By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, April
19, 2022
“Democrats are the party of working
people.” So states Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) in a “guest essay” — it
isn’t an essay at all; it is ordinary campaign literature — in the New
York Times. Senator Warren could have used some editing. The first thing
her New York Times editors should have asked:
Is that true?
Let’s think about that phrase, “working
people.” You would think that “working people” would mean “people who work,”
but that is not what Senator Warren wants it to mean. Hedge-fund managers are
working people — it is fashionable to sneer at people working in finance, but
if you think that it isn’t work, try doing it. You think they’re giving all
that money away? Doctors are working people. Lawyers are working people. College
professors and novelists and movie producers are all working people, too. Even
some journalists are working people, though not very many of them.
So, if “working people” does not mean
“people who work,” what might it mean?
Maybe it is supposed to mean blue-collar
workers, the industrial and manufacturing workers who make up what at least a
few of Senator Warren’s colleagues at Harvard still refer to as the
“proletariat.” It certainly is the case that the Democratic Party once was the
party of factory workers and farmers — that’s why the party in Minnesota is
still known as the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. The word “union” used to have
a distinctly lower-middle-income taste to it, but it doesn’t really anymore.
Most unionized workers in the United States today are government employees,
with incomes that range from the upper-middle to the high. These union workers
are public-school teachers making $125,000 a year in the suburbs of Pittsburgh
— the Molly Maguires, they ain’t.
Setting aside the unionized public-sector
professionals and clerical workers, what about the old-school union workers,
the men and women who put stuff together in factories and steel mills and
whatnot? A great many of them vote for Democrats, but a great many don’t.
And don’t is on the rise as ordinary workers act on the most
obvious of all political facts: that the interests of the union bosses, who
have been entirely captured by the Democratic Party, are not precisely the same
as the interests of the union workers themselves.
“Rank-and-file
union members snub Biden for Trump,” read the 2020 Politico headline. Our friends over
at FiveThirtyEight aren’t exactly what you’d call raging
Trumpists, but Nate Silver
observed about the 2016 election:
The shift
among union voters was enough to swing the election to Trump. According to the
CCES, Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did
so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of
1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and
1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership —
and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.
Robert Reich doesn’t think the Democrats
represent these “working people,” either, writing in 2016:
The
Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three
decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers,
bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign
money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper
middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.
Those suburban swing voters are the real
game here, but let’s put them off for the moment and take a minute to observe
that in 2016, the left-wing populist Reich and the socialist Bernie Sanders
both sounded pretty Trumpish on Trump’s key issues: trade and immigration.
Reich again:
Democrats
have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of
those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they
failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security.
Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements
without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs
means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
. . . Now
Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America
against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure
understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic growth. But
most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years they have
received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms
of lost jobs and lower wages.
In 2016, before his handlers yanked on his
leash, Senator Sanders was nearly indistinguishable from Trump on the subject
of “open borders.”
There is one reason that unionized
industrial workers might have migrated toward the Republicans, joining the
purported “party of the rich” — they’re rich. Mitt Romney once did the nation a
great service (and did his presidential campaign a great disservice) by
pointing out that one important dividing line in American politics is the one
separating the people who pay federal income taxes from the people who don’t.
About half the country — the higher-earning half — pays some federal income
tax, and about half the country — the lower-earning half — has no federal
income-tax liability at all or has a negative liability thanks
to the Earned Income-Tax Credit. (It is not the case that
lower-income Americans pay no taxes — it is the case that they pay no federal income
tax, which is probably more important politically than it is economically,
which was, of course, Romney’s point.) Those factory workers don’t make Mitt
Romney money, but a lot of them make bass-boat money; a great many of them are
on the right side of the income curve, which is the income-tax-paying side.
That is true for both union and non-union
workers. Toyota, for instance, estimates that its U.S. non-union production
workers make about 58 percent more than the average U.S. salary. GM workers
represented by the UAW make about the same wage as their non-union Toyota
counterparts, averaging around $30 an hour. (GM has far higher labor costs,
driven by splendid health-care benefits and an expensive pension system.)
Highly skilled union workers (for example, those working in nuclear-power
plants) can earn decently into six figures. A union manufacturing worker
married to another union manufacturing worker won’t have a household income in
the top 1 percent but very well may be in the top 10 percent.
