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The Workers’ Party?
“Democrats are the party of working people.” So states Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in a “guest essay” — it isn’t an essay at all; it is ordinary campaign literature — in the New York Times. Senator Warren could have used some editing. The first thing her New York Times editors should have asked:
Is that true?
Let’s think about that phrase, “working people.” You would think that “working people” would mean “people who work,” but that is not what Senator Warren wants it to mean. Hedge-fund managers are working people — it is fashionable to sneer at people working in finance, but if you think that it isn’t work, try doing it. You think they’re giving all that money away? Doctors are working people. Lawyers are working people. College professors and novelists and movie producers are all working people, too. Even some journalists are working people, though not very many of them.
So, if “working people” does not mean “people who work,” what might it mean?
Maybe it is supposed to mean blue-collar workers, the industrial and manufacturing workers who make up what at least a few of Senator Warren’s colleagues at Harvard still refer to as the “proletariat.” It certainly is the case that the Democratic Party once was the party of factory workers and farmers — that’s why the party in Minnesota is still known as the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. The word “union” used to have a distinctly lower-middle-income taste to it, but it doesn’t really anymore. Most unionized workers in the United States today are government employees, with incomes that range from the upper-middle to the high. These union workers are public-school teachers making $125,000 a year in the suburbs of Pittsburgh — the Molly Maguires, they ain’t.
Setting aside the unionized public-sector professionals and clerical workers, what about the old-school union workers, the men and women who put stuff together in factories and steel mills and whatnot? A great many of them vote for Democrats, but a great many don’t. And don’t is on the rise as ordinary workers act on the most obvious of all political facts: that the interests of the union bosses, who have been entirely captured by the Democratic Party, are not precisely the same as the interests of the union workers themselves.
“Rank-and-file union members snub Biden for Trump,” read the 2020 Politico headline. Our friends over at FiveThirtyEight aren’t exactly what you’d call raging Trumpists, but Nate Silver observed about the 2016 election:
The shift among union voters was enough to swing the election to Trump. According to the CCES, Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership — and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.
Robert Reich doesn’t think the Democrats represent these “working people,” either, writing in 2016:
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
Those suburban swing voters are the real game here, but let’s put them off for the moment and take a minute to observe that in 2016, the left-wing populist Reich and the socialist Bernie Sanders both sounded pretty Trumpish on Trump’s key issues: trade and immigration. Reich again:
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
. . . Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
In 2016, before his handlers yanked on his leash, Senator Sanders was nearly indistinguishable from Trump on the subject of “open borders.”
There is one reason that unionized industrial workers might have migrated toward the Republicans, joining the purported “party of the rich” — they’re rich. Mitt Romney once did the nation a great service (and did his presidential campaign a great disservice) by pointing out that one important dividing line in American politics is the one separating the people who pay federal income taxes from the people who don’t. About half the country — the higher-earning half — pays some federal income tax, and about half the country — the lower-earning half — has no federal income-tax liability at all or has a negative liability thanks to the Earned Income-Tax Credit. (It is not the case that lower-income Americans pay no taxes — it is the case that they pay no federal income tax, which is probably more important politically than it is economically, which was, of course, Romney’s point.) Those factory workers don’t make Mitt Romney money, but a lot of them make bass-boat money; a great many of them are on the right side of the income curve, which is the income-tax-paying side.
That is true for both union and non-union workers. Toyota, for instance, estimates that its U.S. non-union production workers make about 58 percent more than the average U.S. salary. GM workers represented by the UAW make about the same wage as their non-union Toyota counterparts, averaging around $30 an hour. (GM has far higher labor costs, driven by splendid health-care benefits and an expensive pension system.) Highly skilled union workers (for example, those working in nuclear-power plants) can earn decently into six figures. A union manufacturing worker married to another union manufacturing worker won’t have a household income in the top 1 percent but very well may be in the top 10 percent.
So, then, might “working people” mean “people with modest incomes”? Maybe, but the reality is more complex even when construed according to that simplistic criterion.
We like to think of things in linear terms: the richer you are, the more education you have, etc. In reality, things are not linear but lumpy. A lot of very poor people are Democrats. So are a lot of very rich people. For instance, Wall Street bigs are mostly Democrats — you think a guy with a master’s degree and an $800,000-a-year job in Manhattan, a manicure, and a big tuition bill to pay at Greenwich Country Day is going to hitch his wagon to the daft star of Marjorie Taylor Greene? That isn’t real life. Of course, no sensible person expects Elizabeth Warren to understand such complexities, because no sensible person expects Elizabeth Warren to understand anything more complicated than misrepresenting her ethnicity for professional purposes.
(“Faculty of color,” Harvard called her. Technically true — see: PANTONE 11-0602 TCX.)
If you look at the data compiled by Pew, you’ll see that while the average Republican voter has a higher income than the average Democratic voter (as of 2018), the biggest difference is not at the happy tippy-top but at the miserable bottom. Republicans enjoy a six-point advantage when it comes to workers earning more than $100,000 a year. By way of comparison, Democrats enjoy a 16-point advantage among voters earning less than $25,000 a year. Put another way, the share of Democratic voters earning less than $25,000 a year is more than twice the share of Republican voters in that income group.
Where the Democrats have one great advantage is not among working people but among non-working people, or people with only marginal and desultory employment. Receiving or having received food stamps or other poverty-related benefits correlates pretty strongly with voting Democratic. People who receive benefits under three or more government programs tend to vote Democratic and tend to fall disproportionately into demographic groups that vote Democratic — African Americans and unmarried women.
