More generally, if social scientists have a “prevailing definition” of the term “working class” I missed the memo. Apparently the people we’re talking about did, too. Among whites in the bottom third of the income distribution in 2004, 55% called themselves “working class”; among Gopoian and Whitehead’s whites without college degrees, only 48% did. Further restricting the definition to people with “incomes that surround the median household income for the nation” makes me even more curious why we don’t just use a well-established term that would seem to fit these people comfortably: “middle class.”

Of course, analysts can use whatever labels they want as long as they are clear about their definitions. My focus on low-income whites was inspired primarily by Frank’s reference on the first page of his book to Democrats as “the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized,” and by his subsequent insistence on considering class “in the material, economic sense, not in the tastes-and-values way our punditry defines class.” It also fits nicely with my own broader interest in the politics of economic inequality. It is very easy to think of significant government policies that distribute costs and benefits on the basis of income, but much harder to think of instances in which “who gets what” depends on whether they happen to have a college degree.

Finally, a brief comment on the broader debate in which Gopoian and Whitehead’s analysis is situated. It is certainly true that the Democratic Party has lost support among whites without college degrees. (As with Democratic fortunes more generally, most of that decline is directly attributable to the demise of the artificially Democratic Solid South of the Jim Crow era. But let’s ignore that elephant in the room – along with the growing proportion of the electorate that happens not to be white.) What should we conclude from that trend? Many observers seem to leap to the conclusion that the party needs to reconnect with “traditional values.” Whites without college degrees are, indeed, more conservative than better-educated whites are on social issues like abortion and gender roles. But they also attach much less weight to those issues in their voting behavior. In 2004, the statistical connection between social issue preferences and presidential votes was more than twice as strong among college-educated whites as among those without college degrees. (In contrast, the connection between economic issue preferences and presidential votes was equally strong among both groups.) If anyone has a magic formula for appealing to less-educated socially conservative whites while retaining the loyalty of better-educated – and apparently more attentive – socially liberal whites, I’m all for it. But in the real world of hard political trade-offs, it is by no means obvious that moving to the right on social issues would be a net vote winner for Democrats.

Poverty, hardship, insecurity and ignorance make people conventional, uncritical, brutal, intolerant, selfish, narrow-minded, short-sighted and bad. Education, privilege, security and wealth make people good. Virtue is a luxury item.

The solution is simple even if the means to achieve it isn’t: win the class war. Suppress and disenfranchise the lower classes. And then obliterate the working class by fixing the system so that everyone is reasonably educated, secure and comfortably off—so that everyone is upper middle class.

But I don’t think the ‘urban/rural’ aspect is emphasized enough in all this: I suspect that small town ‘petit bourgeois’ do benefit from Republican policies – low taxes, no social programs on the federal level; that’s just how it is.

The study Henry cites sounds interesting and significant—I’m not arguing with that claim. But it would be a shame if Frank’s argument about class and ideology got lost in the shuffle. This is the stuff he’s been writing about for years, in The Baffler and in his other books, and he’s pretty sharp about it.

It’s hard to exaggerate the degree to which the “new right” is a rejection of the humanities, as taught in American universities 1950-2005. In the US (in contrast to Europe) Undergrad education as not really a good primary venue for political action and education, since many students don’t really respect their professors very much. Envious non-college people end up identifying liberalism with “the elite”, and plenty of college people ignore or resist it. You just end up with a splinter faction of militant students and hangers-on within a generally reactionary world. Historically, student movements have mostly failed.

However, I was a bit surprised to see this poll a coupla days ago:

CBS News/New York Times Poll. Dec. 2-6, 2005. N=1,155 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.

“Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party comes closer to sharing your moral values?”

Republican Party 41%
Democratic Party 43%
Both (vol.) 3%
Neither (vol.) 5%
Unsure 8%

Belle knows.