A quick update on the white working class

More evidence for my general view that Union politicians made the wrong call in 1861.

@2 – Maybe your American friends are annoyed because they’ve heard that argument dozens of times before, each time from someone on the Internet who thinks it’s both novel and self-evident, and are tired of rebutting or hearing others rebut it.

In brief: 1. The South’s intention was not simply to go its own way and leave the rest of the Union alone. 2. Slavery in the South wasn’t just an inefficient economic system that would’ve naturally withered away, it was the cornerstone of their society. 3. Slavery in other parts of the world arguably wouldn’t have ended so soon without the US Civil War. 4. Even if 1-3 were not true, the idea that it would therefore be okay to let four million people live out the rest of their lives in bondage, so that the US would not be “held back culturally,” is hideous.

I hope the comments won’t now be derailed into Civil War counterfactuals since that’s not what John was talking about.

Re Phil @4: the tendency to project current voting patterns back as the immutable essences of some groups of voters isn’t limited to the US. Go back half a century in the UK, for example, and you find that cities now thought of as bastions of leftism were Tory. In the case of Liverpool, there were 100 years of continuous Tory control before the 1960s.

Chris – not quite the same thing; the working-class Tory vote is a recognisable social formation & has recognisably declined (everywhere to some extent, but much further and faster in the urban North than in the South). I think it is a genuine decline rather than label-switching; Blair did poach some of the Tory vote, but more the middle-class part of it – and even that didn’t really last. By contrast it seems as if the US less-educated southern White vote hasn’t changed all that much, despite (permanently) changing parties.

@evt13: here we go for “John Band tries to mansplain slavery to black people”. ffs.

Can’t see why the founding mythology of a modern industrial state would be quietly dropped, rather than have its technological development subsidised and extent proselytised to the same degree as, say, french farming or yankee exploration. If 20c pharmacology and ECT can’t get a slave factory running at a profit, keep up the funding, something will turn up. Even if it ends up forever 10 years from widespread use…

Back on topic, any discussion of class in the USA is always going to be subtly influenced by the universe next door where ‘slave’ is a row in the same table as ‘professional’. Just as it is by the existence of feudal warlords and peasants outside its formal borders.

That’s why there is a hell of a lot more to class than simple income categories. Real class explains and structures things; income categories sometimes just obfuscate and conceal that structure. Like trying to understand a tree in terms of height measurements, instead of trunk, branches and leaves. Some of the leaves may be lower than the trunk; they are still leaves.

Interesting that JQ seems to be counting the failure of income categories to track or explain voting behaviour as a point in _favour_ of using them…

It also bears mentioning that the goal of the South was not to separate from the USA but to impose its political will on it. The Confederate states alone were not powerful enough to preserve slavery, that’s why in the years preceding secession the slave holding states were more and more dependent on federal powers to preserve their institution.

Its the toxic mix of building a society dependent on an institution that can only exist with the help of a government that dosent actually like this institution that led to the confederate states firing on fort sumter all these years ago.

Still, it seems that is a confusion here between “working person” and “working class”. A self-employed plumber, a small farmer, they are working people, quite possibly with low income, but ‘working class’? They don’t belong to the same social class as someone working on an assembly line in Detroit.

It seems to me that if you define working *class* by income, you have lost a concept, namely the difference between class and income. My plumber may well earn more than me, but we are definitely not of the same class.

Conversely, from the Southern perspective, large parts of the US are, indeed, more like Europe than like the America they know and love.

I imagine some of this is also do to regional differences in the origins of what is now the white working class. How much of the southern WWC is Catholic (and thus southern or eastern European) vs. how much of the rest of the WWS is? This difference in origins and time of arrival in the US has led, I believe, to large regional differences in WWC culture.

The result, along with the way in which the US constitutional system gives disproportionate power to smaller States meant that the ‘US’ has always been held back culturally and politically.

Totally agree – reconstruction changed the reading of the Constitution from “these united STATES” ( a looser union ) to “The UNITED states”. ( Much stronger federalism). The biggest mistake was probably that they didn’t completely re-write the Constitiution. Giving political power back to rebels meant reconstruction was a farce and Jim Crow was the result. Should have started over, ditched the states and the Senate.

Not that it’s gone all the way, but isn’t one development over the last half-century or so a reduction in the difference between income and class? There used to be people who weren’t well paid but had fairly decent social status, e.g. clergymen and teachers, whereas better-paid plumbers had lower status. But now status and income are more closely, though still not perfectly, correlated, e.g. teachers have lower social status than before and well-off plumbers have higher status.

“This difference in origins and time of arrival in the US has led, I believe, to large regional differences in WWC culture.”

Wasn’t there a whole book about that? Scots-Irish and the Appalachians or something?

Chris B. @18 and christian h@26 recall E.P. Thompson’s famous lines:

Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine-room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this interest and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.

