never graduated from a four-year college. Well before the financial crash in 2008, they were angry. Employment in manufacturing had plummeted after 2000 from almost 18 million to 14 million jobs. Innovations in technology and structural changes in the economy were raising worker productivity, but the top 1 percent and then the top .01 percent were seizing all the gains in income.
During the 2008 campaign, James Carville and I, as heads of Democracy Corps, and John Podesta, the director of the Center for American Progress, convened a monthly meeting at my house in Washington to help fashion a Democratic strategy. Among the attendees was David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief. We created an “economy project” whose polling showed what should have been obvious. The Democrats’ most powerful message called for an end to trickle-down economics and a focus on creating American jobs and a government that worked for the middle class again.
But despite a deepening economic crisis, Obama didn’t talk much about the economy in his 2008 campaign. Under the banner “Change We Can Believe In,” he promised to get beyond “the bitterness” that “consumed Washington” to make health care affordable, cut middle-class taxes, and “bring our troops home.”
Cross-posted (with additional excerpts about rural voters) to Legal Ruralism.
I am a huge fan of Thomas Edsall, who writes regularly for the New York Times, but I missed this column earlier this month until today. The headline is provocative, "There's a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers." As is typical of Edsall, he marshals recent academic research on a topic. You have to get pretty deep into this column to get to the rural part of this one, which otherwise focuses on class and regional inequality, but I'm just going to highlight below those rural bits. The rural bits, by the way, could also be framed as regional inequality. Edsall writes:
I asked RodrÃguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:
In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.
The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.
“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University; Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics; and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article “Progressive Cities: Urban-Rural Polarization of Social Values and Economic Development Around the World.”
when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”
The urban-rural conflict between postmaterialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”
I'm thinking "postmaterialistic values" sound like what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs"--those that folks with other pressing problems (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in their lives solved then have the time to worry and think about.
In an email, Luca elaborated:
There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in second demographic transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.
Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”
Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.
The RodrÃguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.
Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.
In their October 2017 paper “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”
There's so much more to Edsall's column, which I'll try to get to in another post focusing more on class than geography.
Thomas Edsall writes frequently for the New York Times, and his columns are always worth reading. Here's an excerpt from the one last Sunday, which touches on rural and small-town America in his quotes from scholars who are looking at issues of the day (emphasis mine).
Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she certainly sees threats, “but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”
At the same time, she cautioned,
the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.
In other words, Hochschild is attending to inequities across regions. The column continues:
Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.
“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”
The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,
is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.
Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:
If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.
Then there is this from Westwood that references the culture wars (again, emphasis mine).
The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,
must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.
Here is an interesting exchange about that question from "The Argument" podcast with Jane Coaston, interviewing Matt Taibbi and Michelle Cottle of the New York Times Editorial Board. The topic of this issue, "Is Fox News Really All that Powerful?," dated June 30, 2021. The first comment is from journalist Taibbi.
If you ask what is Fox, who do they represent? They represent a lot of people, but apart from that, you can’t really say they’re backing a major swath of the institutional power in this country as you might have 20 years ago, or during the Bush years, when Fox News was what you watch to see what the people who are getting us into the war in Iraq were thinking. That’s not so much the case anymore.
I think there’s been a shift in terms of the political picture in this country, and it’s very much expressed by, for me, the censorship issue.
Jane Coaston
Michelle, what do you think Matt is getting right and wrong about this intersection of power. In my view, wealthy people tend to support whatever will keep them wealthy.
Michelle Cottle
I don’t think you can lump everything together. And I don’t think it works just as purely an economic proposition, especially because populism in this country may have economic roots, but the way it plays out in politics is not economic. It’s kind of ethnonationalist. What Trump was pitching was not an economic populism, that’s not where his policy —
Matt Taibbi
That’s not true.
Michelle Cottle
— that’s not where his policies went. What he was doing had a certain economic flair to it. But when you look at what really motivates people, it was the immigration issue. It was the, they’re coming for your kids issue. It’s — they’re destroying the American way of life issue. So it gets beyond economics pretty quickly.
Jane Coaston
And I would say — I wrote a piece a while back that, essentially, Trump ran as one thing and governed as another thing, and ran as kind of someone who could be all things to all people type of candidate, and then governed basically as Mitch McConnell.
