>> > Bush's supporters stand on the opposite side of the class divide to
>> > Ahmadinejad's supporters, Chavez' supporters, Nasrallah's supporters,
>> > and so on.
To which Doug replied:
>> Lots of Bush's supporters are working class...
To which Yoshie responded:
> Sure, but the higher up you go up the income ladder, the more support
> for Bush you find, which is the opposite of support for Ahmadinejad,
> AMLO, Chavez, Morales, Nasrallah, and so on.
>
> The class divide, moreover, is clearer in Iran, Mexico, Venezuela,
> Bolivia, Lebanon, etc. than in the USA. After all, the USA is still a
> rich country, and even the poorest in the USA aren't as desperately
> poor as the poorer 50-80% or so in many countries outside the West. As
> I said to Chuck, Chris, Wojtek, etc., above a certain threshold of per
> capita income, the populace tend to express a preference for a
> combination of liberalism (i.e.. political liberalism) and democracy,
> liberal democracy, at the national level, and both the electoral Left
> and Right -- including the Democratic and Republican Parties here --
> are basically committed to it. The masses' preference for illiberal
> democracy is only found in countries below a certain threshold of per
> capita income.*
======================
I liked Yoshie's answer to Doug's challenging point about Bush's working
class support.
It's not surprising that lots of lower-income voters support Bush. All conservative parties like the Republicans necessarily have a mass base or they wouldn't be major parties. Popular support is necessary for them to gain and hold power.
But it's essential, IMO, to distinguish between the typical nature of mass support of the right and of the left to make sense of political developments.
Right-wing mass support draws mostly on the more atomized and less politically educated part of the population - rural farmers, small town merchants and professionals, unemployed and unorganized workers in cities and factory towns, etc. - whose sense their social influence is declining and who feel increasingly threatened by the impact of immigration, technological change, and urbanization on the traditional economy and culture.
It is not qualitatively the same mass base as that of the left. The left's base is mostly to be found the larger and more cosmopolitan urban areas where it draws heavily on the more politically educated part of the population found in the trade unions and other organized social movements.
The right's base is also much more uncertain, because in an economic crisis the contradiction between its social support and its lack of a social program become much more apparent. The Bush administration has thrived on the strength of a strong economy and, especially, the trauma of 9/11 to which economic issues have been subordinated. But as economic insecurity has grown and it has become increasingly evident that the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush administration has made Americans less rather than more secure, the Republican mass support has already begun to erode - a process that will be accelerated if a slowing economy is reflected in rising unemployment and bankruptcy numbers.
In developing countries, there are pressures for even the more traditional layers of the population to move leftwards because their nationalism is expressed as anti-imperialism rather than its opposite, as in the US, and because their economic conditions draw them towards populist parties and politicians. Islamist parties and leaders like Ahmadinejad are especially contradictory because they reflect the combined religious and social conservatism, economic populism, and nationalist anti-imperialism of their oppressed constituencies.
I would disagree with Yoshie only insofar as she seems to regard "political illiberalism" to be universally characteristic of the masses. Unless I am misunderstanding, this seems to be echoing Wojtek from his left. While it may well be true of Middle East Islamist populism, it doesn'tat all seem to be the case with respect to the Latin American populist movements, which are essentially social-democratic in character.