Boston Globe, February 12, 2006
CRITICAL FACULTIES
Who are you calling working class?
The scholarly food fight over how to define the lunch pail class and what
Democrats can do to win back their affections - if, that is, they ever
lost
them
By Christopher Shea
IF THERE'S ONE thing Republican and Democratic strategists agree on, it's
that white, working-class Americans have been fleeing the Democratic
Party
in droves. The statement seems beyond dispute-just part of the political
landscape.
One of the most trenchant elaborations of this view came in the 2004
bestseller ''What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the
Heart
of America," by the essayist and historian Thomas Frank. He argued that
''the poor," ''the weak," and ''the victimized" were increasingly
throwing
their lot in with Republicans, swayed by social issues into voting
against
their economic self-interest. How else to explain why McPherson County,
Nebraska, among the poorest in the United States, gave 80 percent of its
vote to President Bush in 2000?
Through reportage, historical anecdote, and much scabrous wit, Frank
argued
that big-business Republicans were gulling these voters, dangling issues
like gay marriage and abortion before them during campaigns but doing
little to address these issues once elected. What they did implement were
economic policies helping the rich. ''If you make over $300,000," Frank
wrote, ''raise a glass sometime to those indigent High Plains Republicans
as you contemplate your good fortune."
In two recent papers, however, the Princeton political scientist Larry
Bartels-who has a barbed pen himself-has attempted to refute some of the
assumptions behind Frank's thesis. Last September, Bartels presented a
paper at the American Political Science Association meeting in Washington
that asked these questions: Are working-class whites abandoning the
Democratic Party? Has the working class become more conservative? Within
the working class, do ''moral values" trump economics? Wielding data from
the National Election Study survey on presidential races from 1952 to
2004,
Bartels answered: No, no, and no-and set off a debate that has been
echoing
in political circles ever since.
In a response published in December on his website, Frank accused Bartels
of ''blowing off" the phenomenon of conservative populism, a move he
called
''folly on a magnitude that not even a political scientist can measure."
His chief complaint, among many, was that Bartels's definition of working
class was bizarrely flawed. This month, Bartels presented an essentially
rewritten version of his paper at Harvard, responding to Frank's
complaints. Though the tone of these salvos might suggest it, the
continuing dispute is not a left-right one. Bartels describes himself
as a
longtime nonpartisan nonvoter who now leans toward the Democrats, because
of growing concerns about economic inequality. The high-octane rhetoric
instead seems to derive from the importance of what's at stake: an
understanding of what constitutes the working class, how its views have
changed, and whether the Democratic Party needs to reinvent itself in
order
to appeal to those voters.
. . .
The dispute has overtones of a food fight between the humanities and the
social sciences. Frank has written that Bartels's numbers-and-surveys
approach saps all the culture, history, and ideology-not to mention
all the
vim and life-from politics, while Bartels has dismissed Frank's arguments
as the product of a shoot-from-the hip pundit culture, even though Frank
holds a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.
Yet not all empirically minded academics agree with Bartels. Adam
Berinsky,
an associate professor of political science at MIT, says he finds
Bartels's
papers ''very compelling," but Alan Abramowitz, a political science
professor at Emory, says, ''If [Bartels's] point is that nothing has
changed, or that Democrats are doing better than ever among the white
working class-I doubt even Howard Dean would agree with that."
That's not quite what Bartels is saying, but it's not all that far
off: In
his first paper, Bartels found that if you define white working-class
voters as those whose income is in the lowest third nationally (families
earning $35,000 or less), they have only grown more loyally Democratic in
presidential elections since 1976. From 1952 to 1972, considering only
the
two-party vote, 46 percent of white voters in the bottom third of income
voted for Democratic presidential candidates, as did 47 percent in the
middle third, and 42 percent in the top third. From 1976 through 2004,
however, 51 percent of whites in the bottom third went for the
Democrat, as
did 44 percent of those in the middle, and only 37 percent at the top.
Far from turning against Democrats, inflamed by the ''hallucinatory
appeal"
of cultural issues, as Frank put it, the working class has embraced the
Democrats. The better off are the ones who are shifting away.
Bartels's paper had other data purporting to show that economic issues
still determined the votes of low-income Americans, but in his response,
Frank zeroed in on ''a mistake so basic it effectively negates
[Bartels's]
entire effort": defining the working class as those in the bottom
third of
family income. ''He's talking about the poor in the guise of talking
about
the working class," says Ruy Teixeira, a pollster in Washington, DC, who
agrees with Frank on this point. Rick Perlstein, author of ''Before the
Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus" (2001)
is harsher: ''He tortured the data badly."
Frank didn't precisely define his working class in his book, but he now
suggests that a better definition might be Americans lacking a college
degree. He notes that a family consisting of an autoworker, a secretary,
and their four kids-a family that seems working-class in common-sense
terms-might earn $70,000 a year, which would inch them into the top third
of family income. And among Americans without a college degree, the
challenge the Democrats face does seem immense. As Teixeira points out,
Bush beat Kerry 61 percent to 38 percent among those voters, according to
one exit poll.
There are problems with this definition, too, of course: A significant
majority of Americans lack a college degree, for example, and plenty of
them (Bill Gates springs to mind) are quite well off. Bartels still
thinks
that income is a better measure of class, but in his second paper, he
decided to take the fight to Frank's own turf, defining the white working
class as white voters lacking college degrees. While Kerry indeed did
poorly within this group, Bartels says his performance wasn't too far off
the historical average for Democrats. Graphing the two-party results in
Presidential elections from 1952 to 2004, Bartels found that the
Democrats
lost only 6 percentage points to the Republicans among whites lacking
college degrees. And one region in particular is driving that shift:
the South.
Within the South, the shift from Democrat to Republican for this group
has
amounted to 20 percentage points. Outside the South: 1 percentage point.
Considering margins of error, he concludes that the decline of white
support for Democrats is ''entirely attributable to the demise of the
Solid
South as a bastion of Democratic allegiance." The realignment of the
South
after the Democratic party embraced civil rights is an important
story, but
it's not the same thing as hardhats bailing on the Democrats nationwide.
And what of the increasing importance of social issues to working-class
voters? Using voters' self-descriptions from the National Election Study
survey of 2004, Bartels notes that when white voters without college
degrees ranked social and economic issues in order of importance to them,
gun control, at fifth out of 15, was the highest rated social issue.
Abortion languished at 13th. Overall, economic issues carried 50 percent
more weight than social issues.
The conclusion Bartels draws is that all the talk of the need to reinvent
the Democratic Party is a ''ludicrous overreaction." ''The basic
pattern of
electoral support is pretty even, and both parties ought to think of
themselves as fighting hard at the margins," he says.
Frank, meanwhile, is annoyed that the Bartels paper, which he has already
eviscerated once, has become a moving target as a result of Bartels's
latest revision. He writes in an e-mail that he won't read the new
paper or
comment on it until it is published. (It's been accepted by the Quarterly
Journal of Political Science.) ''When he has decided what he really,
truly
wants to stand behind, then I will consider responding," Frank says. When
and if Frank and other political analysts do respond, Democratic
activists
tired of their losing ways will surely be reading closely.
--
www.marxmail.org
