Proles at the Polls

The big political story of the last twenty years is the white working class’s abandonment of the Democratic party, according to the demographer Ruy Teixeira and the sociologist and political activist Joel Rogers. It’s not that Republicans have been innovative. It’s that the Democrats have shown no interest in the people who eat Velveeta, watch Court TV, and stick decals on the back of their pickups.

The working class does still exist. Granted, in this economy, 58 percent of workers hold white-collar jobs, versus only 25 percent who are blue-collar. Trade unions, despite a recent resurgence, remain relatively weak. But just because working people are doing different things (scooping Haagen-Dazs, for instance, rather than assembling car doors) and just because they live in different places (suburbs rather than cities) doesn’t mean they lack common interests. And so Teixeira and Rogers, in their new volume America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, look at the three quarters of whites who lack a four-year college degree and ask how they’ve fared in the New Economy.

The answer is, they’ve been pummeled. Two-thirds earn between $ 15,000 and $ 75,000 a year. Between 1979 and 1997, their real hourly wages took a nosedive, while those of college grads soared. Men were particularly hard hit: Those who attended some college saw their incomes fall 12 percent, high school grads lost 17 percent, and dropouts lost 30 percent. While the authors grant that wage levels rose at the end of the 1990s, they point convincingly to real anxiety over job security, retirement security, and spiraling health care costs to show that this remains a group under pressure.

The authors are leftists, rather than liberals, and feel a need to explain why they’re focusing on white people. For one thing, other Democratic constituencies are maxed out. Democrats now get roughly a third of their votes from blacks, securing majorities — 93 percent in the last presidential election — that would lead us to cry electoral fraud if they happened in Cuba or Iraq. And the Democratic party is doing fine by women. But live white males, with nothing like the Civil Rights movement or feminism to cement party loyalty, feel no particular attachment to Democrats anymore. Despite what most left-wing theorists claim, it’s not that white voters resent programs focused on gays, women, and minorities. It’s just that Democrats aren’t talking to them at all.

And when they do focus on white people, Democrats are much more attracted to “soccer moms,” “wired workers,” and other New Economy elites. This is a mistake. Elite women are becoming more and more reliably Democratic — in the polarizing election of 1994 that brought Republicans to power in both houses, white women with college degrees were the only important white sub-population to vote more Democratic. But such women don’t cast much more than 10 percent of the votes. Downmarket whites, by contrast, make up 55 percent of the voting population, and they’re true swing voters. Their allegiances shift wildly: Between 1990 and 1992, Republicans saw a 22 point drop in their white working-class support. Between 1992 and 1994, Democrats were abandoned by 20 percent of their white working-class voters.

Teixeira and Rogers’s America’s Forgotten Majority is stuffed with factoid treasures that will correct many political misperceptions. For one thing, it provides the most convincing account yet of the Perot phenomenon, showing that the two-thirds of Reform voters who came from the white working class tended to be those who had experienced particularly large wage losses over the preceding decades. In so doing, Teixeira and Rogers implicitly refute those who claim George Bush the elder would have won if Perot hadn’t been in the race. Head to head, Bush might have done worse. Reform voters turn out to have been midway between Clinton and Bush on size-of-government issues, but closer to Clinton on social ones. And the book shows that the great electoral triumph of Bill Clinton was halting the hemorrhage of votes from his party’s once-solid working-class base. Much has been made of Clinton’s winning fewer votes in his 1992 triumph than Michael Dukakis did in his 1988 loss. But even with Perot’s third-party threat, Clinton got more white male votes than Dukakis did.

Teixeira and Rogers argue convincingly that the economic decline of the last quarter century has shaken old political certitudes among the working classes. But a mystery remains: Why did economic decline, over which, after all, both parties presided, harm Democrats rather than Republicans? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors move from poll-watching to ideology, and they fall down. Their absolutely atrocious final chapter on “Mobilizing the Forgotten Majority,” which outlines a program of government activism meant to win back the white working class, clashes with the brilliant electoral analysis of the rest of the book.

Some of Teixeira and Rogers’s policy prescriptions are disingenuous: We should make whatever adjustments are necessary to keep the economy growing, they write. But “whatever adjustments” apparently doesn’t include tax cuts and deregulation.

Some are anodyne: In today’s global economy, we all have the right to a decent wage and to speak our minds and organize.

And some play into the hands of the very yuppies who hijacked the Working Man’s party in the first place: Women who work outside the home should have access to affordable, quality child care sounds sweet — but it adds up to a way of forcing Norma Rae Trailer, who stays at home with her five kids, to subsidize the day care of Louise Lawyer.

What’s more, the authors’ economic determinism leads them to fudge issues concerning values — indeed, to ignore the question of whether there’s any such thing as working-class values at all, other than equal opportunity and the importance of work. They call the distinction between values and economics “artificial” and dismiss President Clinton’s gays-in-the-military gaffes as merely “an exploitable distraction,” made possible by the administration’s bailing out on its populist economic policy. They scarcely consider the possibility that voters may have been upset about gays in the military because they were upset about gays in the military.

Nonetheless, this is a vital book. It establishes Ruy Teixeira as perhaps the most innovative election analyst working in Washington today. Speaking at the Brookings Institution in early June, Teixeira presented his latest findings about how the presidential nominee of the self-proclaimed “party of the little guy” is doing with those little guys. Among white working-class men, Teixeira noted, Al Gore is polling at 32 percent. The biggest question this book leaves is why two committed leftists like Teixeira and Rogers are struggling so sincerely, so desperately, to rescue the Democratic party — which their own work demonstrates has become the Rich White People’s party.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.