The part that Drum skips over is that the WWC does, in fact, receive government benefits - food stamps, in particular, are available up to fairly significant income levels if you've got kids (IIRC, family of 4, $20k income, $600/month, and it tapers towards ~$30k).
There's 2 threads that come from this. One is the raw hypocrisy, often with a dose of cognitive dissonance: Atrios loves to quote actor Craig T Nelson saying, "We were poor, we were on food stamps, and nobody helped us out."* The other thread, of course, is the, if you will, narcissism of small differences - it's really important to distinguish yourself from those in bad circumstances that are similar to, but not precisely the same as, yours.
Then you've got race on top of that, but you see it in all-white communities, too.
*almost exact words - it's that blatant
Basically, I think Drum wants to argue that the WWC have a legitimate beef, where I think it's a lot more accurate to say that WWC resentment is understandable and predictable, but not necessarily justifiable.
I'd add that, if the resentment were just, it wouldn't rely so heavily on urban myth (e.g., Obamaphones, buying liquor/cigarettes with food stamps).
Yeah, 1.1 was my first thought. Lots of drift between "working class" and social services-eligible these days, whether temporarily or longer term. Also the working class benefits significantly from the ACA. I'm sticking with "mainly racism".
I don't think it's a matter of "simple common sense", it's what people look out and assume they're seeing.
the working class benefits significantly from the ACA
Drum's follow-up says that's not really so.
I started reading the comments there. Are Drum's comments usually that bad?
6: Yes. KD has said several times that he very rarely reads them himself.
5: The chart he's relying on looks like it deliberately excludes the fungible value of insurance, which seems like an odd way to measure whether you're economically better off under the ACA. I've only glanced at the full report but it looks to me that with that accounted for, the economic net gains extend to the bottom 3 deciles. Plus of course there's the non-monetary benefits alluded to in the postscript (as well as others he doesn't mention; and things like annual out-of-pocket limits etc. are monetary, not sure this report accounts for them). Mixing working class and middle class on this point is obscuring things I think.
I get annoyed with the middle class and the working class for different reasons.
I haven't had time to really read the Brookings paper he links, but I want to, because it implies that only the bottom quintile is benefiting but other charts show subsidized plans are helping people all the way up to the third quintile.
People spend a lot of time trying to understand why working class whites resent poor blacks, but no time wondering about the attitudes of working class blacks to poor whites.
7: ...which is especially weird because he often poses interesting questions to his commenters that would be great to have a follow-up on, but if they ever give him a good answer he never posts it.
Ogged, when are you going to guest-blog for him again? It's been a while.
Seems to me that Unfogged and Calpundit have diverged a bit in their core competency.
There used to be a lot more overlap. He did more personal and neato stuff, and we did a lot more politics.
Here's where Drum goes astray:
It's pointless to argue that this perception is wrong.
Well, no. Drum's whole argument to that point - and after this point - is based on the idea that the white middle class is correct in its perception of the Democrats.
Mitch McConnell knows better. He knows quite well that Obamacare delivers benefits to his constituents, so he refuses to oppose Obamacare as policy, but comes out against it as the signature achievement of that uppity fellow in the White House.
Here's Mitch, threading the needle:
"Kentucky Kynect is a Web site. It was paid for by a $200-and-some-odd-million grant from the federal government. The Web site can continue... with regard to Kynect, it's a state exchange. They can continue it if they'd like to."
Surely we cannot go astray if we treat the WWC* to round or two of noble-savage/pity-the-heathenism, anatomizing their superstitions and folkways while we negotiate them up the great river of Christian education from their brute state of nature toward citizenship in the greater world. That has worked well before, after all.
* Come on.
The hatred of the "undeserving poor" isn't natural or legit, it's produced through ideological struggle from the very beginning of industrialized labor and large scale farming - the ideological work that was needed to get farm labor to stop, like, drinking and celebrating and adhere to a regular schedule, the ideological work used to keep "good" workers from joining unions, the preaching at church against labor organizing and for knowing your place, the use of recruitment into the police and the army to create a compliant element of the working class. (I was thinking about the effort to create a compliant working class in the wake of the rebellions that established the Weimar Republic and ended WWI - that was proles with guns). Hatred of the undeserving poor was produced through work house rules and charity rules - the "good" poor were divided from the bad not by the poor themselves but by the boards who doled out the charity. Attributing this to working people themselves when it was the great project of the elites from perhaps the failure of the French revolution through the Second World War is just ridiculous. Certain people are in love with the idea of an "authentically" conservative working class for reasons that do not seem very credible, possibly having to do with projecting their own conservatism and hatred of the "undeserving".
13: I'm not imaging that you guestblogged there at least once? Right?
So we're supposed to read the comments with comprehension now?
11 would make a passable reality tv show premise.
The hatred of the "undeserving poor" isn't natural or legit,
Agreed. And 18 is such a great comment that I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with it. But I guess I can only agree in part.
Solidarity with the very poor isn't natural either, though of course we want to see it as more legit. And the upwardly striving "respectable" working class was more than capable of producing and enforcing its own norms of "respectability," and of making invidious distinctions between us and them. How the Irish Became White, for example (which is, admittedly, probably an overly schematic and functionalist interpretation, but still).
The hatred of the "undeserving poor" isn't natural or legit
You and Jane are on crack. It's the reaction everyone has to a roommate who shirks their share of the chores. "Come on, pull your weight, motherfucker" is a hugely natural reaction. Why do you think the Republicans are pounding those welfare queen type messages? "Millions of people are working as hard or harder than the rest of us and still are poor but we don't care so fuck em" might be what they're thinking but they know damn well not to put that in their speeches.
24: You're conflating the naturalness of the reaction with its legitimacy. Why do people who resent their neighbors for working only 2 minimum wage jobs view inherited wealth as anything other than a BURN IT ALL DOWN situation? I mean, there are psychological stories (contempt for the familiar), but those stories also handwave all sorts of natural reactions.
