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| Here's your living wage! |
We hear it all the time from the confounded, urbane Left. White working class people vote against their own economic interests. At the polling places this midterm, there will indeed be lots of old white people in line. Not many young white folks, and not many browner faces either. Even so, how many of these old white people will actually be "working class?" What is "working class?"
Forget obscure textbook economic, or "Marxist" definitions. For purposes of what is relevant in American politics today, "working class" should mean someone who works a job, at will without contract, for wages, and owns no property. Actually, a more accurate way of categorizing the voter divide is between the "property owning" classes, and the renter class. The former does elect Republicans. The latter does not.
The renter class does not vote Republican, and they are not politically responsible for electing those who, over the last generation, have gutted the middle class, and pushed millions once at the bottom of the "propertied class" down into the "renter" class with speculator-friendly trade laws, and who have crushed private sector unions.
How many fast food hourly workers will you find in line voting Republican this November, lured there by abortion baiting, misuse of religion, white panic, etc.? How many day laborers? Not many. Most won't show up at all. And that will be just fine with the GOP.
The real white working class does not vote Republican. When these people do vote, Democrats usually win. Not that Democrats have a good record lately of doing much for them, but when they do show up, it won't be to vote for another Bush. Religious panic, race baiting, etc. won't get them to the polls.
Republicans this fall, and always, are elected with the votes of property owning small business operators, landowners, the financial elites, and home-owning wage and salaried workers with some modest stake in capital (i.e. pension accounts, etc). And of these four groups, only one is prospering and growing in our post Glass-Steagall economy: the financial elites that include government protected banks (and that does not mean all banks), financial market speculators, and crony capitalists with cartelized government market protection.
The South now votes Republican, not because its "ignorant" workers do, but because its racist, nativist and fundamentalist property owners do (the ones who were able to pay the poll taxes back when they were constitutional) and who used to vote solidly Democratic, but now vote solidly Republican. Both Bushes were elected by these people.
The one (partial) exception to this rule occurred outside the South and the "sunbelt" that now defines the Red base of the Republican Party. That was the rust belt "Reagan Democrat" voters in 1980 and 1984. Private sector union workers who voted Republican. It was only a partial, and very ironic, exception, because their very union memberships, FHA loans, etc. allowed most of them to become "propertied" proletarians with pensions whose modest affluence confirmed their conservative tendencies.
Now after a generation of trade and financial policies that have all but eliminated that class entirely, their children either work at jobs with little or no benefits, and a growing number rent their residences in the post housing bubble era. Only a tiny few have been lucky enough to accumulate substantial wealth in our new plutocrat-centered economy.
When it comes to the reality of income and wealth distribution upward, and a shrinking middle class, there is little disagreement about the existence of both among either the left or the hard right. You will hear these trends confirmed as much at a Tea Party meeting indicting RINOS like the Bushes, as you will on the "Ed Show."
One thing is certain. Whether or not Obama, who essentially continued George W. Bush's bailout and wealth concentration scheme unchanged, has done anything to reverse this or not (arguably not much of anything), those who own property are becoming a smaller percentage of the population in the United States.
In a trend that would shock and depress Ayn Rand, more and more of the urban "creative" and educated classes are also abandoning the Republican Party as it becomes more culturally reactionary in the service of entitled plutocracy. It is for these reason that the neoconservative Republican Party of the Bushes and Cheneys, the Roves and Atwaters, the Tony Perkins, Ralph Reeds, and other religious charlatans, is a "dead party walking." And it is why their efforts to protect their crony capitalist and plutocratic benefactors by shrinking the voting population to exclude as much of the propertyless as possible, whether with legislation, suppression, repression, etc. will continue. The Republican Party has probably reached a point of no return. Transforming it from its corrupted present state into a competitive economic neoliberal party that promotes robust private sector GDP and job growth with fair trade policies, equitable taxation of earned and unearned income, properly functioning capital and production markets, and responsible regulation of financial speculation and oligopoly is not likely to happen.
The Democratic Party, sadly, is at present almost as much in the thrall of the same protected interests as the Republicans, but the Democrats have a democratic candidate selection process that might enable anti-plutocrats eventually to mount a successful challenge through them. If not, look for increasing political chaos as the Democrats become the default plutocrat party of urban modernism, the Republicans relegate to a marginal reactionary and sectional party, and a greater percentage of the population opts out of the political process absent the emergence of a third anti-plutocrat party.
Republicans will have a decent showing with the old, scared white property owners this fall, but the tide of history, and the future they are creating is moving against them, like Jefferson's firebell in the night.
Daily Beast: Why Whites Will Abandon the GOP
Atlantic: The End of Ownership: Why Aren't Young People Buying More Houses?
Encyclopaedia Brittanica: proletariat
Freethought Blogs: Why does the working class vote against its own interests?
Mother Jones: Democrats Have Done Virtually Nothing for the Middle Class in 30 Years
