At a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6, Obama uttered his now-famous remark about white working-class Pennsylvanians:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
This theory of white working-class alienation from the Democratic Party derives from Thomas Frank's compellingly argued 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas? To Frank, the proletariat suffers from a form of "derangement" in believing that its woes derive from the decline of traditional values—patriotism, organized religion, self-reliance, the heterosexual two-parent nuclear family, etc.—when the true source of its troubles is a set of economic policies that favors the rich. Republicans have come to win blue-collar votes in elections by portraying Democratic tolerance of racial and cultural diversity as depravity—"abortion, amnesty, and acid," in the famous slogan used against George McGovern in 1972. (This is not a new trick.) GOP officeholders typically set their conservative cultural agenda aside after the election is over to concentrate on cutting taxes, reducing regulation, busting unions, and so forth. But the white working class continues to fall for the bait-and-switch because the demoralized Democratic Party lacks the courage to lure it back with a muscular appeal based on economic justice.
Noah is suspicious that Obama--and Democrats in general--are prepared to reach out to these voters. Why?First, The white working class isn't the problem; Dixie is. This theory has been forwarded by Paul Krugman and Thomas Schaller, among others. . . . Obama, if he is the Democratic nominee, might as well write off the South, because Democrats can't win there. Princeton's Larry Bartels made the case two years ago in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. According to Bartels, the white voters lacking college degrees who have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves are nearly all Southerners. Outside the South, the decline among voters in this group who support Democratic presidential candidates is less than 1 percent. Moreover, if the white working class's interest in "guns or religion" indicates derangement or bitterness, then the white working class isn't very deranged or bitter. According to Bartels, there is no evidence that social issues outweigh economic ones among white voters lacking college degrees.
And second, the white working class votes . . soon . . . won't exist. Less crudely, the white working class will exist, but it will no longer conform to the familiar definition. It will continue to shrink, but not as fast.Bartels defines the white working class as white people who lack college degrees. This notion of the white working class works fine if the setting is 1940, when three-quarters of all adults age 25 and older were high-school dropouts and 95 percent lacked a college degree. Today, however, only about 14 percent of adults 25 and older are high-school dropouts, and only about 70 percent lack a college degree. Fifty-four percent have "at least some college education." These data are included in a new Brookings Institution study by Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, who further point out that since 1940 the percentage of workers who have white-collar jobs has increased from 32 percent to 60 percent. Nobody knows what to call the newly swollen ranks of people at the low-income end of white-collar America.
