Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Douthat, Ross, and Reihan Salam. 2008. "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream." New York: Doubleday.
6 - Frank's central agrument, in particular, is appealing but flat wrong: The poorest Americans haven't turned right over recent decades, under the influence of "hallucinatory" culture war issues. Instead, they've turned left, voting for Democrats more reliably than even in the heyday of the Great Society. But this turn hasn't delivered liberals a majority, because most working-class voters aren't poor. They're relatively prosperous, in spote of left-wing claims about their supposed immiseration.
The problem for Frank and like-minded liberals is that they imagine the working class as it was sixty years ago--a mix of Joad-like farmers and unionized industrial workers, bound together by their antagonistic relationship to big business and dependent on redistributionist policies for their economic security. In reality, if you're a Sam's Club voter today, you're far more likely to be working in education or health care, office administration or business services than on a farm or an assembly line. You're more likely to belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year than one that makes $30,000. You probably own an array of electronics that would have dazzled your parents and grandparents; [. . .] and thanks to Wal-Mart and all its big-box peers, you spend less of your income on the necessities of life than any generation before you. (It's worth noting, too, that just about all of these advances can be attributed to the very same "job-killing trade agreements" so often described as the natural enemy of lower-income Americans.)
None of this means that the working class no longer exists, or that class politics no longer resonate. But it means that the
7- working class of today is defined less by income or wealth than by education--by the lack of a college degree and the cultural capital associated with it. a diploma isn't a prerequisite for individual success: Many men and women in the Sam's club demographic become quite comfortable, even rich, without graduating from college. But these individuals are the exception, and the larger non-college-educated demographic is enduring a slow-burning crisis, just as Frank argues [. . .] But it's not a crisis created by wicked plutocrats and their Republican enablers, and it's unlikely to be solved by stronger unions, more food stamps, a war on Wal-Mart, or the nationalization of a major industry or two. It's a crisis of insecurity and immobility, not poverty, and it's a crisis that has as much to do with culture as with economics.
The economic trends are important, certainly. Globalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and health-care security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration--all of these developments of the last trhee decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they're materially better off than ever before. And there's no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP's emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.
But the "social issues," from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, aren't just red herrings distracting the working classs from the economic struggles, as liberal have insisted for the better part of forty years. Rather, they're at the root of working-class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic
8 - institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy, and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation, and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain--which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vi9cious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass.
Sam's Club voters have been wobbling on the edge of this abyss ever since the social revolution of the sixties, whichwas a liberation for those equipped to deal with its freedoms but a slow-motion disaster for those Americans who lacked the resources and social capital to rebound from illegitimacy, broken homes and failed marriages. Over the last thirty years, familial stability has gone from being a near-universal feature of American life to a privlege reserved for the mass upper class, whose wealth and education protect them from the disruptions that create divorce and single parenthood, and who have the social capital to pass these advantages on to the next generation. The result has been a persistently stratified America, in which working-class voters lack both personal and professional stability--and lack, as well, a way to rise in a country where success is increasingly tied to education, and education is tied to stable families, and both are out of reach.
[. . .]
9 - [. . .] Given these perils, where are Sam's Club voters to turn? The populist Left is responsive to their economic difficulties but allergic to moralism in public policy, and deeply resistant to any cultural critique of post-sixties America. Worse, its immediate wish list of economic "solutions" [. . .] often seem designed to take money out of the average Sam's Club voter. The moderate middle, meanwhile, is defined by its support for the status quo--free trade and cultural progressivism, secularism or a liberral religiousity, fiscal responsibility and continued large-scale immigration. These are the politics, allowing for certain variations, of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, the mass media and the business class. They aren't the worst set of ideas to dominate American politics, but they're inadequate to the challenges facing working-class America and the country as a whole.
[. . .]