Bottom line: it's awfully weird that 250 years of concerted propaganda by the upper class has had no effect, except for the weird coincidence that the working class's world view aligns with it beautifully.
But that's too simplistic, swiftamous. A sense of fairness seems to be innately human, but that doesn't get you all the way to drawing the lines of who is undeserving and what it is that they don't deserve. I'll grant that some people are lazy, and definitely don't deserve, for example, a new car, but I think even lazy people should be able to count on health care and a roof over their heads, even if I'm on the hook through my taxes.
More generally, I don't have any idea how non- or pre-capitalist societies explained "laziness" or "shirking" and how they thought it should be dealt with, and insofar as their ways differ from ours, that's an argument for the "production" of the category of the undeserving poor.
25: Read the OP, that's not what Drum's talking about. And it's totally legit. Seriously, have you people not all had that urge to throttle a useless coworker who actively avoids doing any work?
Some pretty fucking good economics from the 'bam man tonight. Also extremely trollerific.
27: Sure, but I just can't seem to make my hands really squeeze my throat very hard.
The guy at school pickup who didn't want to vote in the election for a new parent representative (in addition to me, not replacing me, which is why I had to try to get people to just check a fucking name off a list) who was not quite complaining that he was raising his grandkids and his wife had died two months ago and they've all been bouncing from house to house and the kids haven't had tv in 7 months may or may not have been generally considered undeserving, but fuck! And I didn't pressure him or anyone else to vote (5 out of more than 100 did, and one of them then announced she wasn't eligible anyway after having told me she was) because I didn't want to out anyone as being illiterate, but it was really depressing and also cold, which is fine because I'm an undeserving middle-classer who has earned some time in the cold.
I spend more time in bars than 95% of the unemployed people. Because I deserve it.
I'm trying to find the not-racism reason why only white people feel this way.
Oh, plenty of non-white people feel similarly. But I personally think there's an intrarace version of "OMG, what a disappointment you are!" where black middle-class folks are looking down on Antoine Dodson in a different way from their take on white poor people, deserving or not. I presume other ethnicities have their own flavors.
Though maybe white-on-white is more "fuck you!" and less "you make us all look bad!" or something like that? I don't know; ogged's the expert on white people.
I think this is where the personal and political is getting mixed up in unfortunate ways. Sure, we all probably have some element of what gswift describes (whether actively expressed on occasion or completely latent). But what whites have is powerful racist fuckpig media outlets and politicians incessantly giving voice to it, and manipulating it to further the ends of the truly rich and powerful. There is some bus we'd all be bozos on.
Though maybe white-on-white is more "fuck you!" and less "you make us all look bad!" or something like that?
Yeah, I think white people don't tend to think of themselves as a defined group among others that way, so middle-class whites look down on poor whites as an alien group the same way they see poor (or, for that matter, middle-class) blacks. (Uh, present company potentially excepted, I guess.)
But what whites have is powerful racist fuckpig media outlets and politicians incessantly giving voice to it, and manipulating it to further the ends of the truly rich and powerful.
Plus a centuries-long history of racism and oppression with themselves in the role of the oppressors, of course.
Seriously, have you people not all had that urge to throttle a useless coworker who actively avoids doing any work?
Well, sure. I mean, obviously. But it's a pretty big leap from potential "coworker" to "member of an urban underclass, without even a high school diploma, perhaps, in an economically depressed, de-industrialized city, where there is no sense of hope, and no evident or apparent connection between hard work and its rewards," is it not?
Where I agree with gswift is that if we're talking about the WWC (ugh), many of them are going to identify with 38's "member of an urban underclass... &c" -- but they see themselves as deserving, and their cock-up cousin who (e.g.) can't do anything right even when it's handed to him as undeserving. Everyone knows people who are screw-ups; when you're poor, odds are good they're also poor and more of a pain in the ass because you don't have the social network and financial support to deal with their screw-ups.
This narrative is *really* common. One can have a lot invested in thinking of oneself (probably correctly) as a basically decent person who needs help only because of bad luck, not like that clown over there who keeps screwing things up.
I also agree that this has been exacerbated by UMC distinctions between the deserving/undeserving poor, but I suspect the aid groups/etc were exploiting an existing distinction.
38: Yes, but I do think Drum is right about this.
at its core you have a group of people who are struggling and need help, but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone else. Always someone else...Helping the poor is one of the great causes of liberalism, and we forfeit our souls if we give up on it. And yet, as a whole bunch of people have acknowledged lately, the Democratic Party simply doesn't do much for either the working or middle classes these days.
What Cala said. A lot of WWC identify with "can't find a job" just fine, which is why the right is so keen on painting the poor as "won't find a job".
"Always someone else" -- it's funny that this weariness only seems to affect white people, and men in particular.
Look, even if the Democrats don't do shit for the working class, they still do more than the Republicans do, so when the working class votes Republican it's because they care about other things more.
My diagnosis is that a lot of people are simply racist and socially conservative. And this racism and conservatism is so baked into our culture that even the liberals who strongly oppose it can't help but think of it as specially "authentic" and legitimate.
My diagnosis is that a lot of people are simply racist and socially conservative. And this racism and conservatism is so baked into our culture that even the liberals who strongly oppose it can't help but think of it as specially "authentic" and legitimate.
Yup. It's remarkable how many aspects of American history and politics are explained by racism.
Look, even if the Democrats don't do shit for the working class, they still do more than the Republicans do, so when the working class votes Republican it's because they care about other things more.
Well yes, "doesn't do shit" does not in fact have a ton of sway over other concerns, biases, whatever. The question is whether the party will try and deal with the populace they have or be content to feel morally superior as a perpetual minority party.
