The NYT points out that policies aside, Democratic and Republican candidates for office each tend to be very well off. Very legislators on the national and state level have blue collar backgrounds - according to this story 3% of state legislators have working class backgrounds. Does this mean that legislators have little understanding of the circumstances and needs of the working class? This question gets to the heart of democratic representation.
A quote from the story:
If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.
And these trends don’t stop at the federal level. Since the 1980s, the number of state legislators whose primary occupations are working-class jobs has fallen from 5 percent to 3 percent. In City Councils, fewer than 10 percent of members have blue-collar day jobs. Everywhere we look in government, almost no one with personal experience in working-class jobs has a seat at the table.
Their absence, moreover, has real consequences. Lawmakers from different classes tend to bring different perspectives to public office. John Boehner is fond of saying that he’s a small-business man at heart and that “It gave me a perspective on our country that I’ve carried with me throughout my time in public service.” And he’s right. Former businesspeople in government tend to think like businesspeople, former lawyers tend to think like lawyers, and (the few) former blue-collar workers tend to think like blue-collar workers.
The author has an interesting book coming out: “White-Collar Government: How Class-Imbalanced Legislatures Distort Economic Policy-Making in the United States.”
