December 25, 2016
Why the white working class votes against itself (?)
The little lady writing below is a reasonably good journalist. She presents both sides of the argument pretty well. As a product of America's Left-dominated educational system, however. She lacks historical or academic context. Leftists hate history because it falsifies so much of what they believe. So they teach as little of it as possible. So the kids hear all about Adolf Hitler and slavery but little else.
It would be very rare for them to hear of a flamboyant Jew who ran the British Empire at the peak of its influence, little more than a century ago. A German socialist incinerated 6 million Jews. The British Conservative party made a Jew their Prime Minister. See any significant difference there? A Leftist probably wouldn't. They just blot the whole thing out. Conservatives are racist, don't you know?
Why did the British Tories make a Jew their Prime Minister? Because Benjamin Disraeli was a brilliant man. He was largely responsible for giving working class British people the vote. Yes: It was a Conservative who did that, not a liberal. Why did Disraeli do that? Because he saw the workers as "angels in marble": Good people behind a rough exterior. And he thought that he as a sculptor could show the angels in those blocks of marble.
And how did he do that? By stressing that the Conservative party stood for the welfare of the nation as a whole, not any sectional interest. He made the Tories the party for all proud Britons. He wanted to keep the "Great" in Great Britain.
And Disraeli succeeded. For decades after that, about a quarter of the working class in both Britain and Australia voted for the Tories rather than the Labour party.
And that drove Leftist sociologists crazy. They wrote books about it. Why did workers not vote for THEIR party? The Leftists had a theory but it was not a very deep explanation. Their claim was that some workers were "deferential": They looked up to their "betters" in the middle and upper classes. And there was something in that. But WHY were some workers deferential? Because they were psychologically inadequate was the best answer the Left had for that but there was no attempt to prove it.
So I looked into it. I was an active survey researcher and an experienced psychometrician at the time so I resolved to do a thorough job of looking into it. After much trial and error, I constructed a reliable and validated questionnaire to index social deference. I then looked at who these blighted deferential people actually were, using several samples with good prospects for generalizability. I found:
"that working-class conservatives are not a-typically deferential. Rather it is the working-class Labourites who are a-typically non-deferential. In other words, both groups of upper-class people [Left and Right] also respect social position and expertise in the people they vote for. It is this effect which also accounts for the overall positive correlation between deference and self-assigned class. We do then have support for Parkin's account of deference as representing a normative cultural value from which working-class Labour voters are especially (but institutionally) insulated.
A slightly surprising finding is the low relationship between deference and authoritarianism. A similar low relationship was observed in the Meadowbank pre-test of the scale -- where the correlation was 0.109. It is quite clear then that deference cannot now be viewed as simply a particular instance of attitude to authority in the political field. It is a quite separate determinant of voting behaviour in its own right. Deferentials defer not because of their attitude to authority but because of their beliefs about the causes and efficacy of social position. They are not browbeaten people."
So there is your answer from psychometrically sophisticated research findings, not from journalistic opinion or single-question surveys. Generalizing that finding to Trump voters, we would have to say that his working class supporters were mainstream Americans in their outlook. It is the workers who voted for Hillary who are isolated and alienated -- which is roughly the opposite of the answer given below. As Disraeli foresaw, the Trump-voting workers voted for the welfare of their nation as a whole, not for the many special interests that the Democrats were sponsoring. They really did want to "Make America Great Again"
Why did all those Economically Anxious Trump voters reject policies that would have helped relieve their economic anxiety?
Maybe they believed any Big Government expansions would disproportionately go to the “wrong” kinds of people — that is, people unlike themselves.
Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss, particularly in traditionally blue strongholds, has led to lots of rumination about what the Democrats must do to reclaim their political territory. Smarter marketing, smoother organization, greater outreach and fresher faces are among the most commonly cited remedies.
But there seems to be universal agreement, at least among the Democratic politicians and strategists I’ve interviewed, that the party’s actual ideas are the right ones.
Democrats, they note, pushed for expansion of health-insurance subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans; investments in education and retraining; middle-class tax cuts; and a higher minimum wage. These are core, standard-of-living improving policies. They would do far more to help the economically precarious — including and especially white working-class voters — than Donald Trump’s top-heavy tax cuts and trade wars ever could.
Here’s the problem. These Democratic policies probably would help the white working class. But the white working class doesn’t seem to buy that they’re the ones who’d really benefit.
Across rural America, the Rust Belt, Coal Country and other hotbeds of Trumpism, voters have repeatedly expressed frustration that the lazy and less deserving are getting a bigger chunk of government cheese.
In Kentucky, consumers receiving federal subsidies through the Obamacare exchanges complain that neighbors who are less responsible are receiving nearly free insurance through Medicaid.
“They can go to the emergency room for a headache,” one woman told Vox’s Sarah Kliff.
In Ohio, white working-class focus group participants decried that women who “pop out babies like Pez dispensers with different baby daddies” get “welfare every month” and “their housing paid for, their food.” These women seem to live large, one participant said, while people like herself are “struggling to put food on the table.”
Participants in this focus group, held by the Institute for Family Studies, were also skeptical of efforts to raise the minimum wage.
Opponents argued either that higher pay wasn’t justified for lower-skilled, less intense work or that raising the minimum wage would unfairly narrow the pay gap between diligent folks such as themselves and people who’d made worse life choices.
“That son of a b---- is making $10 an hour! I’m making $13.13. I feel like s--- because he’s making almost as much as I am, and I have never been in trouble with the law and I have a clean record, I can pass a drug test,” said one participant.
In Wisconsin, rural whites are similarly eager to “stop the flow of resources to people who are undeserving,” says Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.”
The people Cramer interviewed for her book often named a (white) welfare-receiving neighbor or relative as someone who belonged in that basket of undeservings — but also immigrants, minorities and inner-city elites who were allegedly siphoning off more government funds than they contributed.
More broadly, a recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that “average Americans” have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that “blacks” have gotten less than they deserve. (African Americans don’t count as “average Americans,” apparently.)
None of this should be particularly surprising.
We’ve known for a long time, through the work of Martin Gilens, Suzanne Mettler and other social scientists, that Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs.
Hence those oblivious demands to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” and the tea partyers who get farm subsidies, and the widespread opposition to expanded transfer payments in word if not in deed.
Rhetoric this election cycle caricaturing our government as “rigged,” and anyone who pays into it as a chump, has only reinforced these misperceptions about who benefits from government programs and how much.
It’s no wonder then that Democrats’ emphasis on downwardly redistributive economic policies has been met with suspicion, even from those who would be on the receiving end of such redistribution. And likewise, it’s no wonder that Trump’s promises — to re-create millions of (technologically displaced) jobs and to punish all those non-self-sufficient moochers — seem much more enticing.
No American likes the idea of getting a “handout” — especially if they believe that handout is secretly being rerouted to their layabout neighbor anyway.
SOURCE
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