42: I don't think that's true -- Coates' Cosby article touches on a similar division in the black community (as does Chris Rock's infamous "love black people" routine.) It's just that it doesn't show up in voting trends. Not denying that there's a lot of racism, too, of course.
WJ Cash nailed this in his book The Mind of the South in 1941: "Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism -- these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today."
Yup. It's remarkable how many aspects of American history and politics are explained by racism.
Doesn't the Chris Rock routine an example of how pervasive racism is? And I don't mean racism as in "racism makes you a bad person who should be shunned," I mean racial essentialism is something that black people internalize and need to defend themselves against.
The Republicans have won the popular vote in the Presidential election exactly once in the last quarter century, so I dont know where this "morally superior permanent minority party" stuff comes from. What exactly will it take for the Dems to win the WWC vote -- are you telling me that if the ACA was more radical in nature, it would have been the Democrats cleaning up in the midterms? I guess it's time to start passing abortion restrictions and bitching about Mexicans.
sorry swifty. you see fuckups day-in and day-out, and I know you're thinking, 'if that asshole I had to arrest last week was my neighbor and on welfare I'd be pissed too.' but why would you be pissed at him and not someone who inherited one billion dollars and is a colossal asshole, like that one walmart granddaughter who's lying on the kitchen floor and screaming 'wanna wanna sweetie!!!' because she might have to pay any taxes, ever? really, why? you, personally, aren't likely motivated by this, but the plain and simple answer to the question 'why do white people, even broke white people who are either not paying significant money in taxes, or are even getting a little help (EITC, health insurance) from the government, hate on social programs that they are convinced benefit lazy, shiftless, young bucks spending welfare money on T-bone steaks?' and the answer to that question is always RACISMRACISMRACISM. so boring, so always the answer. so boring that liberal pundits like to think of other reasons, so it can be an interesting question again! but no! it's still racism! and who convinced the broke white people it is shiftless negroes getting all those easy, valuable section 8 housing benefits and using them as babydaddy crash pads to have three children with eight different men who are all selling crack? republican politicians, on purpose. unless they're from, say, south carolina, and then they didn't need any convincing in the first place. it would take some doing to get them thinking otherwise. also, what frowner said [mic drop]
The hatred of the "undeserving poor" isn't natural or legit, it's produced through ideological struggle from the very beginning of industrialized labor and large scale farming
It goes back long before that. The law has been making distinctions between the infirm poor (who couldn't work) and the sturdy beggars (who could but weren't) since the fourteenth century at least.
What counts as working class? And pre-Obamacare what did they get. I would consider a family of 4 (or 3 if it's a single parent) on $40k working class depending on work they did--say non-skilled construction.
My FE the Canuck has a co-worker who is in a lower tier biology job with a Bachelor's. At one point, she and her siblings inherited her mother's house in Boston, and they all moved in together to try to make it work, but they weren't contributing, and they couldn't make the mortgage. One of them had some work as a cook at Harvard but it was inconsistent. The other one wasn't working. It didn't sound like they were helping around the house and one was mooching and doing a lot of coke. I think it was important to her to see herself as hardworking and secure and different from them--even though her husband was an alcoholic who died of liver failure.
40: Go back and read #1. This is my whole fucking point:
but instead feel like they simply get taxed and taxed for the benefit of someone elseis pure bullshit. The WWC* receive government benefits, but tell themselves this fairy tale, which Drum quotes approvingly.
And here's the thing about the "undeserving poor": it's anyone who isn't like you. Look at responses to stories about people who e.g. leave their kids home alone so they can work a fucking job - they're always full of language about laziness and incompetence, despite the fact that the whole goddamn story is about somebody who has a job or three. The fact that some poor people are, in fact, lazy (unlike us white collar people who spend 10 hours a day on Unfogged) does nothing but provide cover for people who tell themselves that the government aid they receive is deserved, and that the government aid received by some stranger they've never met is undeserved.
*have you noticed how this conversation keeps slipping into "middle class" vs. poor? Middle class doesn't enter into it: WWC, if it means anything, means people earning below median, so $50k is the ceiling. They're all poor by middle class standards
Anyone care to hazard a guess to the racial makeup of the society in ajay's 50?
Drum has basically picked up on one of the more tiresome regular features of the British political scene - every time the public demonstrates any discontent, we get a round of boring pols talking about the very real concerns of the white working class, which are axiomatically held to be a) immigrants and b) football, but never c) wages. It's our version of Thomas Frank-ism.
Anyone care to hazard a guess to the racial makeup of the society in ajay's 50?
Well, late mediaeval England, so mainly white.
There was probably a Norman/Saxon thing going.
This city is a microcosm of what Drum's talking about. All the liberals here love to squeal and cream their jeans that the mayor is a university professor and an urban planner who rides his bike to work. Sploosh!. But that motherfucker might as well be Scott Walker when it comes to wages. For years we've dealt with freezes, no COLA's, etc and time and again the mayor will outright refuse to deal or negotiate with the city unions. Meanwhile he and the city are financial wizards when it comes to finding millions for a streetcar project, constructing protected bike lanes, and I shit you not, a 100 million dollar plus Broadway style performing arts center. Hey everybody, sure your income has gone down for half a dozen years but check out the solar panels on the public safety building and anyone in the mood for a Broadway show? We'll ride out bikes!
You all think this same dynamic isn't playing out on a nationwide level? We're doing what exactly to court these votes? Blocking the Keystone Pipeline? Give amnesty to several million people willing to work for less wages?
The people we're talking about giving amnesty to are already living here working for lower wages. The fact that there is such a big, illegal labor sector is one of the things that makes it harder to raise wages.
Although the funny thing (and when I say 'funny' I mean 'totally supports what Frowner said in 18') is that the narrative I keep hearing is that the white working class hates hates hates unions, particularly public sector unions, who are just sucking off the public tit and raising taxes for everyone.
