Class in America
Sep. 3rd, 2005 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinBellatrys makes a long, rambling post that is about a hundred times as furious as anything I could ever imagine. The evil, pernicious myth that the American poor are fine because they have color TVs takes a beating. (I didn't even mention the people who can't afford the TVs, but she does.) In her anger, she lumps a lot of people together and excoriates many who are trying to do good; but I think there's considerable wisdom in there, even though I'm squarely in the population she spends most of her time excoriating.
Among other things, she explains why it irritates me when people joke about seceding from the dumb crackers in Jesusland. The American South, white and black, is poor; it's a Third World country, as are other parts of the US. I lived in the absolute richest part of the boundary of the South for a while, and you could see the poverty there. There's a reactionary rich elite, especially in the cities, but, guess what, you see that in poor countries too.
The patriarchal, hierarchical values that liberals like me complain about are characteristic of poor countries the world over. We have so much cultural reaction in the US because we don't have a social safety net worth speaking of. (Western Europeans and Canadians have an especially hard time understanding this because not having a real social safety net is so far beyond their experience.)
American political alignments cut across class boundaries in what seems like an illogical fashion. Put crudely, the "left" favors the economic interests of the poor and the cultural interests of the rich, and the "right" favors the cultural interests of the poor and the economic interests of the rich. It causes intraparty tensions, like Bellatrys's resentment of rich Clintonite cultural liberals who skew to the economic center (the Democrats have more trouble with this sort of thing lately than the Republicans, but I think that's a historical contingency that might be changing real soon now).
Sometimes people chalk the situation up to deliberate conspiracy, e.g. all those "what's the matter with Kansas?" laments about how rich Republicans hoodwink the Jesusland hicks into voting for them1, or their mirror-image analyses of why American blacks get suckered into voting for liberals who don't agree with them about God and gays. But you see something like the same left-right continuum today in every advanced, approximately democratic country, though the limits of the spectrum and the number and position of party divisions vary according to economic and structural differences. But it wasn't the same in America in the 19th or early 20th century; William Jennings Bryan, say, was a culturally conservative populist who was something like an economic leftist, and he was a major-party presidential candidate.
I think it's a combination of increasingly democratic governance combined with the tremendous amount of money you need to run a modern campaign in the age of TV. It means that a party can't be truly class-based; it needs both many votes and lots of money, so it has to cut across class divisions. Cultural and economic issues are separate enough that you can put the split between them, so the political main sequence runs mostly perpendicular to class divisions on a Nolan-esque two-axis chart. And the rich-people and poor-people divisions of each party are always going to be pulling in somewhat different directions.
And when the very poorest are a small enough fraction of the population, or not sufficiently able or motivated to vote, that all parties can ignore them, then they're in even bigger trouble.
1 Matthew Yglesias claims Kansas isn't all that poor, but it's not rich, and, regardless, the South is poor.
Among other things, she explains why it irritates me when people joke about seceding from the dumb crackers in Jesusland. The American South, white and black, is poor; it's a Third World country, as are other parts of the US. I lived in the absolute richest part of the boundary of the South for a while, and you could see the poverty there. There's a reactionary rich elite, especially in the cities, but, guess what, you see that in poor countries too.
The patriarchal, hierarchical values that liberals like me complain about are characteristic of poor countries the world over. We have so much cultural reaction in the US because we don't have a social safety net worth speaking of. (Western Europeans and Canadians have an especially hard time understanding this because not having a real social safety net is so far beyond their experience.)
American political alignments cut across class boundaries in what seems like an illogical fashion. Put crudely, the "left" favors the economic interests of the poor and the cultural interests of the rich, and the "right" favors the cultural interests of the poor and the economic interests of the rich. It causes intraparty tensions, like Bellatrys's resentment of rich Clintonite cultural liberals who skew to the economic center (the Democrats have more trouble with this sort of thing lately than the Republicans, but I think that's a historical contingency that might be changing real soon now).
Sometimes people chalk the situation up to deliberate conspiracy, e.g. all those "what's the matter with Kansas?" laments about how rich Republicans hoodwink the Jesusland hicks into voting for them1, or their mirror-image analyses of why American blacks get suckered into voting for liberals who don't agree with them about God and gays. But you see something like the same left-right continuum today in every advanced, approximately democratic country, though the limits of the spectrum and the number and position of party divisions vary according to economic and structural differences. But it wasn't the same in America in the 19th or early 20th century; William Jennings Bryan, say, was a culturally conservative populist who was something like an economic leftist, and he was a major-party presidential candidate.
I think it's a combination of increasingly democratic governance combined with the tremendous amount of money you need to run a modern campaign in the age of TV. It means that a party can't be truly class-based; it needs both many votes and lots of money, so it has to cut across class divisions. Cultural and economic issues are separate enough that you can put the split between them, so the political main sequence runs mostly perpendicular to class divisions on a Nolan-esque two-axis chart. And the rich-people and poor-people divisions of each party are always going to be pulling in somewhat different directions.
And when the very poorest are a small enough fraction of the population, or not sufficiently able or motivated to vote, that all parties can ignore them, then they're in even bigger trouble.
1 Matthew Yglesias claims Kansas isn't all that poor, but it's not rich, and, regardless, the South is poor.