11 - [. . .]conservatives have become confused about the legacy of the greatest conservative president of the modern era, Ronald Wilson Reagan. To hear today's conservatives tell it, Reagan was a man of unbending libertarian purity, whose domestic policy consisted of heroic tax cutting and little else. Cut taxes the Gipper surely did, but he was fare more flexible and innovative in his pursuit of reform than his admirers [. . .] would have you believe. Reagan was a president who cut income taxes dramatically but also closed corporate loopholes and raised taxes on gasoline; who slashed welfare spending but also midwifed the working poor-friendly Earned Income Tax Credit into being; who proposed reforming Social Security but also floated a plan for catastrophic health-care coverage; who attacked big government
12 - but also insisted, in his first inaugural, that his mission was not "to do away with government" but "to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back."
19 - The contrast with how Europe's governments treated the working class during the same period [ 18th and 19th centuries, as compared the U.S.-JH] is instructive. Both continents extended the franchise, but Europe's nations did so out of fear: As British prime minister Earl Grey put it with admirable
20 - honesty in 1831, "The Principle of my reform is to proevent the necessity of revolution"--the nonmetaphorical kind of revolution in which elites get their heads chopped off. America, on the other hand, did so out of hope--the hope of attracting settlers, as states competed to offer the most expansive definition of political freedom, the better to lure enterprising pioneers. Similarly, Bismarck's Germany adopted the most ambitious program of social insurance in the world, the better to keep the factories running smoothly, but German elites were far less inclined to expand access to education. The goal was to create a docile working class, not an educated and ambitious one. America, in contrast, expanded schooling fist and adopted social insurance programs only in the twentieth century. In each case, America's leaders wanted self-sufficiency and independence; Europe's wanted conformity and obedience.
62 - [. . .] In theory, at least, the Democrats have had as many chances as the Republicans to ride anti-elitism to a political majority by attacking those aspects of the elite consesnus--free trade, deregulation, privatization--that dovetailed with the GOP's positions and often cost working-class voters their jobs. The emerging mass upper class included plenty of juicy Republican targets for blue-collar ire: Ken Lay was part of the new transnational elite; so was Michael Milken. As David Brooks pointed out, the political divide of 2006 pitted a "ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush" against a "vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi," in a "clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas." In this landscape, poulism could easily cut both ways.
But in practice, the overclass's public face--academics and actors, journalists and bureaucrats, scientists and filmmakers and social workers--was liberal and Democratic, and try as it might, liberalism couldn't escape its identification with the elitist side of an increasingly polarized culture.
133 - The most important thing to understand about today's stratification--economic, social, and cultural-- is that it starts at home, where working-class Americans are far less lilely than their better-educated peers to enjoy the benefits that flow from stable families. In the fifties as we have seen, mariage rates, divorce rates, and illegitimacy varied only a little by class and education. In the sevenites, that began to change imperceptibly at first, and then dramatically. The divorce rate exploded across all classes in the late 1960s, but among the college educated it leveled off quickly and then began to drop.
134 - [. . .]
As with divorce, so with illegitimacy [. . .]In the early 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5 percent among the best-educated third of the population and just 7 percent among the least-educated third. Over the next forty years, the illegitimacy rate would triple for the least-educated third,w hile barely budging among the best-educated segment of the population.
135 - [. . .]
Where do these tendencies come from? In her invaluable book on the stratification of family life, Marriage and Caste in America, Kay Hymowitz points out the paradox of the Sexual Revolution--namely, that the very women who have benefited the most from their newfound freedoms, the well-off and well educated, are also the most likely to embrace the kind of bourgeois lifestyle that predominated before the birth control poll changed the world forever. It's not exactly the same, of course; they're more likely to have sex and cohabit before marriage than their mothers were, more likely to delay childbearing into their thirties, and more likely to stop at one or two children rather than pushing on to three or four. But at a fundamental level, they're accepting a conservative understanding of what marriage is and ought to be--a lifelong commitment that predates childbearing and exists in large part for the benefit of the children.
They do so, Hymowitz argues, out of the abiding practicality that has defined upper-middle-class life in America ever since the sixties ran out of steam. "Educated middle-class mothers," she writes, "tend to be dedicated to the Mission--the careful
136 - nurturing of their children's cognitive, emotional, and social development, which, if all goes according to plan, will lead to the honor rool and a spot on the debate team, which will in turn lead to a good college, then ... eventually to a fulfilling career, a big house in a posh suburb, and a sense of meaningful accomplishment." Ideologically, they may believe that marriage should be optional, just one lifestyle choice among many; they accept adultery in their politicians and unwed motherhood from their movie stars; and they have no interest in anything so harsh as bringing back the stigma that used to apply to illegitimacy, divorce, and cohabitation. But "like high-status women since status began, they are preparing their offspring to carry on their way of life," and an old-fashioned marriage offers as good a guarantee of stability and prosperity as you're likely to get.