You're right that Democrats need to buck that narrative and talk about wages, and lunchbox issues generally, more, but definitely part of the "Who does the White Working Class hate?" story is that they hate anyone with a union job or a pension.
The Keystone thing sort of pisses me off for idiosyncratic reasons having to do with where I was born and raised. If Canada wants to sell its oil, run the fucking pipe across Canada.
Anyone care to hazard a guess to the racial makeup of the society in ajay's 50?
This is like saying that American slavery wasn't about blackness, it was about economic exploitation, because there was slavery in Asia too without the black people.
The deserving/undeserving distinction is surely not just a manifestation of racism. It runs a lot deeper than that. In America though, it's pretty damned intertwined with race.
57.last: Amnesty? Really. And never mind what you call it, what you claim makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
61: though they were all white, a lot of it was because "sturdy beggars" were foreign in the sense of not being from round here: they were vagabonds, which was a very bad thing to be for most of the late middle ages and early modern age and could get you beaten, imprisoned, put in the stocks, branded, probably hanged etc.
58: Of course, but Obama and the Democrats should say that.
Business owners who offer their wages good wages benefits see the competition exploit undocumented immigrants by paying them far less...Second, I'll make it easier and faster for high-skilled immigrants, graduates and entrepreneurs to stay and contribute to our economy, as so many business leaders proposed.
Well whew, about time someone starting looking out for business owners.
One time when I was visiting her at her NGO job in Rwanda, my stepmother said this to me: "...you know, everyone here gets up really early and works really hard. I don't understand why they're all so poor."
60: the whole aquifer thing doesn't just seem like a criticism from out-of-touch liberals.
The original route was too much for even a considerable portion of the Nebraska Republicans. It's been re-routed so that is only goes over a smaller part of the aquifer. Not none of the aquifer, because either local Republicans are strongly probabilistic in their thinking or assholes.
And never mind what you call it, what you claim makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Well, do you think the party courts this demographic at all? Are the big public policy fights this demographic sees from the Dems ever something they give a shit about?
Public sector union workers? The Democrats may not do enough, but they're at least sometimes on their side.
I mean, the whole Scott Walker thing was Walker against the union-supported Democratic party, right?
I agree that there's not enough attention to wages and so on, but if you don't see what's there you can't talk about it sensibly.
I agree with gswift, or drum or whoever, that democrats really don't seem to spend much time talking about the concerns of the WWC. The republicans sell them an endless stream of falsehoods and lies, but at least they're actively selling them something.
Proposals to raise the minimum wage all come from Democrats. Still, not enough, but there's something there.
Sure, technically it's not nothing but if your national economic populism is 7.25 an hour and cutting the interest rate on student loans you might be doing it wrong.
Around here, the state and local Democrats have spent huge amounts of time and effort on successful efforts at enacting or preserving prevailing wage laws for contractors on government projects. These are not a matter of $7.25, but of $30/hour or so for tradesmen. There are repeated efforts to undo these laws by the Republicans.
If there is one thing that can be reliably said about American politics, it's that Democrats are doing it wrong. That's completely fair.
But the bits and scraps of economic populism they are pushing aren't huge vote getters, it doesn't seem. Republicans are pretty successful at painting all that kind as money for lazy other people too. Democrats should fight through that reaction, but it's there -- the working class isn't jumping into their arms when they get a sniff of policies that are in their economic interest.
democrats really don't seem to spend much time talking about the concerns of the WWC
The problem is the Democrats haven't updated their message to speak to today's WWC. The Ds were on solid ground back when private-sector union membership was a larger constituency. Now Democrats just throw their hands up in confusion and say "Why do these people keep voting against their own economic interests?"
Or maybe the problem is just that identity politics trumps economic politics.
The one thing I remember from studying political science is that it's all driven by affect.
Let's be clear about the fundamental problem: the sort of economic populism that would speak to the WWC would inevitably involve costs for the top few %, and Democrats by and large treat that as off the table. Which is why they instead come up with 'technocratic' bullshit 'solutions' that do not resonate.
The minimum wage is an exception to this, I'll grant. But it's not enough.
80: That reminds me of the guy from Dublin, but with no discernible accent, who commented in a class discussion about Rawls, "It's all about look, then, isn't it?" and everybody stared at him. But what do I know about political science.
Though maybe that's part of the problem LB identifies @77: The policies don't get support when the voters can only see them helping them if they're unlucky. People want to think of themselves as fortunate.
The Democrats completely lack a narrative about the decline of the middle class. One crucial part of that narrative would be identifying enemies, and explaining again and again how the Republicans are helping those enemies. Give people someone to focus on other than the proverbial welfare queens.
77: I know that "call the voters stupid" is not a strategy, but when someone gushes about how great it is to finally have health coverage through the ACA, and then says that they're voting republican because they don't want no socialist Obamacare, I'm not sure what the solution is.
83: Like, the 1%? I'm not disagreeing with you, but that narrative is out there, and I don't think there's much of an indication that it took hold in the segment of the population we're talking about.
The Democrats do suck, globally and in detail. But most of the "if they'd just do X" proposals look to me like stuff that they try at least sometimes and doesn't do much for them.
81: I'm not sure I buy that as the fundamental problem. I mean, the bullshit is there and along with the technocrats, but I think the problem is that the costs would go up for the top few % but that the costs would go up for the top 20% or 15% or something like that. Because Republicans keep winning elections on this stuff.
Tangentially, I've been delighted with the news coverage (at least on NPR this past week) over Obama's executive action decisions. A bunch of Republicans ineffectually whining, and the journalists amazed that he could show such initiative after his defeat.
Plus what LB said. Anyway, it remains very much not obvious to me that the Democrats could win on an economic populist platform if somebody could find a way for them to the current level of political spending even after they pissed off all the really rich people.
88: The press loves a "comeback kid" story.