Matt Taibbi
Well, I covered Trump’s campaign, so I was at his speeches. And it’s absolutely not true that there was no economic component to his address in 2016. It was a huge part of the picture. Obviously, race and immigration were central issues for Trump. There is absolutely no doubt about that. And he played on some of the worst instincts of the electorate.
But there were enormous similarities between the Trump movement and, for instance, the Bernie Sanders movement. And I heard people who I interviewed over and over and over again responding to all kinds of things in Trump’s message. I heard Trump argue against the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies. I heard him going after the press. The elitist press was a huge part of his presentation.
Michelle Cottle
That’s not economics. We’re talking economics —
Matt Taibbi
It’s a class issue.
Michelle Cottle
No, no, we’re not talking about class and culture, because the cosmopolitan —
Matt Taibbi
I’m talking about class.
Michelle Cottle
Well, we were talking about economics, and that’s different. His pitch in 2016, as Jane points out, was not how he governed, and it’s not how he ran in 2020. So he pretty quickly discovered that the key to maintaining his popularity wasn’t to actually provide a huge tax cut for the struggling people. It was to tell them that the immigrants were coming for their jobs.
I'm copying and pasting from my other blogs, but here I pause to ask: are the hunters the white working class? or are the white female strippers? or are both? If both, does this come down to a story about gender or is there a component of intersectionality?
A friend drew my attention to this story in South Dakota's Argus-Leader last month. The headline is "Stripping, sex-trafficking, and small towns looking the other way," and it seems to support my long-standing argument that law and legal institutions are less present, less effective in rural areas, in part for socio-spatial reasons. That is, material spatiality disables law because of the challenge and cost of policing vast, sparsely populated places. Further, material spatiality reinforces (and is reinforced by) social expectations of law's anemic presence and role.
Here's an excerpt from Jeremy Fugleberg's story in the Argus-Leader.
Pheasant hunting season was once a homespun South Dakota tradition. But increasingly it is a commercial enterprise, one that comes with a dark side: sex trafficking and pop-up strip clubs that cater to hunters here for a good time.
The hunting season's dark side stands in stark contrast to South Dakota’s friendly, clean-cut image. It can be easy to overlook by small farm towns that increasingly rely on hosting a flood of rich pheasant hunters to offset losses from troubled agricultural markets.
Pop-up strip clubs, while legal, have their own place in the shadow. They can trap freelance dancers in a web of exorbitant fees, throwing them into debt and making them vulnerable to being illegally exploited by traffickers and hunters.
The story features Frank Day's bar in Dallas, in Gregory County (population 4,271), which has "become legendary as a South Dakota destination for groups of hunters, mostly male, sometimes wealthy, looking for after-dark entertainment."
South Dakota is dawning to the realization that human trafficking isn’t just a big-city problem. It’s essentially modern slavery that does happen in the state, as (usually) men, control and manipulate (usually) women and sell their bodies for sex.
It’s a shocking practice, one that can be masked as simply providing entertainment for hunters in remote communities.
“These small towns allow this to happen because it’s a social norm, right? 'Boys will be boys,' that’s what we tell ourselves,” said Tifanie Petro, co-chair of the South Dakota West River Human Trafficking Task Force. “There’s this social acceptance because, ‘that’s just what happens here, that’s just what goes on during the rally, or during the pheasant season.’”
Fugleberg suggests that Gregory County authorities turn a blind eye to exploitation of strippers by establishments like Frank Day's, which becomes "No Wives Ranch" during pheasant season. Fascinating.
So, what is the onus on local government to protect the women who come to work as strippers? What would government protection look like in that context? Is the exploitation mostly economic? or is it something else?
The story suggests that these are the secret ingredients to sex trafficking:
South Dakota’s two largest tourist events, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and pheasant hunting season, both have the ingredients that attract sex traffickers: lots of men a long way from home, looking for a good time, with money to spend. (emphasis added)
Interesting. Maybe so. I always assumed there was a pimp or profiteer or clear-cut criminal who was making a lot of $$$. Is Frank Day's Bar making a lot of money during the period it is the "No Wives Ranch"?
Are these the ingredients to a patriarchal society, turning a blind eye to women not earning what they deserve. But does that equate to sex trafficking?
I noticed a few years ago at conferences that what we previously called prostitution is now widely labeled "sex trafficking." Hmmm. Is all prostitution sex-trafficking? To be more precise, is all sale of sex for $$$ sex-trafficking? or only when a man or men are involved and are making the profit.
