[lbo-talk] "The Trouble With Class Interest Populism, " by Stephen Rose

[Michael Pugliese]

   Same Stephen Rose?
 http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=12002
   >...One strand of this argument contends that, despite rising
insecurity and inequality, most people are doing fine; so it's a
mistake for Democrats to emphasize pocketbook issues, lest Democrats
become a minority party of the poor. The ur-text for this view is
Stephen Rose's April 2006 piece for the Democratic Leadership Council,
"The Trouble with Class-Interest Populism." We invited Rose and
several others to debate this question on the Prospect Web site (
www.prospect.org/middleclass ). Have a look. This has to be the key
domestic policy battle for the Democratic soul.
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=114&subsecID=144&contentID=253831
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-December/022914.html
   >...A new edition of Stephen Rose's classic 1979 American Profile Poster
- a booklet surrounding a poster showing U.S. income distribution by
sex, race, and occupation - has just been published by the New Press,
under the title Social Stratification in the United States. Besides
the centerpiece poster, there are tables and graphs showing wealth
and occupational distribution and other data nuggets. Looks
absolutely excellent.

ISBN 1-56584-550-1, <http://www.thenewpress.com/newbooks/socstrat.htm>.

   	What Is the Matter with Kansas?
Economic populism makes a comeback.
by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/950kzhlj.asp?pg=2
 >...Though he was rarely invoked by name, the renewal of Democratic
populism, particularly in the so-called red states so many liberals
had written off, bore the stamp of Frank's analysis. The Democrats had
attempted this populist turn before--Al Gore's "people versus the
powerful" rhetoric, John Edwards's talk of "two Americas"--but this
time around they made a concerted effort to soft-pedal their social
liberalism as well. Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina and
Pennsylvania's Bob Casey Jr. loved their guns almost as much as they
loved God, and they were at least ambivalent about abortion. And as
seats flipped across the country, no one must have been more pleased
with the results than Frank. His thesis, after all, had been
vindicated.

Or had it? Here's where things get complicated. The original problem
with the Frank thesis, as many reviewers pointed out, was its allergy
to actual data. He claimed the white working class had been
immiserated under GOP rule, even as they voted Republican in
ever-greater numbers. But had they really? If we define working-class
status by education, the white working class represents roughly
two-thirds of the white population, and its median income actually
surpasses the national median. Indeed, roughly 40 percent of these
voters had family incomes over $60,000 in 2004, an amount of money
that still goes a long way in most parts of the country. This is a
group that literally defines the American mainstream.

What this means is that the white working class is so large and variegated as

to defy easy generalizations. It includes successful small-scale
entrepreneurs as well as impoverished blue-collar workers, managers at
big-box stores as well as their struggling part-time subordinates. The
Republican edge with these voters in recent years has been based on
many things, including rational economic interests, not a grand
deception. Working-class Americans who have thrived in the changing
economy, the capital-rich who've seen their homes appreciate and their
businesses grow, are supportive of tax cuts and deregulation. And
enough of them are thriving to have provided the GOP with
supermajorities of the white working class vote in 2002 and 2004.

Meanwhile, those working-class voters who find it harder and harder to
keep up have been trending leftward. Indeed, far from becoming less
Democratic over the past half-century--under the influence of those
"hallucinatory" culture war issues, as Frank would have it--poor
non-college-educated voters have become far more Democratic. These
voters' struggles are real: The sad fact, as Thomas Edsall reports in
Building Red America, is that only 45 percent of whites in the bottom
third of the income distribution work at all, and almost 60 percent
are unmarried. They depend on government services, and they vote for
them.

But there aren't enough of these downwardly mobile Americans for the
Democrats' populist appeals to win elections, at least until this
cycle. Earlier this year, Stephen Rose, now a senior economic fellow
with the center-left think tank Third Way, infuriated many to his left
with a short paper called "The Trouble With Class-Interest Populism,"
in which he pointed out that as little as 23 percent of the American
population "can be categorized as having a direct personal interest in
supporting the social safety net programs that most of the public
strongly associates with the Democratic party."

For Rose, the economic story of recent decades is not one of
immiseration but one of dramatic gains for both middle and
working-class families. His most striking finding: When you
average-out family incomes over 15 years and capture only the peak
earning years--from age 26 to 59--fully 60 percent of Americans will
live in households making over $60,000 a year, with half of these
households making over $85,000. This has meant that more and more
workers feel like beneficiaries of the changing economy rather than
victims of it--and as a result, feel comfortable voting for the GOP.

So what happened in 2006? Why is left-wing populism suddenly
resonating? What's masked by Rose's averaging, and by the general
picture of working-class success, are the tremendous fluctuations in
annual income created by the globalized economy. This has made
economic security, not poverty or prosperity, the central concern of
today's working class--whether you're talking about the small business
woman who can barely afford health care or the autoworker who's just
discovered that his corporate pension is a mirage. And the bad news
for the GOP is that the left has begun to figure out how to speak
their language. In cutting-edge polemics like Jacob Hacker's The Great
Risk Shift, the smartest liberal voices are focusing on voter anxiety
about health care and income volatility--anxiety that the GOP hasn't
even begun to find a way to address.

The good news for Republicans, on the other hand, is that the left's
preferred solution--making America more like Europe through a vast
expansion of the tax-and-transfer state--is still extremely unpopular
with most voters, which is why Democrats talked up economic security
in 2006 but were thin on policy detail. To working-class Americans
struggling to figure out how to get ahead in a more competitive
economy, when you can expect to change jobs several times in a decade
let alone a lifetime, the "Lou Dobbs Democrats" don't have much to
offer--a minimum wage increase, a critique of the alleged inequities
of small-bore trade deals, and tough talk on border security that will
be drowned out in a caucus that's eager to liberalize immigration laws
and increase the influx of low-skilled laborers. Once the artfully
named bills pass and the signing ceremonies fade into the past,
working class voters will probably wonder, as Walter Mondale once put
it, "Where's the beef?"

This gap between what the Democrats are promising and what they can
deliver offers a renewed opportunity to the GOP. To date, Republicans
have failed to come to grips with the issue of economic insecurity,
offering table scraps and tax credits in place of real solutions. This
signal failure is the reason that the Bush-Rove vision of a lasting
Republican majority has hovered just beyond the GOP's reach. It's
easy, however, to imagine a renewed "ownership agenda" focused on
spreading capital ownership, freeing workers from employer-based
health care, rewarding low-wage work, and defending the interests of
hard-pressed parents. The question is whether Republicans, in their
present state of drift and disarray, will be farsighted enough to
embrace it.

Ross Douthat, an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly, and Reihan
Salam, a writer in Washington, are at work on a book on the future of
the GOP.





-- 
Michael Pugliese