86: I disagree that the Democrats actually adopted that narrative in any real, committed way. They're willing to talk about the rise in inequality and the decline of the middle class but only in a very passive manner. These are just things that happened. No mention of policy choices that led to this. Of course, to really address the causes they would have to admit that their party, and a lot of its leaders, have been as responsible for these trends as the Republicans.
I also want to push back against the idea that the failures of occasional, isolated forays into populism, or any particular narrative, are evidence that a more concerted effort over a longer time would fail.
the sort of economic populism that would speak to the WWC would inevitably involve costs for the top few %, and Democrats by and large treat that as off the table.
Well, yeah. But do the champions of the WWC respect this clever Democratic pragmatism that allows them to keep raising money and routinely win elections? No, they're apparently still the "morally superior permanent minority party." Rich people just lack the authentic vibe of the Volk.
You're right that they didn't. But Occupy generally was a huge media deal, and the WWC didn't jump on that bandwagon -- it appealed to wonks and kids with student-loan debt. The Dems didn't walk away from an available populist narrative that was energizing this constituency where they have trouble, it was an available populist narrative that the relevant constituency wasn't thinking much of.
It might have taken off better if the Democrats had pushed it harder, but it's not obvious that that would have worked.
94:
Yes, that's true of Occupy. "I am the 99%" IIRC did have a significant proportion of working class contributors who weren't students and weren't specifically paying off student loans, though those two groups didn't seem to meet as much as they might have. I agree with you, basically.
(I'm also trying to remember when the Republicans turned against immigration reform. They were for it before they were against it, weren't they?)
Argh. I shouldn't be defending the Democrats, who do suck. I just don't think that there's an easy "If they'd just do X" story that helps much. Anything that's going to work is going to be better policy and better GOTV and better candidates and and and -- grinding out a whole lot of 2% here and 2% there. I don't believe in an untapped well of economic populism that Democrats just need to acknowledge and start serving and then they'll start winning elections.
92: And this is right too -- aggressive leadership might convince people to vote for economic populism.
Argh. I shouldn't be defending the Democrats, who do suck.
Yes, you should. Even if the Democrats do suck (and they often do) it's worth pushing back on the assumption that they are so inevitably ineffective that there's no need to pay attention to what they are or aren't doing (because it won't matter in the end).
I'm with LB: as much as a populist message should resonate, I'm not convinced it would solve this problem. I mean, Elizabeth Warren (the one who did/does unreservedly take up this cause) only beat Scott Brown (of all people) 54-46. In Massachusetts, running for Ted Kennedy's seat. In a Presidential year.
Actually, there's a little more to this, I think. Warren's message was about how the system is rigged, the middle class is getting squeezed out of existence by the overwhelming greed of the rich and powerful: economic populism. Brown's rejoinder was, literally, "I drive a truck." And it got him within 8 points, in a state and under conditions that should've been maximally D-friendly.
The Democrats plotted to put a lot of minimum-wage initiatives on the ballot in 2014. These were popular and passed in large numbers, but there didn't seem to be any benefit to the party in the elections.
I'm not sure why people think the Democrats are so horribly ineffective, generally they don't do what people want them to do because either (a) the opposition is pretty strong or (b) because they don't want to do it.
I don't believe in an untapped well of economic populism that Democrats just need to acknowledge and start serving and then they'll start winning elections.
No one said they'd start winning elections. They'd probably start losing even more of them--see, "pissing off all the rich people," above. But the untapped well of populism is there nonetheless. This was basically the point of my 81, although I guess it wasn't very clear.
By which I mean, Brown's message was a pure appeal to in-group identifiers. I'm white and drive a pickup truck, so I should represent you, White Middle/Working Class; never mind the policy debate. That kind of identification is going to be hard to get past.
I'll concede that better Democratic messaging is insufficient when Democratic voters can pick actual Republican policies out of a lineup and still the Democrats lose. At the very least, their constituency shouldn't react with disbelief and denial when someone points out what Republicans want to do with Social Security.
99: She did better than Coakley and the other Democrats who lost this cycle.
Social Security is fabulous and worth protecting.
But the demise of the defined-benefit pension is a huge loss for most middle class/ skilled working class folks.
And people switch jobs a lot more than they used to. I don't know how this would work, but I thik it would be great if employers could sign up for defined benefit plans of some sort that moved from employer to employer. You could say we just ought to make social security more generous, but I think it would be useful to allow people to save without being individually exposed to the market.
I think that some people (maybe Gephardt) had a plan, but I think it would be worth pushing.
Also, Medicare benefits should be more generous. And I don't mean that we should spend more on Medicare, but right now long-term care and home health aids and the responsibility for aging parents is a real strain for a lot of people.
Would vouchers for private day care appeal to people (means-tested but capping out at like $150K)?
The point (which I realize I didn't actually say) of 65 was that the idea that (other) people are poor because they are lazy is deeply ingrained in many (most?) people. Even the ones who vote for progressive policies and want to help the poor people and are frequently confronted with nonlazy poor people (as well as very lazy rich people).
Anyway I think this is why the Democrats have such a hard time responding to welfare queen nonsense- it's because deep down they really believe it too, they just think even welfare queens should get to eat.
Also, Medicare benefits should be more generous. And I don't mean that we should spend more on Medicare
I'm not sure how that would work.
I know that "call the voters stupid" is not a strategy
No kidding. The MIT healthcare economist Jonathon Gruber just did that in a forum, and it cost him a consulting gig in Vermont.
I think it's all jumbled up with the Protestant Work Ethic and the Frontier Spirit and Manifest Destiny and Aspirational Purchasing and whatnot. People think they aren't rich because they aren't working hard enough, and if they work harder they'll probably get rich, and therefore please don't overtax the rich people because that's where I'm headed.
107: Achieve cost savings through better care, less fee for service medicine and more primary care. ACOs have managed to save money.
BUT spend money on things that make people's lives easier. Caregivers have very high rates of depression and frequently develop their own health problems. Easing that burder could reduce the number of Prozac prescriptions and cardiac issues.