I really appreciate Fugelberg's reporting, but I'm trying to sort things out here.
Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism and Feminist Legal Theory.
Those who live in liberal areas on the coasts of America have doubtlessly heard of (and probably support) ideals such as celebrating diversity, practicing cultural sensitivity, and finding culturally appropriate solutions for problems. These values are generally mentioned when talking about interactions with people from different countries – “cross-cultural encounters.” Why are the same principles not applied to interactions among Americans? It’s clear that people in America live and think in very different ways. In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the “culture war” which seems to exist between the liberal coasts and the rest of America and the impact that it may have had on the 2016 Presidential election and the 2018 midterms. Our political polarization and vilification of the other side show that “cultural sensitivity” between Americans is lacking in many cases.
I’ve spent most of my time lately at universities in California, which tend to be bastions of the liberal coastal elite, so I will primarily address those on that side of the “culture war.” The values we hold regarding diversity and cultural sensitivity can and should be applied to our fellow Americans. I dare say that those values would have the same positive effects intra-nationally that they have when we apply them internationally.
Consider the value placed on finding culturally-appropriate solutions. We’ve come to recognize that imposing the American way of solving problems on our friends abroad often backfires. At best, it’s less effective because of its blindness to culturally important factors, which are left unaddressed. At worst, it’s colonization and oppression. We recognize that locally-led efforts which are culturally informed are far better.
Similarly, culturally informed solutions can be applied to domestic problems. Rural and white working-class populations have been struggling with drug epidemics. The impacts of meth on rural and WCW people have been depicted in films such as "Winter’s Bone" and the documentary "Meth Storm", and the opioid epidemic has also hit hard in these communities (see responses by the USDA and CDC). What would a culturally sensitive effort to address this problem look like? At least one already exists. Teen Challenge is a faith-based addiction recovery center. The Central Valley chapter, based in the Fresno area, has been around for three years and has grown rapidly in that time. It now has 170 beds.
This recovery program is attuned to Central Valley culture in at least two ways. First, it is faith-based. Coastal liberals tend to be suspicious of anything that adds religious practice to another activity, such as addiction recovery. Yet Teen Challenge has been quite successful using this model. Moreover, an additional cultural benefit flows from this: community support. Because faith is a value for many people in the local community, Teen Challenge has strong community support. This is crucial and brings us to the second point of cultural sensitivity. Many rural communities are marked by a lack of anonymity. Last Sunday, Teen Challenge gave a presentation at a Central Valley church that has supported their efforts. Two of the young men who spoke at the presentation had attended the local school and were known to the church congregation. Because Teen Challenge enjoys strong community support, the lack of anonymity was less of a hindrance to them entering the recovery program. In fact, community members referred them to the program and supported them along the way. The program is able to use the interconnectedness of these communities to its advantage.
Despite the fact that Central Valley Teen Challenge is locally-led and culturally attuned, I imagine that many coastal liberals would be very reluctant to support it because faith-based programs are not a part of our culture. Colleagues and friends, don’t let cultural difference lead to antagonism. Our culture has done a lot of work in building an appreciation of cultural difference and working to learn from those who are different from us. In some ways, the difference here is smaller – the people on the other side of the “culture war” are our fellow Americans, people with whom we share history and government and future. Please don’t let the fact that this culture is a domestic one prevent you from using the valuable skills of cultural understanding that you have developed in different contexts.
This is the final part
of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an
emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses elite cultural
superiority in their criticisms of Trump and professional wrestling, and what liberal
elites can learn about communicating with the white working class from professional
wrestling.
Are there any lessons to be learned from professional wrestling?
Maybe not. Despite changes to the blood,
sex, and violence that characterized pro wrestling during the 1990s and 2000s,
the sport remains an oft-maligned curiosity to elites that many would
say carries little to no cultural value. According to Common
Sense Media, an organization that recommends media for children, WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (a leading pro wrestling show) is “crass, outlandish, and not recommended.” The
organization further writes that, “parents need to know that this sporting
event-meets-soap opera is brimming with non-stop physical violence, including
body slams, headlocks, knees to the groin, smacks, punches, and kicks.”
It’s also quite tempting to dismiss any possible value in
pro wrestling not only because of the violence inherent to the sport, but also
because until relatively recently matches were replete with extreme racism
and sexism.
