Stereotyping the White Working Class

[salvorhardin]

Democrats cannot do better among working-class whites if they envision them as a uniform group that thinks and feels the same way everywhere, as the political pros quite often do. That is, an overwhelmingly middle-class and upper-class set of politicians, operatives, and pundits appear to have so little direct experience of working-class people of any color that they consistently fall into stereotyping that clouds their vision and often insults the voters they are trying to persuade. At a San Francisco fundraiser in 2008, President Obama articulated the stereotype with unusual clarity (and nuance if you listen to the whole speech) when he expressed some empathy for those who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

There are white workers who cling to their guns or religion or their racism and nativism – I could give you some names and addresses! But there are many others who do not. It seems as if sophisticated, very well-educated people whose vocation involves electoral politics should recognize that within a demographic category including nearly 50 million voters, not everybody thinks and feels the same way. Start with the 40% nationally who vote pretty consistently Democratic in presidential elections. Why do they do that? How are they different from those who vote consistently Republican or the group that goes back and forth?

These are the questions Andrew Levison recently addressed in an article posted on the Democratic Strategist blog, "The White Working Class is a Decisive Voting Group in 2012 -- and Most of What You Read About Their Political Attitudes Will Be Completely Wrong." Using the 2011 Pew Political Typology survey that asked voters to choose between “liberal/progressive” and “conservative” policy statements, Levison found that about 26% of white working-class voters were “progressive true believers” and 27.5% were “conservative true believers.” The largest group, at about 46%, however, is what Levison calls “ambivalent/open-minded.” These may be congenital “moderates” or “low-information voters,” but Levison focuses on something he has directly observed among white workers – a willingness to acknowledge truth in both of two contradictory positions. These are people, he says, “who do think quite seriously about issues, but do so in a fundamentally different way than do ideologically committed people.” He calls them “on the one hand, but on the other hand” thinkers (emphasis added).

The answers in the Pew survey are interesting and insightful in themselves, but Levison’s willingness to wade into the complexity of white working-class political thinking and to come out with a clarifying (if necessarily simplifying) analysis is especially rewarding. There is rarely a clear majority of those who “strongly agree” with either of the two statements presented by Pew, but there are some. For example, 53% strongly agree that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and healthcare,” while another 53% strongly agree that “Business corporations make too much profit” and 70% that “Too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations.” Levison finds that the largest group of working-class whites are “cultural traditionalists,” but that “The genuinely consistent white working class conservatives – the Fox News/Talk Radio” hard-line ideologues – represent only about one fourth of the white working class total.”

Link: http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/stereotyping-the-white-working-class

First, Democratic political strategists should forget—no, indeed, actively reject—the notion that “the typical conservative white worker” is in any possible way a useful political concept. It is empirically false, politically destructive, psychologically misleading and morally corrosive...

Second, using the term “moderate” to describe the substantial group of workers who are not conservative true believers does not in any way imply that they actually conceptualize their philosophy as seeking some sort of abstract “middle of the road,” centrism along the lines promoted by beltway commentators who endlessly dream of finding some magical policy agenda that is exquisitely balanced precisely midway between left and right.

Link: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/_memos/tds_SM_Levison_WC_Americans.pdf