If you want to know white evangelicals' opinions, you have to look at data like those provided above which disaggregate white evangelicals from Black evangelicals and look at the former alone. Party identification is a particularly good indicator of white evangelicals' thoughts on economic questions, as it is highly unlikely for them (in contrast to, say, higher-income women) to refuse to identify as Republican because they support abortion, GLBT rights, and like issues -- a hypothesis borne out by the fact that Republican identification steeply rises with income, as you recognize below.
>It shows, unsurprisingly, that Republican identification rises with
>income, and that born-againers are more likely to be Reps than
>non-b.a.'ers at any income level.
What conclusion should we draw from that? That the born-again at all income levels are a lost cause or that we should present a robust left-wing economic agenda, robust enough to appeal to even low-income working-class white evangelicals the majority of whom do not identify as Republican and differ only a little from low-income working-class white evangelicals? I say it's the latter.
> >All in all, as far as current levels of trust and distrust in
>>various social and political institutions are concerned, Americans
>>and Europeans are remarkably similar. Instead of complaining that
>>Americans are more backward than Europeans -- an opinion that is not
>>likely to win over more Americans to left-wing politics -- US
>>leftists should think about how to build on the strengths that do
>>exist in American social and cultural conditions.
>
>Those strengths don't extend to class consciousness. The conclusion
>to the NYT story on the Wal-Mart union vote in Colorado
><http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/politics/26walmart.html?pagewanted=print&position=>:
Isn't the latest victory of Wal-Mart a sign that the most effective union-busting tactic is to instill fear into workers' minds -- enough fear to outweigh workers' class-conscious desire (expressed for instance by Alicia Sylvia, one of the workers quoted in the excerpt from the article you cite) to improve their wages and working conditions? Is workers' fear a paranoid one based on only illusions or is it a well grounded one based on precedents, such as Wal-Mart closing unionized shops in retaliation in Quebec and Jacksonville, Texas? And what should be US leftists' response to it? To blame workers for not being able to overcome their fear or to come up with practical solutions that diminish the fear?
One hopeful sign in the article, btw, is that the main organizer of the campaign was "a 21-year-old [Joshua Noble] who loves to snowboard," who "rounded up support for a union three months ago from 8 of his 16 co-workers," even though the shop was a mix of college students and "single mothers struggling to make ends meet" -- a mixed constituency that is usually a circumstance that makes it difficult to organize (<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/politics/26walmart.html>). Noble put up a good fight! -- Yoshie
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