Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 20, 2014 16:01:30 GMT -6
from the New York Times
Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?
Dec 9, 2014,
by Thomas B. Edsall
www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/have-democrats-failed-the-white-working-class.html?_r=0
"Why don’t white working-class voters recognize where their economic interests lie? Somewhat self-righteously, Democrats keep asking themselves that question.
A better question would be:
What has the Democratic Party done for these voters lately?
At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.
This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.
Liberal victories in the sexual and women’s rights revolutions – victories that have made the lives of many upscale Democrats more productive and satisfying — appear, from the vantage point of the white working class, to have left many women to struggle as single parents, forced to cope with both male defection from paternal responsibility and the fragmentation of a family structure that was crucial to upward mobility in the postwar period.
This bleak view emerges from 2 recently published works, “Labor’s Love Lost,” by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins, and “Was Moynihan Right? What Happens to the Children of Unmarried Mothers,” a research report by Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, respectively.
Both works address broader subjects than the partisan allegiance of working-class whites, but each illuminates the interaction of economic and cultural forces driving these voters away from their New Deal home.
“The young adults without bachelor’s degrees who are the heirs of the industrial working class today are not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern family lifestyle,” Cherlin writes. “Rather, they are a group making constrained choices.”
Cherlin uses racial and economic change at Bethlehem Steel’s Baltimore plant at Sparrows Point in the 1970s to show how the experiences of blacks and whites have diverged."
[*I got my 1st real job at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant right around this time*]
"Whites at the steel plant, Cherlin writes,
viewed the opportunity to move up to a more desired position or to get good entry level jobs for their sons and nephews — an opportunity long open to whites but for the most part closed off to blacks – as a basic privilege of being a factory worker.
In the 1970s, however, federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination against African-Americans began to be enforced just as the number of manufacturing jobs started to decline.
“Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities,” Cherlin observes.
Suddenly it was harder for anyone to get a job for his son at the Point and at factories around the country. Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities, and a job taken by a black applicant seemed like a job taken away from a white applicant. The simultaneous onset of legally enforced labor market changes and the globalization and automation of production quite probably amplified the reactions of whites. The co-occurrence of the easy-to-see increase of the hiring of black workers and the hard-to-understand deterioration of the economy encouraged white workers to blame the former for the latter.
Black workers, even though they faced many of the same employment hardships, experienced the benefits of the civil rights movement, gaining equal protection before the law in 1964, statutory enforcement of their right to vote in 1965, and protection against workplace discrimination — most notably when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, prohibiting hiring and workplace practices which, whether intentionally or not, had an adverse “disparate impact” on blacks.
From 1970 to 1994, the share of black American families making between $50,000 and $74,999 in inflation-adjusted dollars rose by 3.9%, and the share of black families earning $75,000 and above grew by 5.7%, both significant increases.
Thus black workers have, and have had, grounds for optimism: “although racial discrimination surely has not been eliminated over the ensuing decades,” Cherlin notes, “black workers are aware that conditions have improved.” He adds that civil rights laws “led to a relative improvement in their labor market position.” A 2012 Pew poll asked respondents “when your children are your age, will their standard of living be worse, the same or better than yours?” A plurality of whites, 42%, said worse, and 31% said better; among blacks, 56% said better and 25% said worse. The comparatives speak for themselves.
Even as blacks experienced the benefits of the drive toward racial equality, which many whites saw as a form of reverse discrimination, the liberal cultural agenda began to champion “expressive individualist” and “rights oriented” values. Many working-class whites saw these values as destructive of familiar hierarchies in which they were accustomed to hold a privileged position.
In this way, multiple legal, economic and cultural developments began to overlap.
You can see this convergence in another trend Cherlin describes, the transition, beginning in the 1960s, of younger adults from what he calls a “utilitarian self” to an “expressive self.” The utilitarian self, according to Cherlin, accepts “conformity to external standards — which included doing what your supervisor at work told you to do.” This conformity was essential for industrial work, “which required self-discipline and the suppression of feelings such as alienation and anger.”
The expressive self, in contrast, “emphasizes one’s feelings and emotional satisfaction and the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life.” For the less educated, however, the kind of low-skill, low-wage jobs available to them offered little or no opportunity for self-expression.
