Free Republic

Obviously frustrated by Hillary Clinton’s collapsing presidential campaign (her second in a row!), The Nation’s Joan Walsh, a frequent MSNBC contributor and high-profile Hillary supporter, took to her verified Twitter account Thursday to attack working class Democrats as racists.

A couple of years ago, I read a piece by Ramesh Ponuru, or Reihan Salam, I think. Or both. Yuval Levin may have been in the mix. Don't quote me on that. Google fails me. The thrust of the piece was that the GOP was not offering anything to the working class any longer. This was due, partly, to previous GOP tax-cutting successes; the working class had been largely excluded from having to pay federal income tax. They do pay FICA/payroll taxes, of course -- but those go toward one's own Social Security, theoretically at least, and not to the...

Lots of celebrating by Trump fans and despairing by Trump critics on social media today over this poll. It’s December, notes Philip Klein, and this guy’s now fully 20 points ahead nationally. And not only does he have a big lead, his lead’s gotten bigger: He’s up nine points since CNN last surveyed the country, thanks mainly to the decline of Ben Carson and Jeb Bush. His overall average in RCP’s tracker has now reached a new high of 30.8 percent. Trump critics have been sitting in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, i.e. Trump’s supposedly inevitable slide...

Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don't rate in the eyes of our elites. A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such). That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and...

The disturbing evidence about the health of white middle-aged American working class, discovered and publicized this week by Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case, is not tied to just one trend in the culture, policies, or economic factors at work within the United States. It is not the fault of one party or movement, but has multiple root causes. But it is something we all ought to be concerned about, both for the future fiscal and policy burden it represents, and for the broader lesson it tells us about how America is changing. The numbers clearly...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clearly prides himself in shunning focus-group research. He refuses big campaign donations that he asserts make his opponents beholden to special interests. He seems to target no specific constituency. Many pollsters remain puzzled by Trump’s political appeal. “Republican support for Donald Trump just continues to grow,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth Polling after its August survey, “with no clear sense of who his constituency really is.” Yet a constituency is emerging. Trump’s strongest supporters, roughly a quarter of Republican voters across the polls, are not dissuaded by any increased media scrutiny of their candidate....

In what could be a significant opening for the Republican Party, working-class Americans have largely abandoned President Obama and rejected his economic policies as they continue to suffer from the historically weak economic recovery, a new analysis of IBD/TIPP Poll data finds. By wide margins, this group is more likely than any other income class to say the country is headed in the wrong direction, the economy is getting worse, and they fear losing their jobs. Just 36% approve of the job that Obama is doing, compared with 43% overall, and vast majorities say his policies haven't helped the middle...

In 2016, especially after President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, Democrats may be on even thinner ice with white voters, especially white working-class males. Though the mainstream media wants to gin up the narrative that Republicans have trouble winning minorities, the 2014 midterm elections again showed, as Politico noted, “that Democrats have their own significant demographic vulnerability: working-class white voters. Republicans won white voters without a college degree by 30 points, 64 percent to 34 percent, according to exit polls, equal to their margin in the wave election of 2010.” In addition, “support for President Barack Obama among working-class whites has...

Jewish life in New York is dominated by ritual. Holidays. A pastrami reuben on a hero at Katz’s. The reading of holy books in cycles that take a year (the Torah) or seven and a half years (the Talmud). And just as reliably, there’s the ritual of presidential candidates sniffing around for dough right after the midterm elections. That last one got going in earnest yesterday and today, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas making a whirlwind tour of power Jews in New York City. Last night, Mort Klein’s Zionist Organization of America dinner featured Mr. Cruz, known for his...

For the first time, working-class whites make up less than half of Ohio’s eligible voters, part of a demographic shift in a key Midwestern swing state that is pushing political parties to widen their appeal beyond the once-dominant bloc. Nationwide, working-class whites—defined as those ages 18 to 64, with less than a bachelor’s degree—are more likely to be socially conservative, less optimistic about their futures and skeptical of big government. But in Ohio, the group has been much more politically divided: encompassing deeply religious, GOP-leaning conservatives in rural areas as well as unionized blue-collar Democrats in cities. Now, those voters...

