White working class
John Quiggin writes at Crooked Timber on a not new discussion on what constitutes “white working class” or “whiteworkingclass” used in media descriptions. In comments there are several who tackle the question well….Bruce Wilder for one. I am not sure there is a clear answer without considering geographical issues and histories, rural/city/suburb issues, and such, but has implications for who we notice as important.
All became clear(or, at least, clearer) when I discovered that US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”. The first is the more or less standard one – people who depend on wage labor (normally in manual or low-status service occupations) for their income. The second, specific to the US, and standard in most political polling, is “people without a 4-year college degree”, a class which includes such horny-handed sons and daughters of toil as Bill Gates and Paris Hilton. More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners, and (since college graduation rates were rising until relative recently), over-represents the old.
Data on US voting patterns is surprisingly scarce, but Andrew Gelman has a big data set confirming the point that Republican voting rises with income…
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As the pie chart below illustrates, the biggest group in the Republican voting base, and the group with which they do best is that of middle/high income whites without college degrees (the percentage after the group name gives the Republican share of the vote for that group). There’s nothing surprising in this, since all three variables are correlated with Republican voting. It’s the practice of calling this group “working class” that causes the confusion.
About the only people I can think of who might be able to earn high-income compensation without a college degree on a regular basis (unlike oddities like Bill Gates) are folks who work in the trades, like plumbers, electricians or skilled carpenters. The odd thing about folks in those professions is that they are members of guilds (like doctors and lawyers for that matter), which control the market for their members. Why anyone who is effectively a union member would support a Republican continues to mystify, except that such guilds enable their memberships to establish monopoly markets, which Republicans understand implicitly.
Vic
i think owners of successful small businesses are not necessarily college graduates and they tend to see their interests as Republican “low taxes” and “less regulation.” I think they are wrong, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal.
As for actual workers… i don’t think you need the trade restriction to understand them… they are essentially small business people themselves, and to the extent they are successful… they don’t like taxes.
even i, yes i, a liberal of high degree… don’t like taxes and “excessive” or arrogant regulation. i guess i don’t support the R’s because as a party they have gone insane. the D’s look like they are headed that way. It may only be an accident of history that the D’s are lying about things that are true… that is, we need government and even welfare, but the politicians don’t care about that, they just know that saying so gets them votes from the people who were brought up to believe it.