For example, the
Mexicools were a group of unmasked luchadores who wore stereotypical
Mexican attire like cowboy hats and bandanas and carried leaf blowers and rode in
on lawnmowers in their first appearance. Women were also frequently
confined to marginalized roles and hyper-masculinized if they dared
to deviate at all from the oversexualized, feminine norm. Women in the ring
existed solely for the male gaze, as either hyper-masculinized comic relief or arm-candy for male wrestlers.
Since Trump’s election, elites have written many negative comparisons between Trump’s presidency and professional
wrestling in the opinion pages. To many elites, pro wrestling is the perfect analogy for Trump: low-brow, racist, sexist, violent, and possessing a shaky relationship with the truth.
To be fair to these commentators, over the years Trump has done much to earn this comparison: at first by sponsoring the wrestling contests, then by throwing thousands of dollars from the rafters in a dramatic stunt, and later by being a physical participant in Wrestlemania 23. All this involvement with pro wrestling earned Trump a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, making his election the “first time in history a WWE Hall of Famer would ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.”
Indeed, there are many reasons why comparisons between Trump and pro wrestling are likely deserved. For example, who can blame commentators for drawing comparisons when the biggest
donor to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation was the WWE? Or when Trump
posts GIFs of him bodyslamming the CNN logo on Twitter?
However, it’s pretty clear when one scratches the surface of these criticisms even a little that the real target of many of these opinion pieces are the white
working class. Dripping with condescension, these critical pieces often bear the same hallmarks of arguments for cultural
superiority that are frequently levied by elites at the white working class. Fans
of pro wrestling are reduced to caricatures of racism, sexism, violence, and
yes, white trash. Some commentators have even tried to equate fandom of wrestling or
other violent sports with support
for Trump, as if by consuming this low-brow, culturally inferior sports entertainment it causes you a more gullible victim for Trump’s lies.
Professional wrestling is the perfect example of a sport
that has acquired distributional
significance, because it is strongly classed, both internally and externally. Externally, pro wrestling embodies the virtues of the lower classes in open displays
of strength and violence. Internally, as discussed in
the prior part in this series, wrestlers purposefully work to class the sport
by playing on class conflict in their backstories. What elites seek by putting down pro wrestling
are the social profits they obtain by outwardly differentiating their own
choices in consumption from the working class.
However, while the elites may continue to thumb their noses
at the nation’s first pro wrestling president, they should probably take note
that the animosity between wrestling fans and elites is mutual. Like the white-working class heroes that dominated pro wrestling storylines in past decades, white
working class wrestling fans don’t very much like being told what to think or
how to act.
Outside of the opinion pages, a different type of class conflict is happening in the ring. One Appalachian wrestler from Kentucky has
capitalized on tension between elites and the working class by dubbing himself the
Progressive Liberal. This uniquely Trump-era wrestler wears shirts emblazoned with Hillary Clinton’s
face and trunks that bear Obama's face or say "Blue Wave". He berates
the Appalachian crowd with airs of cultural superiority, calling
them “Fox News maggots” and riffing on country music saying, “it’s simple and
it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.” The wrestler also throws out nasty political
one-liners like, “You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great
secretary of state” or “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points.
Bullet points of knowledge.”
I wonder how much right wingers will like the new gear I’m debuting this weekend. pic.twitter.com/SGzPd65w9a
— The Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards (@ProgressLib804) September 26, 2018
The Progressive Liberal acts out what white working-class fans fear from coastal elites: cultural superiority weaponized into a threat against their existence. The Progressive Liberal's patronizing espousal
of elite liberal values makes him the perfect “heel”
(i.e. the villain in a wrestling contest) for the Appalachian white working class because he
threatens and denigrates their way of life.
So perhaps, instead of adding fuel to the fire and sneering
at the “the
lowbrow guilty pleasure” of professional wrestling, liberal elites
should instead look to pro wrestling for clues on how they can recapture
the white working class. It’s impossible to ignore how the average
WWE viewer is exactly the sort-of person that Democrats failed
to reach in this last election – white, male, low-income, and possessing less than a college degree. Quite simply, pro wrestling offers a
unique insight into the white working class in America, primarily because they
are its
biggest fans.