“A problem with generalizations about “the South” such as John Band’s “poor whites are always going to vote for the anti-black party” is surely that the area covered by statistical surveys of “the South” includes places with a post-civil-war history of working-class radicalism, such as, I believe, parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and coal-mining areas of the Appalachians. Is this not so?”

I think that’s true, but that’s also kind of besides the point. When everybody I know talks about “The South,” we’re not talking about the anomalies, we’re talking about the general rule. Generally, when you’re talking about white people in Arkansas, you’re not going to get much working-class radicalism. There’s plenty of it – millions of people live in Arkansas. Any group of millions of people is going to have outliers, and from time to time have an outbreak of something out of the norm. But the substantial majority of white people in Arkansas are pretty conservative.

Just like if you talk about white people in the Pacific Coast, you’re going to get A LOT of pretty liberal, progressive people. The vast majority, really. But ever been to Fresno? Sweet mother of gawd – there’s a church full of Evengelicals on every street corner. That’s millions of people throughout the West Coast. It’s a minority, but it’s a LOT of PEOPLE.

“. . . the substantial majority of white people in Arkansas are pretty conservative.”

Stating it that way doesn’t tell anyone much about the political dynamics, which made them “conservative”, and defines that “conservative”.

In Arkansas, as in a number of Southern states, anti-majoritarian constitutional provisions make it very difficult to institute a populist or progressive political program, overcoming the presumptive power of the oligopoly of wealthy landowners. People, with a cynical skepticism about the power of populist promise-makers to deliver, fall back on a peculiar kind conservatism, which is very common in the South, particularly among relatively poor whites. Call it cynical conservatism. It’s basic philosophical tenet is not traditionalism or authoritarianism, but a cynical expectation of corruption in government, married to resentments, some of them racially focused. And, it is born out of an experience of political frustration and impotence. If you can’t organize politically to better your lot — the rules of a ruling oligarchy prevent it — you fall back on resentments and cynicism, however perverse, mean, irrational, contradictory and apparently self-defeating.

It’s been several years since I read them, but at the time I found both Erick Olin Wright’s “What is middle about the middle class” and Jon Elster’s “Three challenges to class” very helpful in thinking about these issues. (Neither focuses much on race, but I think they are still useful.) Both are in the Roemer edited volume _Analytical Marxism_. The book _Social Class: How Does It Work?_, edited by Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley might also be of some use to people thinking about this issue, though I’ve only read a couple of the papers in it.

In the US class and income have been decoupled, but that doesn’t mean that class has vanished. Class is more and more a tribal identification based on cultural preferences. Choice of music (country or opera), food preferences (burgers or sushi), religion (evangelical or atheist), automobiles (truck or hybrid) are all potential markers of class. This identification is also being decoupled from family past. I encounter people who come from well-to-do backgrounds who try to act as though they were born to a clan of moonshining illiterates. Is that real class or some sort of pseudo-class?

Plumbers are an interesting social niche. Any competent plumber, self-employed or otherwise, can make very good money, far more than most college grads and as much as many professionals. But anyone who deals with toilets and shit gets relegated to a lower social status (even the ones I know who have season tickets to the opera). On the flip side, lawyers are accorded a higher class status even though many lawyers struggle to stay in the middle class. Note to parents: tell your kids to consider plumbing. They will always have work and no student loan debt.

“I don’t think you need to go much beyond racism. What else explains why Huey Long had so much success when he tried progressive politics?”

I’m not so sure that explains Huey, but since the reference was originally to Arkansas, its Governor and US Senator Jeff Davis demonstrated in the early 20th century that it was possible to be radical (or talk that way) and racist (or talk that way) at the same time. I think he illustrates your point better than Huey.

Some say he also managed to be a drunkard at the same time, too.
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=98

Of course class is a complex social construction, as EP Thompson says, and as I said (not so well) here. So, for that matter, is race.

But if you want to talk about the question “Does the white working class vote for the Republican Party?”, you have to classify particular people as members of this class, or not. And, if you want to answer the question, you have to do so on the basis of the data available. For race, that’s presumably self-identification. For class, as I mentioned, you sometimes get self-identification, but mostly you have the choice between education and income. The point of the post is that, apart from the South, income gives the “standard” answer, that working class people tend to vote for the less rightwing party, but by an overwhelming margin.

SamChevre: “It would seems to me the white populism and anti-immigrant/anti-black politics have historically gone together pretty closely, North and South.”

I suppose there’s some truth in that, but also potential obfuscation of differences and distinctions, which would bear fruitful analysis. There’s a long history of apologists for the Deep South, in particular, insisting that the same racism infested the whole country, when, in fact, attitudes and political dynamics varied significantly. The racism of the Deep South, feeding on the economic oppression of blacks, was quite different from the racism of regions, which fearfully sought to exclude blacks as cultural aliens or cut-rate economic competition.