The expressive self has been a central element of postmodern liberal thinking. But, Cherlin writes,
What no one expected was that less educated young adults in the U.S., many of whom are still struggling to ensure an adequate standard of living, would show signs of making the transition before they had achieved affluence.
The conversion to liberal self-expressive priorities, then, can be seen as reducing the satisfaction of the less educated as they adapt to the drudgery of service work. The cultural resistance to curbs on individual autonomy also coincided with the divorce revolution of the early 1970s, with a generalized resistance over the past half-century to restrictive social norms....
The breakdown of working-class families, then, and the adverse consequences flowing from that breakdown, occurred simultaneously with the collapse of working-class jobs that provided decent incomes to those without college degrees.
As Cherlin points out,
The percentage of workers who were classified as precision production, crafts, and repair workers, and as operatives, fabricators and construction workers – in short what we might call blue collar occupations – decreased from 28 percent in 1970, to 22 percent in 1990, and then to 17 percent in 2010. During this same period, the number of workers who operated lathe, milling and turning machines plummeted from 345,000 to 14,000.
The changing job market has been particularly tough for men without college degrees. “By 1996, the average 30-year-old man with a high school degree earned 20 percent less than a comparable man in 1979,” Cherlin writes. “He belonged to the 1st generation of American young men to earn less than their fathers did.”
Democrats have wrestled intermittently with their difficulties in winning these white voters. The Republican groundswell in the 2014 election has provoked renewed interest in attempts to revive support in the white working class. The Democratic Strategist, a web-based publication, has started a bimonthly “White Working Class Roundtable” newsletter. The Democracy Corps, a project run by the Democratic consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville, has conducted a number of studies of working-class whites.
Of those writing on this subject, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones is one of the most compelling. In a recent blog post, Drum writes that Democrats have a serious problem:
What can they do? That is, what big ticket items are left that would buy the loyalty of the middle class for another generation? We already have Social Security and Medicare. We have Obamacare. We have the mortgage interest deduction. What’s left?"
Democrats are finished if they can't see the obvious--Outsourcing Jobs, In-Sourcing excess labor, and suppressed buying power from monetary expansion into the pockets of the top 2% are HUGE issues that should be in the forefront.
Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?
Dec 9, 2014,
by Thomas B. Edsall
www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/have-democrats-failed-the-white-working-class.html?_r=0
"Why don’t white working-class voters recognize where their economic interests lie? Somewhat self-righteously, Democrats keep asking themselves that question.
A better question would be:
What has the Democratic Party done for these voters lately?
At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.
This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.
Liberal victories in the sexual and women’s rights revolutions – victories that have made the lives of many upscale Democrats more productive and satisfying — appear, from the vantage point of the white working class, to have left many women to struggle as single parents, forced to cope with both male defection from paternal responsibility and the fragmentation of a family structure that was crucial to upward mobility in the postwar period.
This bleak view emerges from 2 recently published works, “Labor’s Love Lost,” by Andrew Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins, and “Was Moynihan Right? What Happens to the Children of Unmarried Mothers,” a research report by Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, respectively.
Both works address broader subjects than the partisan allegiance of working-class whites, but each illuminates the interaction of economic and cultural forces driving these voters away from their New Deal home.
“The young adults without bachelor’s degrees who are the heirs of the industrial working class today are not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern family lifestyle,” Cherlin writes. “Rather, they are a group making constrained choices.”
Cherlin uses racial and economic change at Bethlehem Steel’s Baltimore plant at Sparrows Point in the 1970s to show how the experiences of blacks and whites have diverged."
[*I got my 1st real job at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant right around this time*]
"Whites at the steel plant, Cherlin writes,
viewed the opportunity to move up to a more desired position or to get good entry level jobs for their sons and nephews — an opportunity long open to whites but for the most part closed off to blacks – as a basic privilege of being a factory worker.
In the 1970s, however, federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination against African-Americans began to be enforced just as the number of manufacturing jobs started to decline.
“Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities,” Cherlin observes.
Suddenly it was harder for anyone to get a job for his son at the Point and at factories around the country. Black and white workers were all faced with diminishing work opportunities, and a job taken by a black applicant seemed like a job taken away from a white applicant. The simultaneous onset of legally enforced labor market changes and the globalization and automation of production quite probably amplified the reactions of whites. The co-occurrence of the easy-to-see increase of the hiring of black workers and the hard-to-understand deterioration of the economy encouraged white workers to blame the former for the latter.