Working-class women, on the other hand, may actually be more idealistic about marriage, in a sense. But this means that they tend to either rush into impulsive unions that don't end well or place marriage on a pedestal, often putting it off till after they've had children with a man they love but may not quite trust to provide for them permanently. (In a more skill-based economy [. . .] the typical working-class man isn't as good a catcdh as he was in the age of lifetime employment.) As Kathryn Edin and Andrew Cherlin have argued, these women often regard marriage as the capstone, rather than the foundation, of family life. And this, in turn, creates a sexual climate in which nobody--not women, not men, not grandparents, and not even children--quite understands what their obligations are, in which a pervasive mistrust clouds every relationship. Women feel used for sexd by men who don't want to get married; men feel used for money, "valued only for their not-so-deep pockets," as Hymowitz puts it.
All of this instability is intimately linked to both emotional and economic stress.
140 - [. . .] Liberal pundits get a great deal of mileage out of the fact that the so-called Red states, in spite of their piety and social conservatism, have higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births than their Blue counterparts. But this isn't evidence of Red American hypocrisy, or stupidity; rather, it's evidence that lower-income Americans (Red states are generally poorer than Blue states) have been adversely affected by the dislocations and disarray that followed the Sexual Revolution, and have responded by embracing a conservative politics that promises to shore up the institutions that provide stability and support--their families, their churches, and their neighborhoods.
6 - Frank's central agrument, in particular, is appealing but flat wrong: The poorest Americans haven't turned right over recent decades, under the influence of "hallucinatory" culture war issues. Instead, they've turned left, voting for Democrats more reliably than even in the heyday of the Great Society. But this turn hasn't delivered liberals a majority, because most working-class voters aren't poor. They're relatively prosperous, in spote of left-wing claims about their supposed immiseration.
The problem for Frank and like-minded liberals is that they imagine the working class as it was sixty years ago--a mix of Joad-like farmers and unionized industrial workers, bound together by their antagonistic relationship to big business and dependent on redistributionist policies for their economic security. In reality, if you're a Sam's Club voter today, you're far more likely to be working in education or health care, office administration or business services than on a farm or an assembly line. You're more likely to belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year than one that makes $30,000. You probably own an array of electronics that would have dazzled your parents and grandparents; [. . .] and thanks to Wal-Mart and all its big-box peers, you spend less of your income on the necessities of life than any generation before you. (It's worth noting, too, that just about all of these advances can be attributed to the very same "job-killing trade agreements" so often described as the natural enemy of lower-income Americans.)
None of this means that the working class no longer exists, or that class politics no longer resonate. But it means that the
7- working class of today is defined less by income or wealth than by education--by the lack of a college degree and the cultural capital associated with it. a diploma isn't a prerequisite for individual success: Many men and women in the Sam's club demographic become quite comfortable, even rich, without graduating from college. But these individuals are the exception, and the larger non-college-educated demographic is enduring a slow-burning crisis, just as Frank argues [. . .] But it's not a crisis created by wicked plutocrats and their Republican enablers, and it's unlikely to be solved by stronger unions, more food stamps, a war on Wal-Mart, or the nationalization of a major industry or two. It's a crisis of insecurity and immobility, not poverty, and it's a crisis that has as much to do with culture as with economics.
The economic trends are important, certainly. Globalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy, growing outsourcing and the demise of lifetime employment, the expansion of credit card debt, the decline of retirement and health-care security, the pressure from below created by unprecedented illegal immigration--all of these developments of the last trhee decades have made American workers feel more insecure, even though they're materially better off than ever before. And there's no question that the Republican Party has failed to adequately address these concerns, or that the GOP's emphasis on economic growth over economic security has made working-class life more unstable than it otherwise would have been.
