Well, you have it the other way around. Concern about the rightward drift of white voters is more about "identity" than class, and concern about underrepresentation of people of color in a left-wing social movement is more about class than "identity." Why? Because white voters who are drifting to the right are doing so on the basis of their (moral or cultural) identity concerns (religion, hunting, abortion, etc.) rather than their class concerns (see below).
At 11:06 PM -0500 1/2/03, Lance Murdoch wrote:
> > Why look at only the voters (especially if you are an anarchist!)?
>> There are lots of people who are not voting for the rightward drift.
>
>The Washington Post article was chock full of polls of people
>including non-voters, poor whites etc. The voters was just one of
>many polls cited in the article.
The Washington Post article that you mentioned has the following basic point:
***** Voter Values Determine Political Affiliation By Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 26, 2001; Page A01
...Battles over abortion, gun control and other cultural values are dramatically reshaping the voting behavior of the American electorate..."In the white electorate now," said Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California in San Diego, "the conflict is: Do you vote your pocketbook or your moral conscience?"...
The changes have not produced a full-scale reversal of the two parties' traditional constituencies. In the bottom half of the income levels, the Democratic Party remains strong among African Americans, Hispanics and white union members, while GOP support has swelled among nonunion whites....
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56905-2001Mar25?language=printer> *****
It is not white workers in general but unorganized white workers who vote their morality and identity rather than their pocketbook. Blacks -- even the ones who are not in any unions -- pretty consistently vote their pocketbook, regardless of their personal views on abortion, gun control, etc., and so do white union workers, though to a lesser extent than blacks in general. Black workers, on the average, have a higher level of class consciousness than white workers, who tend to be more easily swayed by right-wing cultural identity politics, especially in the absence of a strong labor movement, than black workers are. White workers, when separated from blacks and other people of color, tend to become conservative. Unions help white workers overcome their conservatism in part because unions are among the few secular and racially integrated institutions that are not fully controlled by bosses. That -- a good influence of blacks on non-blacks -- shows us the importance of blacks in a left-wing social movement focused on class. -- Yoshie
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