Black workers, even though they faced many of the same employment hardships, experienced the benefits of the civil rights movement, gaining equal protection before the law in 1964, statutory enforcement of their right to vote in 1965, and protection against workplace discrimination — most notably when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971, prohibiting hiring and workplace practices which, whether intentionally or not, had an adverse “disparate impact” on blacks.
From 1970 to 1994, the share of black American families making between $50,000 and $74,999 in inflation-adjusted dollars rose by 3.9%, and the share of black families earning $75,000 and above grew by 5.7%, both significant increases.
Thus black workers have, and have had, grounds for optimism: “although racial discrimination surely has not been eliminated over the ensuing decades,” Cherlin notes, “black workers are aware that conditions have improved.” He adds that civil rights laws “led to a relative improvement in their labor market position.” A 2012 Pew poll asked respondents “when your children are your age, will their standard of living be worse, the same or better than yours?” A plurality of whites, 42%, said worse, and 31% said better; among blacks, 56% said better and 25% said worse. The comparatives speak for themselves.
Even as blacks experienced the benefits of the drive toward racial equality, which many whites saw as a form of reverse discrimination, the liberal cultural agenda began to champion “expressive individualist” and “rights oriented” values. Many working-class whites saw these values as destructive of familiar hierarchies in which they were accustomed to hold a privileged position.
In this way, multiple legal, economic and cultural developments began to overlap.
You can see this convergence in another trend Cherlin describes, the transition, beginning in the 1960s, of younger adults from what he calls a “utilitarian self” to an “expressive self.” The utilitarian self, according to Cherlin, accepts “conformity to external standards — which included doing what your supervisor at work told you to do.” This conformity was essential for industrial work, “which required self-discipline and the suppression of feelings such as alienation and anger.”
The expressive self, in contrast, “emphasizes one’s feelings and emotional satisfaction and the pursuit of a personally fulfilling life.” For the less educated, however, the kind of low-skill, low-wage jobs available to them offered little or no opportunity for self-expression.
The expressive self has been a central element of postmodern liberal thinking. But, Cherlin writes,
What no one expected was that less educated young adults in the U.S., many of whom are still struggling to ensure an adequate standard of living, would show signs of making the transition before they had achieved affluence.
The conversion to liberal self-expressive priorities, then, can be seen as reducing the satisfaction of the less educated as they adapt to the drudgery of service work. The cultural resistance to curbs on individual autonomy also coincided with the divorce revolution of the early 1970s, with a generalized resistance over the past half-century to restrictive social norms....
The breakdown of working-class families, then, and the adverse consequences flowing from that breakdown, occurred simultaneously with the collapse of working-class jobs that provided decent incomes to those without college degrees.
As Cherlin points out,
The percentage of workers who were classified as precision production, crafts, and repair workers, and as operatives, fabricators and construction workers – in short what we might call blue collar occupations – decreased from 28 percent in 1970, to 22 percent in 1990, and then to 17 percent in 2010. During this same period, the number of workers who operated lathe, milling and turning machines plummeted from 345,000 to 14,000.
The changing job market has been particularly tough for men without college degrees. “By 1996, the average 30-year-old man with a high school degree earned 20 percent less than a comparable man in 1979,” Cherlin writes. “He belonged to the 1st generation of American young men to earn less than their fathers did.”
Democrats have wrestled intermittently with their difficulties in winning these white voters. The Republican groundswell in the 2014 election has provoked renewed interest in attempts to revive support in the white working class. The Democratic Strategist, a web-based publication, has started a bimonthly “White Working Class Roundtable” newsletter. The Democracy Corps, a project run by the Democratic consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville, has conducted a number of studies of working-class whites.
Of those writing on this subject, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones is one of the most compelling. In a recent blog post, Drum writes that Democrats have a serious problem:
What can they do? That is, what big ticket items are left that would buy the loyalty of the middle class for another generation? We already have Social Security and Medicare. We have Obamacare. We have the mortgage interest deduction. What’s left?"
Democrats are finished if they can't see the obvious--Outsourcing Jobs, In-Sourcing excess labor, and suppressed buying power from monetary expansion into the pockets of the top 2% are HUGE issues that should be in the forefront.