R-E-S-P-E-C-T

As is so often the case, I’m late to the discussion, but I have been wanting to join some time, the discussion of why liberals lack appeal among the white working class, even though Republicans are, after all, the party of plutocracy. In later posts, I intend to discuss Jonathan Haidt's theory that it is because liberals are tone deaf to many people's important moral concerns about in-group loyalty and cohesion, authority, and purity/sanctity, and why these values, though important to many, can be problematic.

But here I want to stick to a simpler and more obvious explanation, as embodied in Alexandra Pelosi’s interviews with the white working class in Mississippi. The basic answer is that they vote their values, not their pocketbooks. Pelosi depicts this in highly patronizing terms as bizarre, inexplicable behavior by fools and bigots too dumb to recognize their own interests. Well, guess what? Treating people as fools and bigots too dumb to recognize their own interest is a really poor way of getting their votes. Before worrying about how to deal with loyalty, authority and sanctity, let's begin with something more basic -- respect. Or, as one view puts it:

This video is PRECISELY the sort of condescending, self-congratulating, tautological garbage that fuels the stereotype of the mainstream media as a band of snotty elitists who sneer at everything that resides outside the Beltway, NYC, Hollywood or San Francisco.

And another:

As long as this shit is accepted on the left, it should be no wonder that liberals are not welcome in white, rural America. It reeks of privilege, prejudice, and the superiority complex that taints the limousine liberal politics that run the Democratic Party. Until liberals can learn how to talk about the people they supposedly care about without this disgusting air of condescension and smugness, Mississippi, and everywhere like it, will remain a one-party state.

And, I should add, whatever liberals' tone deafness on the issues of loyalty, authority and sanctity, problems with respect are bipartisan. If the issue of respect is a major reason the white working class is heavily Republican, it also goes a long way toward explaining why the Republican Party cannot attract minorities. Republicans regard minorities as voting against their interests when they vote for the party of government dependency – and as voting against their values when they vote for the party of gay marriage and abortion.

So how does a liberal respond to that? Probably with an impatient roll of the eyes and an answer that doesn’t even get to economics. You seriously want to court the Hispanic vote while simultaneously treating illegal immigrants as an all-purpose scapegoat? You think Hispanics are going to vote for the party of Tom Tancredo and Joe Arpaio?!?* Are you nuts? And it does no good for Republicans to say they only oppose illegal immigration, not legal immigration, let alone Hispanics who are citizens. Searches for scapegoats rarely confine themselves to neat boundaries. Consider "self-deportation." Republican leaders are basically acknowledging that the federal government lacks the resources to forcibly deport 12 million people, but they hope to encourage “self-deportation.” What this means, in simple English, is to encourage a campaign of harassment and persecution against illegal immigrants at all levels of society to drive them out. And do you seriously believe that not one Hispanic citizen or legal resident will be at all effected by the harassment and persecution? Um, you obviously don't know much about how harassment ans persecution work. And even if you can assure that everyone scrupulously checks for citizenship or legal residency before harassing or persecuting consider the humiliation that goes with constantly having to prove that you are a citizen or legal resident in order to be spared. Nor is the current uproar over Trayvon Martin going to do anything to win black votes for the Republican Party. If I were to write a memo to the Republican Party about how to woo minorities, I would tell them that before they can even begin working to convince minorities that their interests lie with the Republicans, they will have to convince minorities that Republicans don't despise them.

Well guess what? That cuts both ways. If Democrats want to win the votes of the white working class, a good start would be not to make films like the one Alexandra Pelosi made. She said she had intelligent discussions with the people she filmed. Great, then, why not show those discussions? If you want to attract people’s votes, wouldn’t it make more sense to foster understanding of what they believe and value, rather than to mock? I also recommend refraining from patronizing stereotypes and suggesting that people are too dumb to know their own interests. You will never win people’s votes by telling them they are too dumb to understand their own interests.

And yes, I admit it, I am guilty of this too, sometimes. When Rick Santorum brings working class audiences to their feet denouncing Obamacare, I want to scream, don’t you understand? Obamacare means that you won’t lose your insurance if you lose your job. It means you won’t have to worry about how to keep coverage if a member of your family develops a serious medical problem. It means if you are Joe the Plumber and want to stop working for someone else and go into business for yourself, you don’t have to worry about losing health insurance if you do. Can’t you see those things are in your own interest?** But if we ever want to attract the votes of the white working class, step number one has to be not to do that.

Consider Obama’s famous "bitter clinger" speech. It starts off on an excellent note, the sort of note that might connect to the white working class:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

The obvious follow up, then is to explain how you actually can make a difference. Or, if you don't have anything concrete to offer, you acknowledge that you don't have the answers, but pledge to work with the white working class to find them. Instead, of course, he continued:

So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Instead of explaining why many people are legitimately alienated from the political system because they perceive (correctly) that it does not represent their interests the speech drifts off into patronizing stereotypes, portraying as pathology things that many people regard as signs of virtue. And in the end, no one remembered or cared about excellent start. People only heard the patronizing stereotypes.

But this speech, and its inability to offer anything useful to the white working class, raises another, disturbing point. Do we, in fact, represent the interests of the working class? At the margins, maybe we do. But how much difference can we really make beyond the margins? The good-paying blue collar jobs of yesteryear are gone and no one, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative knows how to bring them back. Make no mistake, if any politician knew how to bring those good-paying blue collar jobs back, it would be too big a political goldmine for anyone of any ideology to pass up. Any politician anywhere on the spectrum who could credibly promise to bring back those good-paying blue collar jobs would win the blue collar vote by a landslide that election. And anyone who succeeded would have the blue collar vote for a generation. In the meantime, no one knows how to bring those jobs back, and no one really represents the interests of the working class. So given the choice between a politician who offers them nothing economically but at least shares their values, and one who offers them nothing economically and looks down on them as bitter clingers, the working class will chose a politician who shares their values.

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*Just for the record, Tancredo and Arpaio are both Italian names, not Spanish. I do sometimes, though, if being mistaken for a Mexican immigrant because of their names has anything to do with both men’s intensity on this issue.
**I want to scream it at Santorum , too, as well as Sarah Palin. Both politicians chose against abortion of a baby with chromosomal abnormalities. Both talk about reverence of life for people like their disabled children and warn that if government controls health insurance, it will regard people like them as burdens to be discarded. Don’t they realize that insurance companies already see their children in those terms? That one of the first provisions of Obamacare to come into effect was to require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions in children? That if and when their children grow up and can no longer be on their parents’ insurance, they will be uninsurable by any profit-seeing insurance company and will have no choice but to rely for insurance on the Evil Government that supposedly wants to kill them? And that a lot of people who have developmentally disabled children do not have all the advantages they do and desperately need help with the medical expenses involved?