The historic Republican Party, in its formation in the 1850s, absorbed the anti-immigrant American Party (aka the Know-Nothing’s), and then went on, in the 1860s and early 1870s to enact sweeping political equality to black men.

In the South, there’s always been a remarkably sharp distinction between the lowland “Deep South”, where racism focused on an extractive relationship with a large, oppressed and exploited black population, and the hill country of Greater Appalachia, which found blacks and slavery repulsive, and where racism sought to exclude blacks and the aristocratic planter political oligarchy. State politics in places like Tennessee and North Carolina has often featured a significant tension between the political oligarchy of a lowland wealthy few, which wanted to use the state to enforce their domination and reinforce their rentier extractions, and the so-called yeoman farmers of the hill country, who were more interested in public goods, and state protection against economic exploitation — in short, a more populist agenda.

(It is in Greater Appalachia, where Obama has lost Democratic voters most markedly.)

It also worth noting that the political attitudes of authoritarian followers, with whom populist appeals find resonance are somewhat contradictory. They tend to respect authority and convention a bit too much, but, when their resentments are under control, they tend to favor an egalitarian politics and even somewhat paternalist state, and can be very sympathetic to claims of justice, backed by the spectacle of non-violent protest provoking a violent response. They are also easily fooled by demagogues, and in the South, the history and experience of populism is marred by cynical use of corrupt demagogues by oligarchies, of which the stoking of racial resentments is only one aspect.

Quiggin’s understandable focus on measurement, and its difficulties, should not make us ignorant or stupid about the complex subtleties and cross-currents driving politics and political attitudes.

If I understand the summary in the original it seems that the monolithic republican group among southern whites are those who lack a university education. So this is more a problem of ignorance. More effective education is required. It would boost incomes and make regional differences in political affiliation less pronounced.

Alex@ 43: I will confess to total ignorance of plumbers in the UK. In the US there seems to be ready work for plumbers as well as some other skilled trades (if you can weld stainless steel you are in great demand). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm

Carpentry employment follows the boom-bust housing cycle.

In Australia, plumbers are not particularly high on the income scale: average $60,050. Below the average for all occupations ($65,816). Electricians do better, and so do truck drivers, and secretaries don’t do much worse ($56,706). That plumbers live on caviar and champagne seems to be an enduring myth. See http://www.abcdiamond.com/australia/average-wages-by-occupation-in-australia-2010/

“All of my friends who got trades are loaded while those who went to college are broke as hell.”

Well I think to some extent that is the point being made. How is a struggling lower income family or student, wanting to gain some financial security and a foot hold in today’s economy, best able to achieve it?

Engels: No, just no cat. Unless you’re following the neo-Egyptian view that the soul is contained within the cat.

JQ: also, further positive adjustments may be required to allow for near-universal healthcare, low social unrest, quality of beer, etc. And negative ones for levels of dangerous charismatic fauna.

Unless you’re following the neo-Egyptian view that the soul is contained within the cat.

I don’t want to hijack the thread so I shall forbear responding.

Everyone in the U.S. is middle class, to a first approximation. Working class isn’t a separate identity. A plumber is quite often an entrepreneur, so the lack of a college degree isn’t a definitive signifier. (Primary and secondary school teachers tend to have lower status, despite their educational attainment and even sometimes their income, because teaching was once women’s work.)

One might simply define class by income and call the bottom quintile poor, the top quintile rich, and everyone else middle class. For some reason there is a polite fiction that most of the top quintile, households with six figure incomes, is also middle class, and Romney is promising to relieve us, as well as the less fortunate, of the burden of paying taxes on our capital gains, dividends and interest income (which are negligible for most of that group).

Half of Americans have some college and a quarter have degrees, so defining us by education is as much at odds with our self-perception as defining us by income. Now that you can buy wine at bowling alleys you can’t define us by taste either.

“Born Fighting by James Webb (US Sen-VA).”

That’s the one I was thinking of.

why poorly educated whites vote in their class interests in the North and against them in the South

Occam’s razor would suggets if the group in question votes as if it were middle class (i.e. status comes from ownership of assets, especially housing), and the only available data has it as low income, then it is low-income middle class.

The complicating factor is that in the presence of slavery, freedom counts as an asset: conceptually, you own yourself. This means that certain types of income can actually be seen as a net loss. In particular anything that is presented as organised by the powerful from concern from your welfare will decreases your personal ownership asset by at least as much as the income’s value.

Of course, the US apparently doesn’t collect statistics on class, presumably for the same reason France doesn’t collect them on race: officially it doesn’t exist, and so must not be acknowledged.

rf: “I really don’t see any end to the relentless funnelling of tribute to tradesmen. Everywhere they go they leave behind a ruined economy and thousands of vacant houses.”