Work really is an enormously important variable. High-income households overwhelmingly have two full-time workers in them, while the lowest-income households have on average fewer than one full-time worker in them. Poverty in the United States is much less a working-class problem than a non-working-class problem. The mere fact that many poor people are not working does not necessarily mean that we should be skeptical toward providing them with assistance — some of them cannot work, and in some cases it is better that they do not work — but it should influence how we think about the design and structure of welfare programs and what our long-term economic expectations about them are going to be.
The Democrats are big with the very poor and big with college-educated government workers — i.e., the party of people who are enrolled in welfare programs and the people who administer them.
Things get complicated at the top, too, because it matters how you draw the lines. The $100,000-and-up club comprises the highest-earning 31 percent or so of U.S. households, and they lean Republican. But the very wealthy are less predictably Republican. For example, Americans earning more than $220,000 a year (the wealthiest 4 percent) in 2012 supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, part of a continuing trend of the very wealthy leaning Democrat. Vox isn’t exactly stuffed with Trumpists, either, but here is the headline: “Democrats are replacing Republicans as the preferred party of the very wealthy.” Why that is the case is pretty straightforward: It is not that a bunch of rich Republicans suddenly decided to become Democrats — it is that who gets to be rich has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades, with the rich-guy demographic window shifting in the Democrats’ advantage. Being rich is less correlated with being white and male than it once was, and much more correlated with being highly educated and living in a coastal metro. Urban college graduates vote for Democrats — which is why the first thing Elizabeth Warren wants to offer “working people” is college-loan forgiveness — a policy that not only disproportionately but overwhelmingly benefits higher-income Americans. Covid-era loan forbearance already has provided something on the order of $200 billion in benefits to college borrowers, most of them higher-income.
Where you live matters a great deal, too. It will surprise exactly no one to learn that the majority of voters earning more than $100,000 a year very much prefer Democrats to Republicans in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, while the $100,000+ voters are more R than D in Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are the party of working people,” Senator Warren claims. That statement is, in the most charitable reading, so imprecise as to be useless. Better to have written: “The Democrats are the party of relatively high-income college graduates, especially the ones living in relatively high-income communities, which is why we are leading with student-loan forgiveness rather than something that blue-collar factory workers care about.”
But that doesn’t have quite the same punch in the New York Times, does it?
Words About Words
A teacher writes: “I find in print and conversation that the use of the word slave is being replaced by enslaved people. I think it adds a more human touch to this most miserable of topics. I find myself using it more and more in class discussion. What is your take on this?”
I think the sentiment — to emphasize the humanity of the captive workers who were bought and sold as property — is an admirable one. But other than the old engineering convention (which has itself become controversial), I cannot think of any instance in which the word slave would refer to anything other than a person. To write enslaved person to my eye is like writing English professor person or soldier person or poet person. A slave is a person — that is why slavery was and is a horror.
Enslaved person also sounds a little antiseptic to my ear. Jay Nordlinger often refers to Robert Conquest’s term “nonconsensual societies” — I understand the point of it, but I think something like tyranny would do better. Slavery is a savage thing, and it should have a blunt, ugly name. There’s no way to nice it up, and no cause to.
Rampant Prescriptivism
Homogenous is a word, but it probably isn’t the word you want. The word you want is homogeneous, which is pronounced like a rude but admiring description of Oscar Wilde. I pronounce this one wrong all the time, as a few Mad Dogs & Englishmen listeners have been kind enough to point out in 60 or 70 emails. Homogenous is an old technical biological term that has been supplanted by homologous. Homogeneous, meaning “of the same kind,” is related to homogenized, which has both a literal meaning (as with milk) and a more metaphorical one. The pronunciation of homogenized is close to homogenous, which is probably where the error comes from. The noun form of homogeneous is homogeneity; the noun form of homogenous is homogeny. I use the word probably 200 times in The Smallest Minority, but I still pronounce it the wrong way when I am not thinking about it.
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In Closing
I recommended The Chosen, the crowded-funded series about the life of Jesus and the early days of Christianity, last week. I’ll repeat the recommendation here. But I will also add a question for readers who have seen it: How do you think The Chosen would be received by a non-Christian audience? I think there are two kinds of non-Christian audiences: those who don’t care about Christianity and those who hate it. In a weird way, I think the haters might be more interested in The Chosen, because they are simply more interested in Christianity, even though their interest is a negative one. I think this is similar in a way to the Satanic and quasi-Satanic theatrics one sees all over our culture — sometimes purely for entertainment purposes, as with the band Slayer, and sometimes offered with more seriousness. Christian ideas and the Christian (particularly Catholic) aesthetic still dominate Western civilization to such an extent that even Christianity’s enemies offer works that are almost exclusively derivative of Christianity or conceived in reaction to it. They have no real substance of their own. Andres Serrano made “Piss Christ” because nobody would care very much about “Piss Joe Biden” or “Piss Elon Musk.” In that sense, the upside-down-cross guys evince a certain backhanded respect for Christianity, while the nice, New Age–y Westerners who profess to admire Buddhism while reducing that complex body of analysis into a style of interior decoration offer a much worse insult than anything the goat-heads-and-pentagrams set has ever dreamt of. In the long term, indifference is the sharper sword — and dull accommodation the deadliest weapon of them all.
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