The Elusive White Working Democrat
(posted by FreeDem)
Tonight, Hillary Clinton pulled off a stunning victory in Kentucky, home to good hard working white folk. Barack Obama, on the other hand, pulled off a victory in Oregon, which according to some segments of the media (and the Hillary Clinton campaign) isn’t as white, nor as hard working. In a primary season that has already brought us enlightening discussions on race and gender that have clearly elevated the political discussion in this country, why not just lump class into the mix and start making gross generalizations? Everyone else is doing it. For one reason, I think that the stereotypical model of a member of the “white working class” is horribly out of touch with the reality of most white voters who are defined as “working class” instead of “middle class.” As I mentioned at my blog Freedom Democrats a few days ago, the “white working class” has drastically changed in recent years:
Today, your typical low-income white worker is in a bottom of the ladder white collar job or some other segment of the service industry. And the blue collar jobs that remain in America are more likely to be skilled, making them less likely to stack up on the bottom of the income ladder.
So we essentially have two white working classes. One is generally skilled and blue collar. Even if they aren’t high-tech, they are skilled artisans who use ingenuity and creativity to fix problems and solve problems. They are just as valid members of the “Creative Class” as someone in computer graphics. But the other segment of the white working class is unskilled and stuck in low-level white collar jobs produced by the rise of a service industry linked to the creative economy.
Now here comes Alan Abramowitz to (hopefully) sort this out even more.
The white working class has been shrinking as a proportion of the overall white electorate for at least the last fifty years, as the data in Table 1 demonstrate. In the 1950s, manual workers make up 47 percent of the white electorate in the United States while sales and clerical workers made up 21 percent and professional and managerial workers made up 32 percent. By the first decade of the 21st century, however, manual workers made up only 24 percent of the white electorate while sales and clerical workers made up 33 percent and professional and managerial workers made up 43 percent.
At the same time that the white working class has been shrinking as a proportion of the overall white electorate, white working class voters have been shifting their loyalties from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. As the evidence displayed in Figure 1 shows, during the 1950s and 1960s, white manual workers identified with the Democratic Party at a much higher rate than either white sales and clerical workers or white professional and managerial workers.
Since the 1960s, however, Democratic identification among both white manual workers and white sales and clerical workers has declined sharply while Democratic identification among white professional and managerial workers has risen. Today, white professional and managerial workers are actually more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than either white manual workers or white clerical and sales workers.
Today, white professionals and managers are more Democratic than either white sales and clerical workers or manual workers. Abramowitz argues that this is because they are culturally liberal; half take the most strongly pro-choice stance on reproductive rights. But if you look at the graph, there doesn’t seem to be a big shift among professionals and managers towards the Democrats. They dropped from the 1950s to the 1960s, leveled off, and then picked back up after 2000.
Not only are there fewer manual workers in America as a whole, there are even fewer Democratic manual workers in America. The growing Democratic constituency is the growing block of Democratic professionals and managers. But even outside of the Democratic Party, the “white working class” is as varied as a skilled carpenter or plumber, a cashier at a fast food joint, or someone working at a paper company.
So there you have it. The idea of a monolithic white working class is . . . well, about as meaningful as Obama’s report card from his madrasah.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
“The growing Democratic constituency is the growing block of Democratic professionals and managers.”
Did you mean to write “the growing block of white Democratic professionals and managers”? You are just discussing white voters, yes? I’d have assumed that the Democrats have long held the loyalty of black professional and managers. But is this block growing too?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
Somewhat OT, but I’ve long found the phrase “working class” to be a bit of an Orwellian euphemism. It implies that people who do not have blue collar jobs do not “work.” The example I like to give is the comparison between the union apprentice carpenter who makes $25 an hour to work a 40 hour/week job and the associate attorney who makes $100,000 a year to work an 80 hour/week job. Their hourly rates are the same, except that the carpenter can actually relax and doesn’t have hundreds of thousands in student loans to pay off.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:27 am
Jackson,
I’m discussing white voters, specifically, when talking about how professionals and managers are the growing segment of the Democratic coalition (among white voters). At the same time, professionals and managers (of all races) are becoming more Democratic . . . both for the reason stated above (white managers and professionals are becoming more Democratic), but also because professionals and managers are becoming less white/more racially diverse.
Mark,
I think the whole “working class” phrase is a hold over from a more European approach to voting behavior–an understanding that identity politics does play a role in voting. For too long (IMHO), Americans have focused on class as equivalent with income, and not with how you make your living (and the part you play in the economy). Two people with the same income could have different economic interests if they are in different sectors of the economy, say a farmer versus a factory worker. Or two people with different incomes could still have similar economic interests if they both are in the same sector of the economy.
Of course the difference in income can still come into play, especially in a straight redistributive welfare state. But the more politics also includes identify, culture, values, etc., and regulation of the economy in a way that pits sectors against each other (steel manufacturers versus steel consumers, frex), the more we can see “class” being more than just income . . . it’s how you make that income too.
“Working class” generally has referred to non-professional white laborers, specifically manual and often unskilled. But the idea that all blue collar jobs are unskilled is no longer true, hence the complication over “white working class” today.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Eh, at least “middle class” isn’t being tossed around as much. I swear that is the most misleading, politically abused, functionally nonsensical term I’ve ever heard repeated, one cannot seriously define a “class” large enough to include both people a couple paychecks away from being out on the street and and suburban McMansion types that traded up before the housing bubble burst, so much over the years has been justified on the basis of this constantly shifting mass it makes my blood boil just thinking about it.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I guess my point is more that the use of the term “working class” serves the purpose of implying that the “rich” don’t “work.” This makes having a rational debate almost impossible when it comes to tax policy, amongst other issues.
I’ll also agree with b-psycho that the phrase “middle class” isn’t far behind on the Terrible Euphemisms That Are Part of the Accepted Vernacular scale.
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:21 am
Mark, I actually think there is a role in finding a way to identifying people who “work” for a living through an income derived from their own labor, and people who receive an income through the ownership of other assets. You can have two people with the same income, but different sources of that income, and they still will have different economic interests.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:29 pm
FreeDem: the problem with your distinction is that, as a practical matter, it winds up including just about everyone who doesn’t own a business in the “working class.” This would be fine, and even a useful distinction, if the phrase “working class” were actually used in that manner. But the way the term is just about always used, it really is referring to policies that will only benefit a small subset of the group in your definition.
And therein lies the crux of the problem: just about everyone likes to think of themselves as working class, even though the policies that are presented as benefiting the working class are really intended to reach only a small subset of that group. Thus some people wind up supporting policies in the mistaken belief that it is they who are supposed to benefit from the policies. This is why I am so suspicious of politicians who claim to represent “working class Americans” when they are for instance advocating obscenely pro-union policies that can have no potential benefit to the average American.
May 25th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I think, historically, the working class, the laboring class, WAS based on anyone who doesn’t own a business. What’s happened is that the American economy has robustly produced a level of affluence unknown of for humanity before WWII. People who are technically working class are able to afford a lifestyle that was once unimaginable.
Of course I think there are some other groups that can be cut out of the working class. Professionals, ranging from doctors to lawyers, arguable see themselves as a distinct class. And rightly so, when you consider their guild like education structure. The divergence of income between college graduates and non-college graduates also probably indicates that there’s something different between those two groups. A division between skilled and unskilled workers is probably necessary, but if you do that you’ve got skilled blue collar workers running around not in the “working class.” What do you do with them?
May 25th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Hey - I have no problem with distinguishing between different groups of people based on their type of job. My point is more with the use of the word “working,” which implies that all others don’t “work.” Which is simply not true.