104: Sure. 7% more people voted for Warren than for Coakley, in Senate elections against Scott Brown. That's a significant number. How much of that do you think was populism, though, as opposed to having Obama on the ballot too (and being a competent campaigner, and other factors)?
There are just some voters who are not going to vote Democratic no matter what. Exhibit A: Kansas. Governor Brownback slashes taxes and government services, claiming that this will unshackle the private sector and bring about an economic boom. Predictably, the opposite happens, and Kansas is doing worse than other states that followed Democratic economic policies. As clear a referendum on the GOP economic agenda as you could ask for. And what happens? Brownback wins reëlection. Now, could Paul Davis, the Dem nominee, have won if he had just gotten his message across better? I don't know. But Jesus Christ, if election results represent the voice of the people, and that voice says "Thank you, sir—may I please have another?" Well then they got what they asked for, and they're getting what they deserve.
(And there go my hopes of a future consulting gig in Vermont.)
People think they aren't rich because they aren't working hard enough, and if they work harder they'll probably get rich, and therefore please don't overtax the rich people because that's where I'm headed.
I've heard this a lot, but I don't really believe it. I've never met anyone who felt this way.
I think when people say "economic populism" they mean the platform of people like the Working Families' Party, which I think aren't based on polling people to see what they'd vote for, and aren't populism in the sense of being a kind of identity politics, or following a politician who appeals to populist voters as a group. If people don't actually like those policies, the response can be that they're not voting their own interests. But appealing to some part of the working class that might agree on the Working Families' Party platform (which I don't know a lot about), and persuading more to support it, seems reasonable. Trying to get more WWC people into the coalition seems reasonable.
112: what was Paul Davis proposing to do to help people who are struggling financially that was different that what Brownback has done?
111: Charlie Baker ran for governor not national office. People see that differently, because they know that Scott Brown affected the balance of power in Washington where the national Republicans are extra crazy. Plus Baker is smarter than Brown.
115: Paul Davis argued, very explicitly, for restoring income tax levels to the previous level and using the money to provide government services.
111: Shitty midterm turnout is partially a consequence of poor Democratic messaging. Anyway, see 92.
113: Well, no, and I don't believe it either, but clearly my stepmother does. And I think more people believe it on some level than would admit to it.
Oh, did you mean you don't believe anyone thinks that? Huh. I think that's silly. It's built in to all the stories we learn in history classes.
117: and what the hell does that do for me, if I'm a working class citizen who isn't (knowingly) benefitting from those government services? It sounds like you just want to raise my taxes.
The Democrats plotted to put a lot of minimum-wage initiatives on the ballot in 2014. These were popular and passed in large numbers, but there didn't seem to be any benefit to the party in the elections.
Dude, go look up the median wage in this country. Raising the minimum helps a lot of people but in the context of trying to speak to the WWC "hey look, 9 bucks an hour" isn't going to do it.
People think they aren't rich because they aren't working hard enough
The last eight years has squashed a lot of that thinking.
121, 122: What are the economically populist policies you're envisioning being popular? You name it, I'm probably in favor of it, but I'm coming up dry on actual policies that you think would be appealing, if a generalized "Soak the rich and improve government services" doesn't do it.
121: So, have an education program on what the government does for you? I assume the campaign does that, but it has to swim against the tide of a constant set of messages about how all government funding is wasted.
116: Right, but I was comparing Warren-Brown (2012) to Coakley-Brown (2010), not Coakley-Baker (2014).
118/92: Fair enough. I took your objection to be based on cases where some democrat had picked a single issue for a short time, so I thought Warren's campaign, which was centered on the issue from start to finish, was instructive. But party-wide, you're right, we don't have data.
57: I hear ya. We can put in bike lanes, but damned if we can increase faculty lines despite a 125% growth in the student population. I am told that I can fix the graduation rate by being more inspiring in the classroom, so our students realize that they need to take more than six credits a semester. (Tangential, but yay state employees.)
"hey look, 9 bucks an hour"
I think $10 is the current main push. The people arguing against increasing the minimum wage seem convinced that by giving those at the bottom $10/hour, the people now making $10/hour will be able to get $12/hour and so on up the scale.
It just seems that the idea that government policies can in any way contribute to creating a rising tide that lifts all boats is mostly absent from public discourse. Sure, Obama tries to make the case for this in State of the Union speeches, but other than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, there are precious few Democrats who are willing to give a full-throated defense of liberalism. Now maybe that message wouldn't play in Peoria, and Dems are being smart by not going that route. But Republicans are unapologetic in their support for their policies, and it would be nice to see a few more Dems be equally unapologetic.
There's also a basic problem that it's not clear what one can do concretely to help out the working class in the absence of strong unions. I don't think unions as such are coming back, but I wonder whether something like pushing for worker owned companies and profit sharing could help. We need something to counterbalance the power of shareholders and executives who are the people keeping wages down.
122: Just to get it in the thread, the median hourly wage was $16.87 last year.
government policies can in any way contribute to creating a rising tide that lifts all boats is mostly absent from public discourse
Right, whereas we hear constantly that tax cuts for job creators will lift all boats.
123: Cash for Clunkers.
Minimum wage increase is seen as something that helps minimum wage workers, presumably at the expense of everyone else. Pro-immigration policy is seen as something that helps immigrants, presumably at the expense of everyone else.
What are the economically populist policies you're envisioning being popular?
There's a lot of ways to throw money at people in a hurry along the lines of 76 and as Drum mentioned, Cash for Clunkers type programs. Schools and public colleges around here have hundreds of millions of rennovation needed. All they lack is the funds. Throw money at those organizations with strings like Moby mentioned in 76. Give people money to upgrade the energy efficiency of their homes. Real money not the bullshit they do now. When we upgraded to our steel "cool roof" and our new fiberglass high efficiency windows the max federal kickback was 500 bucks, on something that cost me 25K. Offer people a voucher of up to 50 percent on those things and make a list of approved American made products that qualify. Any company that wants on the list gets told the minimum wage is 20 bucks an hour or whatever.
