Posted on 06/26/2008 11:47:46 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
White working-class voters typically aren't in vogue, with the political chatter tending to revolve around "soccer moms," the "youth vote" or other boutique demographic groups of the moment. But the late charge of Hillary Clinton's doomed presidential campaign made white working-class voters surprisingly fashionable.
They'll stay that way if the important new book "Grand New Party," by two young writers for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, has the impact on the political debate that it should. In an incisive analysis of the past 30 years of our politics, Douthat and Salam puncture self-comforting delusions of both the right and the left, and persuasively advocate a reorientation of the GOP to address working-class concerns.
They define working-class voters -- "Sam's Club" voters, in the phrase they borrow from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty -- as that half of the electorate that lacks a college education. Neither party has been able to build a durable majority, Douthat and Salam write, because of "the refusal of America's working class to pick a side and stick with it." These voters supported Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980 and Gingrich in 1994 -- before defecting back to the Democrats for Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Nancy Pelosi and Co. in 2006.
Their economic forebears were a pillar of FDR's New Deal coalition -- understandably, in Douthat and Salam's telling, since the best of New Deal policies helped graduate them into the middle class by rewarding work and aiding economic aspiration (with Social Security benefits, the home-mortgage deduction, etc.). They came unmoored from the Democratic Party when LBJ's Great Society "cost them money and seemed to undermine their values into the bargain."
The Democrats have labored under twin misapprehensions in seeking to woo these voters back. One is that today's working class could be pulled straight out of a John Steinbeck novel. In reality, according to Douthat and Salam, a Sam's Club voter is "more likely to belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year than one that makes $30,000," and "far more likely to be working in education or health care, office administration or business services than on a farm or an assembly line."
The second is that the basket of cultural issues with which the GOP has often been able to win these voters is a mere distraction. Actually, these voters have a keen self-interest in arresting social breakdown: "Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy, and upwardly mobile." Marriage in particular is key. The rise in illegitimacy blights the prospects of the working class, even as the college-educated upper-middle class disproportionately benefits from the social and economic rewards of stable family life.
If they aren't the stuff of social realism, working-class anxieties are real. Can't anyone get a college education and climb in economic status? Yes, but the odds are stacked against those whose parents aren't already upper-middle class, creating an "inherited meritocracy." Douthat and Salam's worst case is a "steady degradation of everyday working-class life under the pressures of rising illegitimacy, insecurity, and stratification."
Douthat and Salam want Republicans to work to forestall this future, and to speak persuasively to working-class voters. A first step is acknowledging "the persistent unpopularity of the GOP's small-government message among the Sam's Club constituency." Douthat and Salam float an activist program geared to buttressing families and addressing working-class discontents: a $5,000-per-child tax credit; subsidies for parents providing their own child care; expanded transportation infrastructure to ease the suburban commute; etc.
The details are less important than the trajectory. Their proposals have been dismissed as "Clintonian triangulation from the right." But back in 1992, Bill Clinton's political achievement was considerable. He broke with the stale pieties of his own party, and -- with new emphases and a few well-aimed policies -- renovated its image. Republicans await a figure who will pick up the challenge of Grand New Party.
This easily could be the “tipping” factor in the next election.
The problem is, the Republican party has been so adverse to paying a decent wage, prevailing wage, that it has turned-off many, many voters.
Oh, like Rush Limbaugh and Bill Gates.
So Congress raised the minimum wage and then gave a pass to employers who underpay illegal immigrants because Americans “won’t” work at those wages.
This is not a solution. It is a problem that bred more problems.
I for one, also believe that to be the case.
The pro-livable wage crowd are also the ones responsible for our turning out illiterate kids after 12 years of public education, who turn to crime as ways to "earn" a living and "advance" in their careers.
“the persistent unpopularity of the GOP’s small-government message among the Sam’s Club constituency.” ...geared to buttressing families and addressing working-class discontents: a $5,000-per-child tax credit; subsidies for parents providing their own child care; expanded transportation infrastructure to ease the suburban commute; etc.
So we need a five-year soviet socialist plan. Lowry has always impressed me as a twinkie - soft on the outside, mushy inside and he turns green when sitting around too long.
????
Prevailing wage is usually interpreted to be union wages. Union wages have notworked out well for the Detroit automakers and other industries.
The fundamental problem we as conservatives face is that difficulty of finding and promoting articulate representatives of that position who will defend themselves and their constituency against Big Journalism - and against those politicians who promote Big Journalism, and are rewarded by positive PR, such as the label "progressive."
As someone who lives just outside the DC Beltway with a second home in the Virginny mountains, the big problem that cannot be overcome is that regardless of income level, my observation based on chatting with the people I come into contact with is that virtually EVERYONE in the electorate, by that I mean upwards of 90%, want government to “fix things.” Somehow the very same proponents have missed the fact that everything that needs fixing was first broken by GOVERNMENT. Except for committed principle driven small “L” libertarian/conservatives there is a reflexive desire for an ever increasing state to provide more security and happiness. Can’t work, won’t work, and the intellectuals like Lowry and Brooks have fallen hook, line, and sinker for Gramscian nefariousness.
The GOP strives to be the Archie Bunker party?
I am a Sams Club voter. I do not want anything from the government except my borders secured and the illegals deported, I want my military funded to fight the terrorists that want us dead. I want common sense. I want my country back.
“I for one, also believe that to be the case.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I believe the current minimum wage is merely an excuse to pay LOW wages. Six dollars an hour now will not buy the groceries that fifty cents an hour would buy forty five years ago when the minimum was $1.25 an hour. If a minimum wage was intended to help people as they claim it would be set at least double what it is now. I think we should scrap the minimum altogether and stop pretending.
I don’t understand what the Archie Bunker thing is supposed to mean.
I know many people without a college education who live extremely well. They worked hard and eventually owned their own businesses and do better than some of the college educated people I know. Those same Archie Bunker people probably have more of their children in Afghanistan and Iraq right now then those college educated people. The Archie Bunkers I know are proud to be American, raise their children the same way. They don’t whine and they work hard and by and large do not ask for handouts from anyone. They go to church and volunteer their time and money and teach their children the same.
I don't understand what this whole article means.
Except perhaps for the hard sciences, a college degree these days seems to be little more than a certification that the liberal indoctrination has been completed.
Meanwhile, the supposedly knuckle-dragging Archie Bunkers keep the machines running, build the houses, fix the plumbing and keep common sense alive.
“The GOP’s small government message” ...
since when ?
An alternative path to political power would be to
TRY small government
... for a Change.
See how that works.
Minimum wages can be $12.00 an hour and the same people complaining about the low wages will continue to complain about the price of bread and butter, because, believe it or not, as minimum wages grow so does the price of bread and butter, plus other necessitities.
Those business people who have no college education have something in their gut that 98% of the college educated do not have. They have a gut desire to make something work and they have a tenacity to stick with it. They are good managers, they aren’t afraid to work long hours, not afraid to teach someone to do the work necessary to keep the business going, they have a appreciation of someone else’s worth, they are not afraid to dig deep in their own pockets to make the company operating. They are the backbone of this country. They have a strong faith the American Ideal of Freedom to do something other than wait until Friday’s paycheck.
What are minimum wages in what time frame?
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