11-03-2016, 12:27 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-03-2016, 12:33 AM by Eric the Green.)
(11-02-2016, 08:33 PM)Einzige Wrote: You know, most polls show that Republican voters (who skew elderly and poor) favor New Deal-Great Society social programmes at nearly the same level as Democratic voters, who are connected to those programmes through an aging political tradition.
I can easily envision the GOP becoming the Party of selective economic interventionism, American liberal policies directed towards illiberal ends: expanding Affirmative Action to encompass the white working class, for example, or heavy spending on jobs programmes in poor Red States like Oklahoma and West Virginia.
They'd have to ditch their libertarian wing, but it's not as though libertarians have ever won an election for the Republican Party anyway.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is increasingly resembling a high-tech version of last century's GOP.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/opinio...ngine&_r=0
Quote: For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been making steady gains among upper income whites and whites with college and postgraduate degrees. This year, however, is the first time in at least six decades that the Democratic nominee is positioned to win a majority of these upscale voters.
According to the Oct. 20 Reuters-IPSOS tracking survey, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 5.6 points among all whites earning $75,000 or more. This is a substantial improvement on the previous Democratic record of support among upscale white voters, set in 2008 when Barack Obama lost to John McCain among such voters by 11 points.
According to an Oct. 23 ABC News poll, Clinton also leads among all white college graduates, 52-36. She has an unprecedented gender gap among these voters, leading 62-30 among college-educated white women and tying among college educated white men, 42-42.
What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
As recently as 2012, Mitt Romney won among well-educated whites by 14 points. In 2008, McCain won college-educated whites by four points.
The data reflects an ongoing evolution in the composition of the two parties.
This situation, to the extent that it exists (and it does to some extent) seems to have no connection to the actual policies pursued by the two parties. The Republicans are still dedicated heart and soul, lock stock and barrel, to libertarian economics, and have now brought the racist dog whistle associated with it more into the open. The Democrats are still dedicated to policies that help the poor and middle class rise economically through government action. Nothing has changed. It's still 1964.
So why the switch among some white people?
As Bob Dylan said, they have become pawns in the game. Quite a profound song, it turns out.
https://youtu.be/KY2lQV3ADfc
In the long run, lack of education promotes ignorance, which means poor and lower middle-class whites can be more easily swayed by the clever propaganda of libertarian economic dog whistles. They have been trained, literally, to blame their status on other ethnic groups (and men on women) who are competing with them for the diminishing pie, rather than the bosses that feed them the propaganda. They use appeals to values too, the religious right values, which have a larger appeal to less-educated voters. Trump has added various kinds of resentment against feriners, especially the trade issue on which he has a solid argument. But ironically, the crony capitalist Mr. Trump is using it to further advance libertarian economics in all other respects. And since his voters are more easily convinced by emotion and sloganeering, he can talk a game of "change" when he actually represents more of the same thing that has kept the middle class and poor down for 35 years: libertarian economics.
Earlier populists like Bryan and FDR and LBJ were able to convince many poor and middle class, less-educated whites to support them, because these leaders really had the country's and the peoples' interests at heart, and the labor movements had prepared the way for decades. But today's populists are deceivers, paid for by the cronies and greedy libertarian capitalists who have fought back for 40 years against the movements for real change that began in the 1960s. They have used their superior education over folks like WJ Bryan or Father Caughlin and so on to scheme and plot their way to deceive the people, and they have new weapons given to them by the 60s movements-- resentment against the new welfare programs that provide opportunities for non-whites to compete with the poorer whites, and resentment over the challenges to their traditional values like national military greatness and traditional religion and traditional lifestyles and cultures.