I think that you misspelled ‘bankers’.

Barry

You have me on the first one brother. Second was bad Jim. I wouldn’t imagine everyone in the US is middle class….(my point, such as I have one, is limited to plumbers)

68 is extremely believable but might be a bit tricky to measure?

70: it’s trivial if you’re working in India; you can just go to the marriage brokers, who charge commission based on the desirability of the husband they hook your daughter up with, and work out what sort of social capital would equate to a certain level of actual capital. So if Sanjay has $50,000 a year, and Rajiv has $40,000 a year plus a masters’ degree, and they’ll charge you the same for each one, the value of a masters’ is ten grand.

ajay (on Indian marriage brokers): The evil, failed, dot-entrepreneur in me suddenly finds himself wondering if you can use dating websites and social networking to assign a cash value to certain trades, educations, ethnic origins, religions and lifestyle choices. There should be some way to profit from being able to say “If you’re looking for a partner, you have to make an extra $10,000 a year to compensate for smoking.”

It’s an evil thought and I’ll probably manage to suppress it.

“There should be some way to profit from being able to say “If you’re looking for a partner, you have to make an extra $10,000 a year to compensate for smoking.””

There was some research on this recently. I wish I could find the link. It looked at things like height in males and how much extra money a man had to earn to make up for being short.

It’s a tangent here, but I think the characterization of populism above unfair. The relationship between populism and racism/authoritarianism/right-wing sentiment is something we’ve been over it before. Here is an overview I did of the major 19th century populist parties. Short version: most of their ideas were left-wing, some were prescient (fiat currency, anti-monopoly, business regulation, graduated income tax), and anti-authoritarian (direct election of Senators, women’s vote). There was some racism, especially in the Knights of Labor, the most classically left-wing group (and the one that had an urban proletarian rather than rural base), but there was also opposition to racism, which compares favorably to the Democrats of the day. If we are to evaluate them primarily in terms of prejudice, we should also note that they were very early suffragists.

When I looked up their platforms, the only ones I found that had a position on immigration were the Knights of Labor, who were opposed (largely to cheap Chinese labor). The last incarnation of the Populist Party, largely a personal vehicle for Tom Watson, may also have had such a platform as it did embrace racism, unlike the earlier versions of the party.

The evil, failed, dot-entrepreneur in me suddenly finds himself wondering if you can use dating websites and social networking to assign a cash value to certain trades, educations, ethnic origins, religions and lifestyle choices.

OKCupid has published some stuff along these lines. The numbers on race are predictably dispiriting.

Some quantitative social scientist should be talking to them about getting the underlying data…

Yes, there was some of that in the People’s Party. You notice I looked at 5 different groups and got a complex answer. You are looking at one to support a broad generalization.

Someone else seemed to imply Huey Long was a racist candidate. This, too, is oversimplified. He eliminated the state poll tax increasing voter registration by 76% in one year. Figure that helped blacks any? He invested majorly in Universities and Charity Hospitals. He declared a foreclosure moratorium during the depression. He created a major adult literacy program. He initiated health and dental care for prisoners. His strict regulation of the banking system meant only 7 failed in Louisiana out of 4800 nationwide. He was the key and decisive backer of the first woman elected to the US Senate. He was autocratic as hell, and clownish, and willing to ally with the likes of Coughlin, though this is before Coughlin got into the antisemitic stuff. He took no position on the Klan, though he was running against an outright backer. It seems to me there is more to be said for the man than liberals typically will admit.

There is a recent book called American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122029). The thesis is basically that regional cultures within the US/North America are strongly determined by the first permanent settlers, even when they have been diluted by later immigration waves. Appalachia is of course one of those regional cultures.

“According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of presidential elections.”

“I’m not quite sure what statistics you could collect. The UK has things like the National Readership Survey which puts you in A, B, C1, C2, D, E – but that’s almost entirely based on job status.”

One of the reasons why “class” is such a difficult concept in the UK. Whether it’s “tea” or “dinner”, whether you hold you knife as a pencil or not, whether, if you thought about joining the Army, you would expect (yes, expect) to join as a squaddie or a 2nd Lt.

Tea and dinner are also, to some extent, northern and southern. But class is a socio-economic concept, not purely an economic one, in that country.

Surely it’s “everyone in the US is middle-class to a zeroth approximation”. And that is an appalling approximation. Just one more example of how easy it is to talk nonsense with numbers.

@Salient

Interesting example, the pollster. Nowadays I think occasionally the person involved might be capable of doing it right, and consequently, not talking nonsense, but that would be too much effort, and too few would recognize the difference. Indeed, where doing things wrong and talking nonsense is the norm, doing it right risks dangerously standing out from the crowd. Those who stand out from the crowd in our era are not fêted the way Keynes was. And following Keynes death an industry has developed to dance on his grave ad posthumous punishment for his standing out.