>Let's suppose that you are a strategist for a political party to the
>left of the Democratic Party, who is confronted with the above
>figures. What's the program that you want to advocate? What's the
>strategy to mobilize people for it?
I wish I had a nice answer I could pull off the shelf. As a start, I'd say it would have to hold some powerful appeal for the bottom half of the income distribution - a basic social democratic package of income security, health insurance, job retraining and placement, free education and child care, etc. But it would have to address explicitly what I referred to in shorthand as the Jesus and race issues - and the "Jesus" issue is heavily inflected by the weird sexual anxieties that afflict American society (the kinds of "cultural" things that a lot of traditional lefties don't like to talk about).
Nathan says:
>It's a bit too materialist to dismiss all social beliefs as "Jesus"--
>abortion is a serious moral issue for some people and more
>broadly, it represents a whole series of values for married
>religious people for whom modern gender relations are not
>wanted. I don't agree with them, but the idea that social values
>have no legitimate pull is a delusion that progressives make at
>their peril.
They have a pull, no doubt about it, but "legitimate"? No, those social values are deeply reactionary, starting with abortion. Women cannot be free without reproductive freedom, and opposition to abortion is one of the prime weapons of reaction around.
And race. Any serious progressive movement in the U.S. can't duck the issue but has to take it on explicitly, and make the point that white skin privilege can't pay the health insurance bill.
A footnote to the voting numbers: below-$15,000 households are about 16% of the U.S. population but just 7% of the electorate, while the over-$50,000s are 44% of the population and 53% of the electorate. So the low end is seriously underrpresented, but it would seem from the vote, that within that demographic, the religious right is grossly overrepresented.
Doug