Dateline Chicago: 12 hours of violence leaves 4 dead and 14 wounded across Chicago – Chicago Tribune Dateline Ukraine: Ukrainian military helicopter shot down; 14 dead – CNN Dateline Syria: Jihadists shoot dead 102-year-old man, his family in Syria—The News.com.au Dateline Libya: Fighting in Benghazi leaves 36 dead, Libyan officials say—CNN Dateline Iraq: Attacks kill 16 in Iraq as May death toll tops 900—The Daily Star Dateline Afghanistan: 12 Civilians going to a wedding killed in Afghanistan bombing—Fox News Latino Dateline Pakistan: Taliban ambush on Pakistan border leaves 17 dead – Sydney Morning Herald If it’s not quite fair to...

Women used to be faced with a dilemma: forgo a career to stay at home and raise children, or sacrifice the upbringing of your children in order to pursue a career. Since the 1960’s, feminists and conservatives have sparred over this choice. Feminists criticized mothers who stayed at home, claiming women could instead “have it all;” pursue a career while putting their kids in daycare. Conservatives criticized women who put their career first, correctly observing that a parent in the home raising the children is better for the children. This debate was known as the “mommy wars.” The war is...

America’s job market is changing – again. It was just a few decades ago that women entered the workforce in large numbers. Now they are increasingly the primary earners in their families – with a full forty percent acting as the chief breadwinner in their homes. At the same time, men are seeing their place in the workforce diminish: the percentage of stay-at-home dads has doubled in the last decade. And according to a new documentary that focuses on this issue of our time, “The Big Flip”, the average woman’s income is rising at a pace that will put them...

The tech industry scored two major victories on immigration this week, but its toughest legislative battle on the issue lies ahead in the House The passage of the Senate’s immigration bill is the closest the tech industry has come in recent years to its primary goals of raising the H-1B visa cap and securing more green cards for highly skilled foreign workers. But tech companies, like other stakeholders pushing for immigration reform, are only at the 50-yard line. “We want to see the process move forward and this week it did, in a big way,” said Andy Halataei, director of...

More Germans need state help to supplement their wages—because their jobs pay so badly they cannot pull themselves above the poverty line, figures from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) showed on Wednesday. This could fuel an ongoing debate over introducing a minimum wage. Lots of people in Germany have part-time “mini-jobs” for which they earn just enough to have to pay social contributions—around €800 ($1,052.80) per month—and according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, many of these people claim basic welfare support, Hartz IV, as they cannot live off their wage. There were also, the paper said, people with full-time jobs...

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs -- half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship. Over the last few decades, we've created our modern version of these Helots -- millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations. Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about...

President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign will be the first in modern political history to abandon white working-class voters, strategists claim. For decades, Democrats have been losing more and more blue collar whites. Their alienation helped lead to the massive Republican wave in 2010, when the GOP wooed 30 percent more of them than the Democrats could. Democratic strategists say President Obama is focusing his attention, instead, on poor black and Hispanic voters and educated white professionals. 'All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left...

Has Barack Obama’s Democratic party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with the Huffington Post, thinks so. Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in the New York Times on November 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned.” Of course, an Obama campaign spokesman issued a prompt denial. No campaign wants any groups of voters to know that it has written them off. But Edsall is plainly on to something. Obama campaign strategists have...

Big Labor: Union organizers reportedly are telling South Carolina Boeing workers they'll halt a National Labor Relations Board action to shut their plant as long as the workers join their union. What contempt for workers! That's right, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), the very union that's trying to put 1,000 workers out on the unemployment lines in Charleston, S.C., through a complaint filed through the National Labor Relations Board, is now trying to force workers to join their union anyway, says a report last week in the Daily Caller. This is just the latest way the organization that proclaims...