But the "social issues," from abortion and marriage law to the death penalty and immigration, aren't just red herrings distracting the working classs from the economic struggles, as liberal have insisted for the better part of forty years. Rather, they're at the root of working-class insecurity. Safe streets, successful marriages, cultural solidarity, and vibrant religious and civic
8 - institutions make working-class Americans more likely to be wealthy, healthy, and upwardly mobile. Public disorder, family disintegration, cultural fragmentation, and civic and religious disaffection, on the other hand, breed downward mobility and financial strain--which in turn breeds further social dislocation, in a vi9cious cycle that threatens to transform a working class into an underclass.
Sam's Club voters have been wobbling on the edge of this abyss ever since the social revolution of the sixties, whichwas a liberation for those equipped to deal with its freedoms but a slow-motion disaster for those Americans who lacked the resources and social capital to rebound from illegitimacy, broken homes and failed marriages. Over the last thirty years, familial stability has gone from being a near-universal feature of American life to a privlege reserved for the mass upper class, whose wealth and education protect them from the disruptions that create divorce and single parenthood, and who have the social capital to pass these advantages on to the next generation. The result has been a persistently stratified America, in which working-class voters lack both personal and professional stability--and lack, as well, a way to rise in a country where success is increasingly tied to education, and education is tied to stable families, and both are out of reach.
[. . .]
9 - [. . .] Given these perils, where are Sam's Club voters to turn? The populist Left is responsive to their economic difficulties but allergic to moralism in public policy, and deeply resistant to any cultural critique of post-sixties America. Worse, its immediate wish list of economic "solutions" [. . .] often seem designed to take money out of the average Sam's Club voter. The moderate middle, meanwhile, is defined by its support for the status quo--free trade and cultural progressivism, secularism or a liberral religiousity, fiscal responsibility and continued large-scale immigration. These are the politics, allowing for certain variations, of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, the mass media and the business class. They aren't the worst set of ideas to dominate American politics, but they're inadequate to the challenges facing working-class America and the country as a whole.
[. . .]
11 - [. . .]conservatives have become confused about the legacy of the greatest conservative president of the modern era, Ronald Wilson Reagan. To hear today's conservatives tell it, Reagan was a man of unbending libertarian purity, whose domestic policy consisted of heroic tax cutting and little else. Cut taxes the Gipper surely did, but he was fare more flexible and innovative in his pursuit of reform than his admirers [. . .] would have you believe. Reagan was a president who cut income taxes dramatically but also closed corporate loopholes and raised taxes on gasoline; who slashed welfare spending but also midwifed the working poor-friendly Earned Income Tax Credit into being; who proposed reforming Social Security but also floated a plan for catastrophic health-care coverage; who attacked big government
12 - but also insisted, in his first inaugural, that his mission was not "to do away with government" but "to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back."
19 - The contrast with how Europe's governments treated the working class during the same period [ 18th and 19th centuries, as compared the U.S.-JH] is instructive. Both continents extended the franchise, but Europe's nations did so out of fear: As British prime minister Earl Grey put it with admirable
20 - honesty in 1831, "The Principle of my reform is to proevent the necessity of revolution"--the nonmetaphorical kind of revolution in which elites get their heads chopped off. America, on the other hand, did so out of hope--the hope of attracting settlers, as states competed to offer the most expansive definition of political freedom, the better to lure enterprising pioneers. Similarly, Bismarck's Germany adopted the most ambitious program of social insurance in the world, the better to keep the factories running smoothly, but German elites were far less inclined to expand access to education. The goal was to create a docile working class, not an educated and ambitious one. America, in contrast, expanded schooling fist and adopted social insurance programs only in the twentieth century. In each case, America's leaders wanted self-sufficiency and independence; Europe's wanted conformity and obedience.
62 - [. . .] In theory, at least, the Democrats have had as many chances as the Republicans to ride anti-elitism to a political majority by attacking those aspects of the elite consesnus--free trade, deregulation, privatization--that dovetailed with the GOP's positions and often cost working-class voters their jobs. The emerging mass upper class included plenty of juicy Republican targets for blue-collar ire: Ken Lay was part of the new transnational elite; so was Michael Milken. As David Brooks pointed out, the political divide of 2006 pitted a "ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush" against a "vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi," in a "clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas." In this landscape, poulism could easily cut both ways.
