GOP: Party of the Working Class?
By Via Roy Edroso, Ross Douthat claims that “the GOP is now a working-class party.” The linked article, as you might suspect, does little to actually substantiate the claim as it is riddled with obvious errors, such as ignoring the fact that donations need to be a minimum level to be reported, not accounting for the fact that Democrats have substantially more donations in total, etc. The key strategy, though, is to define “working class” by a series of arbitrarily chosen professions rather than by income, which is crucial. After all, when it comes to actual support at the ballot box Republican support consistently increases as income level does, and this has been the case since 1972.
Douthat anticipates the objection, saying that he’s using “class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics.” But while I can understand not wanting to reduce “class” solely to income, to count people with well-above-median incomes as “working class” is to distort the term beyond its usual meaning. Even more problematically, to define class by “culture” is just a straightforward tautology. I concede that if one defines people with reactionary cultural views as “working class” this makes the GOP much more working class, but obviously this isn’t a very useful definition.
I’ll have more to see about Larry Bartels’s fine new book later, but this also seems like a good time to mention his finding that people with high incomes are more likely to vote on cultural issues than people with lower incomes.