An election all about values
The puzzle of the 2004 election is why it should be as close as 2000. Why aren't the Democrats way ahead? After all, the vast bulk of middle- and working-class Americans are being financially squeezed between slowly rising wages and escalating costs for oil, healthcare, and education, and the war on terrorism is seen through the prism of TV news on Iraq, which focuses on horrific pictures of terrorist violence. Yet President Bush retains a narrow lead in many national polls and is doing well in many battleground states, and the Republicans continue to lead at the congressional level. What's up? The Democrats, you'd think, would be able to exploit the fact that many workers are no longer on an automatic escalator to the middle class. In the mid-1960s, when auto and steelworker unionists could enjoy a middle-class life with one paycheck, three quarters of them didn't have a high school degree. Today, when most people don't work in factories, American households still have a modest median income of roughly $43,000 a year. More people work in doctors' offices than in auto plants, and in dry cleaners than in steel mills. But their economic condition bears little resemblance to that of the suburban, college-educated professional we hear so much about. Middle-class and working-class incomes have barely budged in the past several decades, and a huge gap has opened up between the top 20 percent of the income spectrum, especially those with college degrees and advanced degrees, and those with only a high school diploma or who are high school dropouts.
The Democratic Party should be riding a wave here. It has always cast itself as the party of the little guy, fighting against the GOP, the party of the wealthy. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the Democrats began to focus less on economics than on social conditions. At a time of declining real wages, Democrats were seen to be more concerned with liberal social programs to promote the particular interests of blacks, gays, women, and other groups. This pushed a lot of traditional Democrats into the Republican column--construction and blue-collar workers, homemakers, military veterans, cops, evangelicals, rural residents, and many ethnics. When Jimmy Carter lost control of the American economy, producing some three years of double-digit inflation, Reagan's antitax, small-government message became appealing. The Reagan Democrats emerged, consolidating the wide disaffection of white working-class workers brought about by the Vietnam War and conflicts around race in the 1960s.
"Hip-ocracy." The beginnings of a cultural war could be discerned. Many conservatives, churchgoing people who played by the rules, saw 1960s and 1970s radicals who rejected them and their ideas of accomplishment leading to a breakdown in the social order. The efforts of the New Left to weaken oppressive authority ended up corroding all authority. Weary of the unraveling of the orderly, coherent, moral community they once relied on, Americans rejected the hedonism of Woodstock, in which individual choice and uninhibited, personal expression trumped all. Hollywood came to epitomize for them this narcissism and repudiation of conventional values. They were tired of the new counterculture of radical change, seeing in the New Left a contempt for middle America and its values, reflected in fathers abandoning their families, the delegitimization of the sanctity of marriage, raising children without clear moral guideposts--all of which, in their minds, led to increased criminality, drug abuse, people being recast as society's victims rather than accepting responsibility for their own actions. They yearned to restore the authority of public institutions and to remove some of the violence and sexuality in TV programs, records, and computer games, whose content they ascribed to the liberals who write the screenplays for TV and movies.
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