So, then, might “working people” mean
“people with modest incomes”? Maybe, but the reality is more complex even when
construed according to that simplistic criterion.
We like to think of things in linear
terms: the richer you are, the more education you have, etc. In reality, things
are not linear but lumpy. A lot of very poor people are Democrats. So are a lot
of very rich people. For instance, Wall Street bigs are mostly Democrats — you
think a guy with a master’s degree and an $800,000-a-year job in Manhattan, a
manicure, and a big tuition bill to pay at Greenwich Country Day is going to
hitch his wagon to the daft star of Marjorie Taylor Greene? That isn’t real
life. Of course, no sensible person expects Elizabeth Warren to understand such
complexities, because no sensible person expects Elizabeth Warren to understand
anything more complicated than misrepresenting her ethnicity for professional
purposes.
(“Faculty of color,” Harvard called her.
Technically true — see: PANTONE 11-0602 TCX.)
If you look at the data compiled by Pew,
you’ll see that while the average Republican voter has a higher income than the
average Democratic voter (as of 2018), the biggest difference is not at the
happy tippy-top but at the miserable bottom. Republicans enjoy a six-point advantage
when it comes to workers earning more than $100,000 a year. By way of
comparison, Democrats enjoy a 16-point advantage among voters earning less than
$25,000 a year. Put another way, the share of Democratic voters earning less
than $25,000 a year is more than twice the share of Republican
voters in that income group.
Where the Democrats have one great
advantage is not among working people but among non-working
people, or people with only marginal and desultory employment. Receiving or
having received food stamps or
other poverty-related benefits correlates pretty strongly with voting
Democratic. People who receive benefits under three or
more government programs tend to vote Democratic and tend to fall
disproportionately into demographic groups that vote Democratic — African
Americans and unmarried women.
Work really is an enormously important
variable. High-income households overwhelmingly have two full-time workers in
them, while the lowest-income households have on average fewer than one
full-time worker in them. Poverty in the United States is much less a
working-class problem than a non-working-class problem. The mere
fact that many poor people are not working does not necessarily mean that we
should be skeptical toward providing them with assistance — some of them cannot
work, and in some cases it is better that they do not work — but it should
influence how we think about the design and structure of welfare programs and
what our long-term economic expectations about them are going to be.
The Democrats are big with the very poor
and big with college-educated government workers — i.e., the party of people
who are enrolled in welfare programs and the people who
administer them.
Things get complicated at the top, too,
because it matters how you draw the lines. The $100,000-and-up club comprises
the highest-earning 31 percent or so of U.S. households, and they lean
Republican. But the very wealthy are less predictably Republican. For example,
Americans earning more than $220,000 a year (the wealthiest 4 percent) in 2012
supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, part of a continuing trend of the very
wealthy leaning Democrat. Vox isn’t exactly stuffed with Trumpists, either, but
here is the headline: “Democrats are
replacing Republicans as the preferred party of the very wealthy.” Why that is the case is pretty straightforward: It is not that a
bunch of rich Republicans suddenly decided to become Democrats — it is that who
gets to be rich has changed dramatically in the past couple of decades, with
the rich-guy demographic window shifting in the Democrats’ advantage. Being
rich is less correlated with being white and male than it once was, and much
more correlated with being highly educated and living in a coastal metro. Urban
college graduates vote for Democrats — which is why the first thing Elizabeth
Warren wants to offer “working people” is college-loan forgiveness — a policy
that not only disproportionately but overwhelmingly benefits
higher-income Americans. Covid-era loan forbearance already has provided
something on the order of $200 billion in benefits to college borrowers, most
of them higher-income.
Where you live matters a great deal, too.
It will surprise exactly no one to learn that the majority of voters earning
more than $100,000 a year very much prefer Democrats to Republicans in California,
Maryland, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, while the $100,000+ voters are more R
than D in Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are the party of working
people,” Senator Warren claims. That statement is, in the most charitable
reading, so imprecise as to be useless. Better to have written: “The Democrats
are the party of relatively high-income college graduates, especially the ones
living in relatively high-income communities, which is why we are leading with
student-loan forgiveness rather than something that blue-collar factory workers
care about.”
But that doesn’t have quite the same punch
in the New York Times, does it?
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