When you talk populism and illustrate that with a plan to give money to people rich enough to own a house, you are America personified.
134: That's actually not a bad list offhand -- have you considered running for office?
135: But that's kind of the point of this whole conversation, that the WWC, who for the sake of argument are in the 30-50% income percentiles (completely pulled out of my ass -- anyone want to suggest better numbers?) feel abandoned, because anything they notice as a government benefit goes to people poorer than them.
135: Homeownership rate in this country is 67 percent.
If the government can only help the working class around the margins, and these incremental improvements are so small that they're easily outweighed by culture war and identity issues, then... maybe the WWC is right to vote Republican? And maybe the Dems are right to not alienate their existing constituents by pursuing their vote, given that they actually do fairly well in elections (at least on the national level)?
Voting isn't dominated by the so-called WWC, it's dominated by people who have decent jobs, by people who think universal health care is great in theory but who are outraged by the idea of having their premiums go up to pay for it. It might be that a radical re-envisioning of the Democratic Party is what it needs to gain its rightful place as America's dominant political party, and you need to tear the whole thing down so that it rise again with dominant majorities in all branches of government, but that seems like a bit of an evidence-free stretch to me.
Minimum wage increase is seen as something that helps minimum wage workers, presumably at the expense of everyone else.
That's a good example of the failure of Dem messaging. Dems need to explain that if the working poor can earn a living wage, they won't need public assistance to supplement their incomes, and they'll be able to buy stuff, which will create demand for products, which will lead to more hiring, etc. And they need to keep explaining it over and over and over and over . . .
My understanding is that a properly adjusted minimum wage would be somewhere around $21.00 or $22.00/hour. Yet Democrats are generally talking about $10.10. Why?
136: Tax deductions need to be somehow rephrased as government benefits.
137: True. And there are already very large tax advantages to owning a home.
Offer people a voucher of up to 50 percent on those things and make a list of approved American made products that qualify. Any company that wants on the list gets told the minimum wage is 20 bucks an hour or whatever.
Would it really be hard for someone to throw a wrench in this? "Hey if you want to having a fancy-pants house spend your own money. So-called 'climate change' isn't even real, why should our hard-earned tax dollars go to this corrupt boondoggle? And why should those workers get paid at least 20 bucks an hour when all of us are getting 15? Stupid Dems always spending other people's money on stupid shit, step back and let the market work."
144: That would certainly be the Republican angle, but who's to say it would work?
It appears to have worked several times before.
That's actually not a bad list offhand
That's a lot of why this stuff frustrates me. How hard can this really be to pull of in times when our party controls both houses?
And there are already very large tax advantages to owning a home.
A lot of that skews towards the higher end housing markets. Has your interest ever been higher than the standard deduction? Mine hasn't.
Would it really be hard for someone to throw a wrench in this?
Well, the Wikipedia entry on Cash for Clunkers says it was three billions dollars and exhausted the funds within 30 days. I don't see why these wouldn't be similarly popular.
143: no, that just keeps the minimum wage steady with inflation--i.e., not a decrease in terms of real purchasing power. But $11 doesn't actually increase the minimum wage at all in order to keep up with the last 50 years of economic growth. If you want the rising economic tide to lift all the boats, your policies have to require that it does so. It doesn't happen automatically.
Has your interest ever been higher than the standard deduction?
Not interest. But I have many thousands in property taxes also.
How hard can this really be to pull of in times when our party controls both houses?
Because the right wing has done a spectacular job of starving the government of funds for anything that might be popular. You're right that things on your list would be popular, and they can probably be constructed so as to be good policy too. But they're all very obviously optional -- they're cash handouts to people who aren't starving. To pull off policies like that, you need either enough tax revenues to support essential government services plus this kind of thing, or the willingness and ability to borrow (which plenty of states and localities don't have, legally, in the same way the Feds do).
Might be a good idea, but there's no mystery about what makes it hard.
So this is a genuine (non-snarky) question: what was the overall political impact of Cash for Clunkers?
150: Which is why Bush could send everybody $600 and start two wars.
151: Probably nothing, but that's the point--it was a tiny program that Democrats generally didn't even do a good job of trying to claim credit for. Multiply it by a thousand and you'd have something.
Obama needed to have come after Clinton.
He could have started one war and given everybody $750.
Speaking of home improvement, I'm starting to think the tile guys aren't showing up today. A phone call would be nice, godamnit. I did have other things to get done besides screwing around on the internet while I wait.
156: And I figured you were on a stakeout.
He'll rest at nothing to bring down the man who kidnapped his grout.
Regrouting is one of those things that I thought I could do, but turned out to be best left to professionals.
157: It's my day off.
159: This is a remodel of our main bathroom. I'm down for replacing a toilet myself but no way in hell am I attempting all that. I'll work some overtime and pay someone who knows what the hell they're doing.
144.2: I don't know why `less dependence on foreign oil' doesn't play better across the aisles.
Someone above has surely mentioned by now that the "undeserving poor" in an American context are mostly going to turn out to be the nonwhite poor, yes? Because the vast bulk of WWC hatred of supposedly "undeserving" poor in recent decades was dog-whistle politics about handouts to the Negro? If that hero has appeared already (I haven't managed to read the whole thread just yet) it is my pleasure to agree with them.
We've been way ahead of you, LC.
No, nobody here has ever considered that before, Lord Castock.
(I should've just done a search for "racism." Slow this morning.)
You could start in Missouri, but that's probably a long trip that isn't necessary.
A fair number of the people I grew up with moved to the suburbs of Kansas City, but I don't think they live in actual Missouri
Let me be the first to suggest racism.
