Here's a paper, "The Trouble With Class-Interest Populism," written by labor economist Stephen Rose for the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank connected to the moderate Democratic Leadership Council.
Rose addresses the What's the Matter With Kansas? argument that working-class whites have been bamboozled into voting Republican against their own economic interests by the skillful deployment of cultural issues. But, says Rose, people mostly don't vote on "pocketbook issues" anymore. The New Deal was 70 years ago, the Great Society 40. And "even if people did vote primarily on pocketbook issues, the group that could reasonably be categorized as having a clear, class-based interest in voting for Democratic policies would comprise less than one quarter of the population."
Voters can't be mobilized to defend the 40-hour week, overtime pay, and sick leave; they were all first legislated back in 1938, when the large majority of voters weren't alive yet, and "go largely unchallenged even in Republican administrations." Ditto Social Security and Medicare. Nor do most Americans feel involved in an adversarial, zero-sum struggle with their employers. "Today, most people work in offices or high-end service jobs, and they believe their economic interests are more closely aligned with the companies they work for." Or, one might add, the companies they're going to work for next year. Americans, especially young Americans, change jobs all the time—or go to work for themselves.
In a sentence: "In the post-industrial economy, the great question is how government can equip workers with new tools for economic success, not how government can insulate them from the rigors of competition or restrain business power."
All words of wisdom, I think, and in line with things that I have been writing for many years. To pick up the Kansas metaphor: We're not in the 1930s or 1940s anymore. My advice to Democrats—and to Republicans, too—is to fashion government programs that incentivize, encourage, subsidize, and honor upwardly mobile behavior. Examples from the 1930s and 1940s: the GI Bill of Rights that encouraged veterans to get college educations, the FHA and VA home mortgage loan guarantees that encouraged young workers to buy their own homes. Those laws helped transform Americans from a nation of non-high school grads to a nation of people who have mostly gone to college, from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. In the process, they have retransformed America from a nation in which (in the 1930s and 1940s) most people did not own a significant amount of property to a nation in which people over the course of a lifetime accumulate significant property. America today, like the majority-farmer America Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s, is a representative property owners' democracy—and property owners don't need the kind of populist policies Rose is arguing against.
One thing that strikes me when I listen to Democratic politicians and voters is that I don't hear heartfelt demands for policies of economic redistribution. That is not what motivates them strongly. They are much more likely to be motivated by cultural issues—opposition to the military struggle in Iraq, for instance, or abortion rights. Their advocacy, usually in vague terms, of populist economic policies is a ploy, often a cynical ploy—an attempt to gather in what they suppose are the millions of votes of the downtrodden out there, the What's the Matter With Kansas? people. They don't ring true, and the target audience understands this. Democrats could argue in return, with some justice, that economic conservatives use cultural issues as a ploy, often a cynical ploy, to get the votes of ordinary people who don't share or at least don't much care about their economic stands. But the fact is that in this stage in our history, cultural issues are the prime motivators for more voters than are economics.
That doesn't mean the parties should ignore economic issues. Any responsible government needs to address them, and the past two administrations have arguably addressed them constructively in ways consistent with their parties' beliefs. Examples: the Bush tax cuts that, among other things, cut or eliminated income taxes on those with low incomes; the Clinton expansion of the earned income tax credit that, by definition, benefits only those who work, not those who are idle. Both are arguably in line with the prescription I set out above. But both are also not of earth-shattering importance. They don't by themselves move a lot of votes. Coming up with such policies is part of responsible governance. But it's not particularly compelling politics.
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