This doesn’t make them worse the their brethern on the other side of the self-identified political aisle, but let’s not let them off the hook because they are pro-gay marriage. The have nearly nothing in common with the lower third, by income or education, and it is these people who form the cultural identity of Democrats as witnessed in the media. That is Frank’s point. Thirty years ago that wasn’t the case, but it most certainly is now. TWU workers are middle class, and an MIT junior professor isn’t? With logic like that, I’m surprised you folks aren’t still turning in circles trying to figure out why Kerry lost.

The flaw in this (admittedly interesting) argument is that it posits that the workers have gone from a place where they can reasonably expect for the company to take care of them in a sense to a place where they could find themselves destitute in fairly short order.

And at some level it’s profoundly irrational for anyone in such a place to support the interests of CEO types in dismantling safety social safety nets. Admittedly, that may not be an obvious fact to these voters until they actually see people in their peer group start to fall through the cracks.

If we’re interested in a broad thesis like Frank’s, it makes sense to take a broad enough definition to capture a significant fraction of the population; but then if one wants to account for the aggregate characteristics of the group, one has to disaggregate to see what further can be learned.

As for the “threshold” argument—yes, white working class conservatism is an important phenomenon, whether or not it accounts for the majority of that class. But in writing that “such a study does not depend upon a majoritarian argument of any kind,” Frank is being at least a little bit disingenuous: WMK makes just such a majoritarian argument, so it hardly seems beside the point to criticize him for it. (In his rejoinder, Frank denies only that he makes a “systematic argument” to that effect. Part of what’s frustrating about the book, for all its interest and appeal, is that Frank fails to make many of his arguments consistently or precisely. So it’s pretty exasperating to see him invoke that as a point in his defense.)

Moreover, to the extent that white working class conservatism isn’t a majority phenomenon, it affects both Frank’s analysis and prescription. For one thing, it suggests that maybe a study of the “rhetoric and ideology of right-wing populism” shouldn’t limit itself from the outset to looking primarily at the white working class, or even to the economically insecure (which is hardly the same thing). Second, if Frank is wrong about how and to what extent the Dems lost the white working class (and here the regional question matters as well), then he’s probably wrong that a return to a straight up economic liberalism will make winners of them again. On that point, at least, I think we agree.

Catherine’s Bourdieu-lite intervention, which is helpful because it links the characteristic and historically enduring anti-intellectualism of American political culture, with its equally powerful suspicion of malleably defined “elites.” While, as Catherine points out, this free-floating contempt can sometimes, as today, be manipulated by moneyed interests, it can also create bonds among workers which generate class antagonism toward both cultural and economic elites. Indeed, the 19th century roots of modern kitsch is powerfully traced in Ann Douglas’s great, “The Feminization of American Culture”, and the homogenization of that strain into the nascent mass culture of the early 20th century paradoxically laid the groundwork for the cross-ethnic solidarity that created the CIO—thus under the right historical circumstances, mass culture can become a prod, not a tranquilizer, to class consciousness.

Catherine continues, however, to do a better job of explicating Frank than Frank—she insists that he isn’t interested in the self-definition of the working class, whereas in good Thompsonian fashion, HE insists that he is, and, indeed, that that is one of the best ways to understand class as an analytical category! And she imputes to him a sophisticated definition of “working class as a mode of consumption” that I think, in fact, is more implict, and somewhat muddled for that, in his work—see especially The Baffler essays. (actually, I guess I’d say that’s a poor explication, but a good refinement of his argument!)

2. One classic definition of “working class” ignored by Franks is just anyone who depends on wages for their living. Education is irrelevant to that.

3. There’s quite an enormous income overlap between workers with and without four-year degrees, especially because a lot of tech degrees are two year degrees, and because a lot of four-year degrees are economically useless. Generalizations about”college education” do a lot of wild lumping.

4. If the lack of a 4-year college degree is written into the definition of “working class”, and if income level is written out, then the cultural-politics divide is defined as a class divide pure and simple. There’s a valuable perception here, but I think that it’s a misuse the idea of class.

5. The cultural war should rather be seen as a battle between non-poor non-rich workers without 4-year degrees, and non-rich non-poor workers with four-year degrees. There are other variables such as unionization and category of employer, and I would suspect that such non-poor Democrats tend more to be in unionized jobs or working for large somewhat paternalistic institutions such as government, the universities, or non-profits.

But then the socially progressive elites of the US decided as well to adopt division of culture into high and low (see Lawrence Levine on this): from Jane Addams to Frederick Law Olmsted, progressives took up high culture as an instrument to educate the poor and immigrant classes, or those most explicitly exploited by massive industrialization.

This is at the root of American working class suspicion of cultural elites—and the working class relationship to culture is not one of uplift—either through symphony or museum attendance, or New Ageism but rather one that is more unabashedly indulgent in the remnants of folk spectacle, even if industrialized (which is often identified as kitsch)—so NASCAR, excessive Xmas lights, the Crystal Cathedral, professional sports are seen as somehow “working class” even if their participants make a lot more money that your average University professor who has more cultural capital, but less income on her W-2 form at the end of the year.

Thus, Frank’s definition of working class as a mode of consumption would obtain here—this is the stage of capitalism that we have reached in these United States—class status is not self-defined as it defined by modes of consumption.

Now the ruling elite in the US has become more and more explicitly pohilistine in order to reach out to the discontentment of the culturally marginal—this is perhaps the ultimate achievement of of post-modernism’s overturning of high/low divisions.

This means that the same political party can hardly satisfy both. Thus a self-employed plumber with no BA and 40K income may vote Republican and be rational about it (well, at least in part).

Also, I think the self-employed do get taxed for for the SS, it’s called ‘self-employment tax’, and it’s twice higher than employee’s portion of the FICA/Medicare tax; the self-employed pay over 15% for SS/medicare. This could be a reason for them not to be too fond of these programs.

Rich – I think you’re right – but I also think that there are two slightly different issues. One, which you are referring to, is how best to define class in the US and advanced industrial societies. For my money, best recent semi-popular piece I’ve seen is this interview href=”http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Polyc-int.PDF” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Polyc-int.PDF with Erik Olin Wright. Two, there’s a methodological issue – given that we don’t have good data on the economic insecurity of people’s jobs, what are the best proxies that we can find for this in existing data? Both measures that have been proposed are unsatisfactory in many ways – after reading Frank, I’m more convinced by his take than by Bartels.

gkurtz – I was trying to speak to some of these issues, albeit in a slightly different way in the last sentence or two of the post above.

I think you mean political interests.

A self-employed plumber occassionaly employs people (even if it’s his nephew, usually);

But he may, nonetheless, work very hard, live in a working class neighborhood, all his friends may be working class and so on. Further, he may shift back and forth between working for a company as a plumber and working for himself.

things like minimum wage, family sick leave, environmental and work-safety regulations – that’s anathema to the self-employed plumber.

Since it would tend to put him out of business, or force him to go to work for a company instead of doing it himself. I’m not sure where you’re going, abb. To me that implies that wooing the working classes would require being careful not stomp the self-employed. Or is the self-employed plumber (whatever his income level) to be regarded as the oppressor?

I should also point out that many people working in trades work as independent contractors for tax purposes. It’s just like being a wage slave but you don’t get taxed for SS and you get no benefits or protections afforded wage slaves. Those people would qualify as ‘self-employed’ even though there is no practical difference between the two states except for taxation purposes.

Anyways, nobody has pointed out that the worth of given amount of income varies widely over the country. 45k in income in Texas would be comfortable; in New York, not so much.

ash
[‘Speaking as part of the (sorta-)white working class, whatever the hell that is.’]