That's what I said.
One small framing point - I think the word "services" is the touch of death. Both boring and easy for many to gloss as "something for nothing". We need ways to talk about what government should do whole avoiding that word.
Government Loin-Girding for Economic Competition with China.
Government Aid in Raising Avengers of Terrorism.
Temporary assistance to needy financial conglomerates.
147.1 -- "Party" and "control" don't exactly mean what you want them to mean. 'Coalition' and 'has agenda setting but not unilateral enactment authority over' is closer to the reality. I know you know this, but using the wrong words leads to misunderstanding of what is, or was, possible.
Way back, on the Drum follow-up regarding benefits of the ACA failing to accrue to the working class (I'm just delving in here):
8: Mixing working class and middle class on this point is obscuring things I think.
Mixing poor and working class is obscuring things as well. The chart Drum points to seems to consider the bottom 20% poor, and Drum distinguishes them from the working class, but there are many working poor. I do wish that anyone who puts out studies and papers on these matters which speak of the bottom, or second, or third quintile would attach income figures to these. I also begin to fuss about averages vs. medians.
113 - I'm also really suspicious of this claim. I kind of suspect that what's actually going on is functionally equivalent but a lot uglier. It's just that a lot of people in America instinctively try to side with the highest status people around, and because we don't have a specifically designated set of aristocrats it just ends up being the richer people/bosses/etc. It's not so much that they're miscalculating their chances of the policies benefiting them, it's that they want policies that benefit the people they see on top of the hierarchy even when it's clearly not them (and when the harm isn't direct enough to count against them) - just like they want policies that harm people they see as below them on the hierarchy.
I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if the government stopped fooling around with tax deduction style benefits entirely. (The Republicans have done a good job of funneling as many government benefits as they can into tax deductions, I suspect because they're the most efficient way of giving government benefits to people while still making them feel like they aren't receiving any benefits.) We could still have all the same incentives/financial assistance/subsidies/etc., just in the form of a lump sum cash payment every year/quarter/whatever. It would be a lot more interesting to have these sorts of arguments about government benefits and so on if instead of people getting money from the government in the form of a such-and-such tax break they got a check in the mail every three months for several hundred (or thousand, or whatever) dollars.
I'm not saying we wouldn't see the exact same argument, I mean, but it is a lot easier to push back against it when you're talking to someone getting social security than it is when you have to start talking to middle aged or younger people about interest rates and tax deductions and subsidized loans and so on.
178.2: That would be interesting, indeed, but would involve a ballooning of government bureaucracy in order to generate these additional checks, no? Still, in fantasy land, would be interesting to see how people might respond to increased awareness. I'm going to guess that they'd fairly quickly fob off their gov't checks in the mail as "rebates".
That would be interesting, indeed, but would involve a ballooning of government bureaucracy in order to generate these additional checks, no?
Not necessarily. Mailing people checks is one of the simplest things government bureaucracies do, in terms of administrative needs. The Social Security Administration is famous for low operating costs and administrative overhead.
It would probably cut back on a lot of work that the IRS does right now (while replacing it with the check-sending apparatus, I mean). The rebate thing could probably be managed with a quick specification of why the money is what it is. I mean, not a really complicated one but something like "Government home owner's subsidy: $whateveritisIdon'thaveahome; Government parental care subsidy: $etc." along with the check.
I mean, we still live in a country where people living on disability or social security engage in endless rants about how the government shouldn't be allowed to send people money to live on. Nothing I can think of can correct for good old fashioned moronic American totallynotracism. But it would be nice to see the extent to which those subsidies exist made really clear, both to shut people up and to make for interesting "wait why are those people getting $500 checks every year again just because they [whatever]?" debates.
180: Right, but in this hypothetical case the generation of checks would be quite a bit more complicated, needing to account for 'rebates' of many sorts. As it stands, people calculate their rebates themselves in the form of tax deductions: in the hypothetical, the government would be doing that.
182: Fair enough, but I think 181 answers that concern pretty well. And it's not like all the work involved in the current tax-credit system is on the taxpayer; the IRS still needs to check their calculations, make sure they're actually eligible for what they're claiming, etc. A system of just cutting checks would still involve some of that work, of course, but it wouldn't necessarily add more bureaucracy than already exists.
the IRS still needs to [...] make sure they're actually eligible for what they're claiming
I'm not sure the IRS actually does that in every individual case, for every deduction. Is the thing.
For the EITC, at least, they do actually check to see if you qualify even if you didn't claim it, and if they find that you do they give it to you and send you a nice letter explaining that. It's happened to me a couple of times.
At any rate, MHPH's emphasis on the term "subsidy" for these hypothetical rebates is well-taken.
If people had to directly apply for a homeowner's subsidy or something that would really end up interesting, because Americans at least are really reluctant to do that sort of thing a lot of the time (in a way we aren't when it comes to claiming deductions). So you'd see an impressive increase in government revenue which could be spent on the less-direct-but-really-important stuff like roads or plumbing. It would probably come from exactly the wrong groups of people, though.
187: I kind of think the large amounts involved (especially mortgage interest deduction) would mostly overcome that inertia one way or another. Also those deductions disproportionately go to richer people - 70% of the value of mortgage interest and property tax deductions goes to the top income quintile - so any government savings would mostly be on the shoulders of lower income people who don't have the leisure or resources to make the applications.
That's kind of what I was thinking when talking about the wrong groups of people...
Much as I love Social Security, the agency is kind of a pain in the ass.
It's fine if you're retired and collecting a check, but (in no particular order)
1.) Their web site sucks
2.) they keep shutting down offices
3.) they are a pain in the ass to deal with for SSI and SSDI
e.g. if you go back to work above a certain number of hours and are not participating in ticket to work, they overpay you and garnish your future payments retroactively
Not as bad as applying food stamps, but it still sucks even though it ought to be much simpler.