The papers discussed here are worth reading. You can get them at
Bartels' website at Princeton; Frank's website for his first rebuttal,
and an overview of the debate at the American Prospect. Normally, I'd be
dubious of the class classification by education that Frank uses, except
that 1) Bartels' argument goes against all other evidence about the loss
of white working class voters; 2) he does indeed define working class to
mean poor, in order to obscure the difference (really poor
people--$15,000 and less--have remained reliably Democratic), which is
how Bartels can say that despite so many losses in a row, nothing has
really changed; 3) there is something in the argument that for a given
level of education, the higher the income, the greater the likelihood of
voting Republican, but for a given level of income, the higher the
education, the greater the likelihood of voting Democratic.
Joel Blau
I think some of you might remember my piece on Frank versus Bartels:
Do Workers Understand Their Class Interests?
by Louis Proyect
(Swans - October 24, 2005) In the aftermath of George W. Bush's 2004
electoral victory, Thomas Frank became the pundit of the moment. In a New
York Times article dated only 3 days after the election, Frank put forward
the notion that blue-collar voters chose Bush over Kerry because culture
(abortion, gay marriage, etc.) trumped economic issues:
The first thing Democrats must try to grasp as they cast their eyes
over the smoking ruins of the election is the continuing power of the
culture wars. Thirty-six years ago, President Richard Nixon championed a
noble "silent majority" while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, accused
liberals of twisting the news. In nearly every election since, liberalism
has been vilified as a flag-burning, treason-coddling, upper-class
affectation. This year voters claimed to rank "values" as a more important
issue than the economy and even the war in Iraq...
Like many such movements, this long-running conservative revolt is
rife with contradictions. It is an uprising of the common people whose
long-term economic effect has been to shower riches upon the already
wealthy and degrade the lives of the very people who are rising up. It is a
reaction against mass culture that refuses to call into question the basic
institutions of corporate America that make mass culture what it is. It is
a revolution that plans to overthrow the aristocrats by cutting their taxes.
In some ways, Frank's analysis simply builds upon observations first made
around the phenomenon of "Reagan Democrats." Supposedly the Gipper's macho
style endeared him to lower income voters who traditionally voted Democrat.
Despite their ostensibly pro-working-class economic policies, the Democrats
lost because they were "wimpy." In Reagan's time, the emphasis was on
appearing more "muscular" vis-a-vis the Soviets, while today it is on
"family values" and "the war on terror," but in either case liberal pundits
felt that workers were suckered into voting against their own class
interests. Of course, as Frank points out, it doesn't help when Democrats
-- especially after the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council -- appear
more like Republicans on questions such as NAFTA, etc.
full: http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy30.html
--
www.marxmail.org
