[WS:] Just because you do not understand something it does not mean it is stupid. So let me elaborate a bit.
I am currently involved in a book project, to which I am a major contributor, whose central premise is a relationship between socio-economic class and institutional social security arrangement. This premise is built on previous research in the neo-Marxist tradition (Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer etc.) arguing that the strength of the working class was essential for building democratic institutions. The book argues, in a nutshell, that the strength of the working class is essential for building collective security arrangements - the stronger the working class the stronger collective welfare protections arrangements (aka the welfare state), the weaker the working class the stronger the individual welfare protection arrangements (e.g. charitable organizations or reliance on family networks). It is of course more complex than that - but this is the main gist of it.
But the more I study it, the more I doubt that this premise is true. To begin with, your own country, Australia, historically had strong working class vis a vis landowners and industrial bourgeoisie - yet it has predominantly individual welfare protections and rather weak welfare state.
Your neighbor New Zealand is in the same league. What is more, in countries with strong collective welfare protections, like Sweden or Norway, the push toward collective security arrangement primarily came not from the working class but from the professionals and government administration. Ditto for the UK, the social welfare was spearheaded not by Labour but by professional bureaucrats (Beveridge, etc.).
Germany is even a more telling case - social security arrangements were first introduced by Otto von Bismarck, basically against the wishes of both the high bourgeoisie and and labor. His main motivation was that collective security was instrumental in his project of German unification - it created a sense of collective "German interests" while neutralizing radical elements among high bourgeoisie and militant labor. Similarly in the Netherlands and Belgium - collective security was an element in a defense mobilization against the German threat in the 1930s.
In short, the connection between working class and collective security arrangements is at best dubious, if existing at all. The question is why, because on the surface such collective welfare security arrangements are in the material interests of the working class. Of course, the significance of it for the US is quite obvious - it raises the question why would a significant proportion of the 99 percent who would materially benefit from collective welfare arrangements actively oppose such arrangements (the What is the Matter with Kansas thing).
The standards explanation of this is based on the "false consciousness" thesis - that people have been duped in one way or another to act against their own interests, I find that explanation unsatisfactory, because it is not an explanation at all, but a semantic argument to save the central premise that socio-economic class is central driver of political behavior from empirical refutation.
My own thinking goes in a different direction - that broad concepts of class based on a single distinguishing factor, such as the relations to the means of production - are not very useful and bound to produce falsehoods like every other generalization. We need to define class in a more precise way by taking into account several other factors in addition to the relations to the means of production, including occupational status, level of formal education, cultural preferences (thank you Bourdieu) as well as socio-demographic factors such as gender, ethnicity or nationality. From that point of view, evangelicals and tea party supporters form a class - but it is unclear how to define that class. Calling them petite bourgeoisie does not do it because it is based on the false consciousness assumption - those members of the working class that do not have working class consciousness must be petite bourgeoisie. Moreover, petite bourgeoisie referred mainly to small shop owners - and most evangelicals and tea party followers do not belong to this category.
So this raises the first question - what defines them as a class? It may sound stupid to someone who does not want to be bothered with facts, but if you do empirical social science you do not want facts contradicting your theories.
The second issue is how class interests are defined. The simplistic - and false - answer is that every individual knows his/her best interests and those interests are aggregated to a collective level by some spontaneous process. That is basically the classical and neo-classical economic theory, which I may add is grounded in Anglo-Saxon individualism. In reality we know that people can hardly agree on anything, let alone such nebulous concepts like "class interests." Studies show that even in formal organizations, which have much tighter rules and control mechanisms than socio-economic classes - there is always a struggle in defining what the goals and interests of the organiazaton are. So for socio-economic class - it is far more difficult and contentious to define class interests.
My own thinking goes in a different direction again - class interests do not emerge from below but are rather imposed from above, by a vanguard party if you will. However, there are many cliques vying for the status of the vanguard party, and the question is which one of them actually becomes one. My hypothetical answer to this question is the clique that faces the least resistance and opposition - which is consistent with institutional theories organizational behavior. In other words - the clique that expresses views that look most in line with what is consistent with the "stock knowledge" or a set of beliefs and value taken for granted by members of a given collective - be it organization or nascent socio-economic class becomes its vanguard party that defines the class interests and class itself.
I sum, socio-economic class is defined not by some objective characteristics of its members but by the vanguard party being followed by members of that class. That is to say, social classes are social spaces created by various cliques vying to the status of the vanguard party that attract different followers. This is pretty much like sports team and their fans - the you will build they will come thing. People may like sports in general, but that does not translate into liking football, soccer or baseball, let alone following a particular team. The reverse is true - sports teams create particular sports and niches within those sports which gradually attract followers. In the same fashion, tea party followers are a class because the "vanguard" tea party defines them as class and they consider that claim to be legitimate. In sum vanguard parties create social classes and define their interests, rather than being expressions of some "objectively" existing social classes and "objectively" defined interests. Anyone can belong to that class regardless of occupation, relations to the means of production, cultural background, gender, ethnicity etc. There may be correlations between these characteristics and membership in different classes, but they just that - correlations not causes or defining factors.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."