A good start for elites would be accepting a more nuanced view on the white
working class and learning to communicate with them on equal terms. While
Trump represents the worst of pro wrestling, it is helpful to instead look at
the best. The Dusty Rhodes or the Stone Colds of the sport were clearly able to
communicate with the white working class, and it wasn’t because they were overtly
racist or misogynist. What these white working class heroes did instead was
authentically communicate that being working class was not an inferior way of
life and that fans or even athletes didn’t need to change their culture or conform
with the values of elites.
Tandem attacks on Trump and pro wrestling may give elites
a nice frame for arguments for cultural superiority over the white working class, but ultimately,
it’s not productive to moving the conversation forward. Democrats who won in deep
red areas often did
not directly attack Trump and instead avoided
the extremes. They also directly appealed to working class voters by highlighting
their working
class backgrounds and sticking with non-partisan messaging around education
and healthcare instead of divisive social issues.
Understanding the distinction between the worst of group and
the best is completely lost on many elites because it is easier to be reductive
about sports or classes of people than it is to have a nuanced perspective. (It’s
probably also fair to say the same is true of the attitudes of many working
class whites towards Blacks and Latinos.) However, if liberals want
to be able to recapture the white working class and turn Trump from hero to
heel, it may make sense to slack off of criticisms that espouse cultural
superiority and instead turn to communications that will reassure working
people that their way of life is safe.
Both the New York Timesand National Public Radio are reporting today on the impact of suburban voters in recent elections. In short, suburban voters are moving to the left, but their positions are often contradictory, and recent shifts are certainly no guarantee suburban voters will stay left. The primary axis of analysis for these stories is population density, though the NYTimes pieces attends to race secondarily.
The New York Times Upshot feature leads with the big news out of Orange County, California in the 2018 mid-term elections: no part of the county will be represented by a Republican congressperson in the coming session, and it's the first time that's happened since 1940.
The NYTimes quotes Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in California:
There is this idea that if all these suburban areas are blue, that will mean they’re automatically more progressive.
Geismer suggests that phenomenon is "an indication of something more progressive, she said, but underneath are “still commitments to a lot of kinds of inequality.” The story provides these specific examples:
[F]urther down the ballot in Orange County, voters also considered several propositions meant to ease the state’s housing crisis. Orange County voters opposed a bond to fund housing assistance programs, which passed statewide. And they rejected a rent-control measure by a wider margin than the rest of the state (the measure failed).
Thus, the New York Times concludes, "Newly Democratic Orange County is not exactly on its way to becoming liberal San Francisco."
[Geismer's] research on suburban Democrats identified many who supported liberal agendas in Washington while opposing affordable housing or school desegregation in their own communities. That dissonance reflects the particular politics of many suburban communities — politics that have made them a national battleground.
The NPR story breaks things down region by region, focuses on suburban seats that flipped across the nation, including suburbs of Atlanta, Memphis, Denver, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Rochester, Jacksonville, San Bernardino County, Austin and Houston, among others. Both stories feature some cool maps/infographics, and those are well worth a look. The New York Times infographic breaks the analysis into six categories of places (as designated by CityLab) based on population density: rural, rural-suburban, sparse suburban, dense suburban, urban-suburban, and urban. The Times observes:
After this election, there are no truly urban congressional districts represented by Republicans in Congress. The last and only one to flip was New York’s 11th, covering Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. Florida’s 25th, west of Miami, is the densest Republican district left.
And rural areas, the Times concludes, are now reliably Republican. As for me, I'm still not sure why that is so--is it stasis and tradition? economic threat? The story says rural voters focus on "individualism and limited government," which is certainly the stereotype.
The New York Times story mentions race only a few times--specifically, whiteness:
... changing nature of the suburbs and the changing preferences of white college-educated voters there who are repelled by the president.
... many highly educated, white suburban voters disagree with the Republican Party than the economic issues on which they’re better aligned.
The last paragraph of the story mentions "rural communities and white working-class voters" as similar, if not synonymous.
The story references minorities--presumably racial/ethnic minorities--twice:
.... as long as Republicans continue to seem uninterested in courting minorities...
and observing that well-off suburban voters' economic interests
simply aren’t aligned with poorer, minority Democratic voters who want more affordable housing, integrated schools or services funded by higher taxes.
A NYTimes story about the health (or lack thereof) of the Democratic party in the American Midwest is here.