George (and Doug),
I will begin the way I will end. What really has changed in politics since the post-war years except the fact that there is no longer any kind of organization that can be called "left" or "working class"? This is the primary fact that must be kept in mind when talking about these subjects. Without some kind of organization in the social space that we call "left," "social democratic," "working class" or what ever, there is simply no range of alternatives except the fake pro-"family" and fake pro-"communal" (racist and "small" business ideology) to express itself.
The funny thing is that it is hard for me to vote Democrat in most cases. Especially during the time periods when I lived in Chicago and Hoboken when voting Democrat was voting for either a big town or small town machine that seemed to me to be a little like organized crime. At times I have actually considered voting Republican in local races. In my childhood, when my family moved from Schenectady to Florida my mother switched from Democrat to Republican simply because southern Democrats were all racists. Now the parties have switched. But my mother back then found anti-racist reasons to vote for the party of Business and Bankers. But this is just to deflect your question and I wont do that... for long.
Another way to deflect your question is to point out how few people actually vote. I guess now days we hover around 50% of the official electorate for presidential elections. How many people does that leave out, people who are not even counted in the electorate? Does anyone have these statistics? How many people vote for off year elections? for primaries? for school board elections? This is of course not just a matter of who votes (more likely upper income people, etc.) but how people are involved enough in society to think that voting makes some kind of difference.
What I am saying is that I think that people have to be organized (somehow, somewhere) in the first place before voting can begin to have meaning. In other words before one can believe that even voting for the lesser evil can bring some kind of benefit one has to not be isolated politically and/or socially. I remember part of Michael Harrington's argument in his book "Towards a Democratic Left" was that the "left" of the Democratic Party, at the time, was a Social Democratic formation. Nelson Lichtenstein in his biography of Walter Reuther has a more specific argument. He says that the Upper Midwest in the post-war era had a wide social democratic character to it, that could be traced back to both the political influence of industrial unions, but also to their larger cultural impact. All of this is missing now. There are historical reasons why this is missing and I am not about to blame the janitor or the barrista or the Wal-Mart cashier for not being able to operate in the context of a larger society that provides political alternatives. We are all partially to blame for not working harder to create these cultural, social, and political alternatives.
But as I said this too is to some extent to deflect your question. But the background of deflection I think helps to understand why 25.5% of the electorate votes Republican.
In the first place, I don't know for sure. I am not an expert, so I expect Doug to shoot me down with real knowledge and statistics. In the following, I am making an impressionistic guess based on my personal experience and my reading.
I think quite frankly for the 20% of the whole electorate that votes for Republicans who are not rich, if there is no other alternative it is in their interests to do so. These are people that most leftists define as "voting against (economic) interest." But we are defining economic interests in a funny way. We are defining it in a more objective and long term way. But when there are no alternatives offered, anti-immigrant cultural attitudes, racist attitudes, ways of seeing the world that show you that your family life may be threatened by forces that you are trying to understand, a way of life you are trying desperately to protect, voting Republican is the default "lesser evil" in most places in the country. Neither party addresses important matters, but the Republicans often address matters that resonate with everyday life in important ways. If middle class people are not pulled by a strong working class pole that can transform the political and economic choices, then the default mode is to vote your economic and cultural selfishness. And the rest of the population that doesn't even vote simply reflects that limited range of choices presented to the people who do vote.
The only solution here is organization, education, institution building, cultural sharing, etc. The 5% of the rich are always going to vote their class interests. They are organized automatically from the time that they first enter school. The other 20% or so of the electorate that votes republican, the people that represent a large portion of the currently voting electorate may always vote Republican. And they will reflect an equal proportion of the non-voting electorate until their is some amount of good organization that helps to change the alternatives. That is all that I can guess about this subject.
But there is one more factor that comes in here. Racism. Once you get into a racist way of thinking all other forms of selfishness, ignorance, etc. follows suit and the usual class based interests seem to be negated. The Republicans have become the party of implicit (sometimes explicit racism). This racism factors into jingoism and the support for fanatical imperialism. There is too much to say on this subject. But what it comes down to again and again is a more complicated notion of the problem than can be reduced to the fact that some small amount of the whole electorate votes Republican.
By the way, if Robert Taft came around again I would consider him better than any Democrat who has run for the presidency in the last 26 years. In my view he would be the lesser evil if he could revive his old conservative Republican coalition. Why do I bring this up? Because, to a certain extent, the current Republicans are a coalition of the old Dixiecrats with the Chamber of Commerce types and this has lead to a stated preference for "small" government but it is really Bigger and Bigger Government for the National Security State. The distance between the Reagan-Bush Republican Party and the Robert Taft Republican Party only shows how much of the old Democratic Party territory that the Republicans have taken over. So why shouldn't the old Dixiecrats vote for the New Republican Party which now occupies the space of Big Military Government combined with racism?
What really has changed but the disorganization of the "social democratic" to "grassroots" "left"?
Jerry Monaco
Again, forgive my typos.
At 03:20 PM 7/20/2006, you wrote:
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-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
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