But in practice, the overclass's public face--academics and actors, journalists and bureaucrats, scientists and filmmakers and social workers--was liberal and Democratic, and try as it might, liberalism couldn't escape its identification with the elitist side of an increasingly polarized culture.
133 - The most important thing to understand about today's stratification--economic, social, and cultural-- is that it starts at home, where working-class Americans are far less lilely than their better-educated peers to enjoy the benefits that flow from stable families. In the fifties as we have seen, mariage rates, divorce rates, and illegitimacy varied only a little by class and education. In the sevenites, that began to change imperceptibly at first, and then dramatically. The divorce rate exploded across all classes in the late 1960s, but among the college educated it leveled off quickly and then began to drop.
134 - [. . .]
As with divorce, so with illegitimacy [. . .]In the early 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5 percent among the best-educated third of the population and just 7 percent among the least-educated third. Over the next forty years, the illegitimacy rate would triple for the least-educated third,w hile barely budging among the best-educated segment of the population.
135 - [. . .]
Where do these tendencies come from? In her invaluable book on the stratification of family life, Marriage and Caste in America, Kay Hymowitz points out the paradox of the Sexual Revolution--namely, that the very women who have benefited the most from their newfound freedoms, the well-off and well educated, are also the most likely to embrace the kind of bourgeois lifestyle that predominated before the birth control poll changed the world forever. It's not exactly the same, of course; they're more likely to have sex and cohabit before marriage than their mothers were, more likely to delay childbearing into their thirties, and more likely to stop at one or two children rather than pushing on to three or four. But at a fundamental level, they're accepting a conservative understanding of what marriage is and ought to be--a lifelong commitment that predates childbearing and exists in large part for the benefit of the children.
They do so, Hymowitz argues, out of the abiding practicality that has defined upper-middle-class life in America ever since the sixties ran out of steam. "Educated middle-class mothers," she writes, "tend to be dedicated to the Mission--the careful
136 - nurturing of their children's cognitive, emotional, and social development, which, if all goes according to plan, will lead to the honor rool and a spot on the debate team, which will in turn lead to a good college, then ... eventually to a fulfilling career, a big house in a posh suburb, and a sense of meaningful accomplishment." Ideologically, they may believe that marriage should be optional, just one lifestyle choice among many; they accept adultery in their politicians and unwed motherhood from their movie stars; and they have no interest in anything so harsh as bringing back the stigma that used to apply to illegitimacy, divorce, and cohabitation. But "like high-status women since status began, they are preparing their offspring to carry on their way of life," and an old-fashioned marriage offers as good a guarantee of stability and prosperity as you're likely to get.
Working-class women, on the other hand, may actually be more idealistic about marriage, in a sense. But this means that they tend to either rush into impulsive unions that don't end well or place marriage on a pedestal, often putting it off till after they've had children with a man they love but may not quite trust to provide for them permanently. (In a more skill-based economy [. . .] the typical working-class man isn't as good a catcdh as he was in the age of lifetime employment.) As Kathryn Edin and Andrew Cherlin have argued, these women often regard marriage as the capstone, rather than the foundation, of family life. And this, in turn, creates a sexual climate in which nobody--not women, not men, not grandparents, and not even children--quite understands what their obligations are, in which a pervasive mistrust clouds every relationship. Women feel used for sexd by men who don't want to get married; men feel used for money, "valued only for their not-so-deep pockets," as Hymowitz puts it.
All of this instability is intimately linked to both emotional and economic stress.
140 - [. . .] Liberal pundits get a great deal of mileage out of the fact that the so-called Red states, in spite of their piety and social conservatism, have higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and out-of-wedlock births than their Blue counterparts. But this isn't evidence of Red American hypocrisy, or stupidity; rather, it's evidence that lower-income Americans (Red states are generally poorer than Blue states) have been adversely affected by the dislocations and disarray that followed the Sexual Revolution, and have responded by embracing a conservative politics that promises to shore up the institutions that provide stability and support--their families, their churches, and their neighborhoods.
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