AMERICAN DEMOCRATS FROM THE “NEW DEAL” TO THE PRESENT & BEYOND

The Symbol of the Democrats

 

Today’s societal problem is that of finding work that adequately supports Americans and their families.

 

Have the Democrats forgotten about the average working Americans that built the American middle class and that did not have a college degree?

 

From the New Deal through the 1980s it was widely recognized that white working-class voters were the key to American politics. Typical members of the New Deal coalition, for example, were ethnic white workers, commonly envisioned as working in unionized factories, but also including those who weren't in unions or who worked in other blue-collar settings such as construction, transportation, etc.

These voters provided the numbers for FDR's four election victories and Harry Truman's narrow victory in 1948, and they offered political support for the emerging American welfare state, with its social contract and greatly expanded role for government.

 

In the 1950s, the same white working class provided the victory for the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in two elections. At the same time, it continued to support the expansion of the welfare state, as a roaring US economy continued to deliver the goods and the government continued to pour money into roads, science, schools, and whatever else seemed necessary to build up the country.

 

This era, stretching back to the late 1940s and forward to the mid-1960s, was the era that created the “first mass middle class in the world”.  It was a middle class that even factory workers could enter, since they could earn a comfortable living even without high levels of education or professional skills.

 

We may indeed have a "new" economy for most participants, and we have the highest rate of labor-force participation in the world. But an old problem has persisted.  That of finding work that adequately supports people and their families.

 

More than those workers in other developed countries, workers in America depend on their pay and job benefits. And for many working Americans the new economy has until very recently been more new than good. Much of the reason for this is the rapid increase in income inequality in our society.

 

How widely the benefits of growth and productivity are shared is a basic measure of economic performance in a democracy.   Widely shared benefits help to generate positive feelings about a society and its government. By these standards the US economy performed superbly for the first three decades after World War II. The rising tide of postwar prosperity really did "lift all boats," as President Kennedy used to say.

 

Indeed, as all the charts of the time indicated, boats at the bottom actually rose a little faster than those at the top.

 

However, since the early 1970s, and especially in the past three decades, the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily. National income and wealth, of course, have continued to grow, but because of this increasing inequality, only the top 10% of families have made significant gains. The bottom 70%, have barely budged, and some have actually lost income.

 

During this period of increasing income inequality, the value of a four-year college degree has dramatically increased. Those with one have continued to move ahead, and those without one have fallen further behind.

 

For example, from 1979 to 2005 the average real hourly wage rose 14% for those with college degrees and 19% for those with advanced degrees.

 

In contrast, overall average wages for both men and women “fell” by 4% for those with only some college, 10% for those with only a high school diploma, and a stunning 24% for high school dropouts.

 

The difference in prospects between those who have college degrees and those who don't, is large enough to warrant its own name.  It’s called the Great Divide. This Great Divide defines the new working class. The new working class is the key to twenty-first-century politics, but neither party has found a way to mobilize it effectively.

On one side of it are the three quarters of adults who lack college degrees; these people have not fared well over the past thirty-five years. On the other side are the one quarter of all adults who have a four-year degree or even more education than that; over the past thirty-five years these people have fared very well indeed.

 

Of course, those mostly ignored, non-college-educated individuals are not like the white working class of yesteryear. They are more likely to be doing low-level white-collar and service work than blue-collar work. They are much more likely to work in an office with a computer or at a similar service-sector job than to work in manufacturing. They are also likely to have more education than the old-style working class, perhaps some college, maybe even a two-year associate's degree. And those in the work force are much more likely to be female. But in economic terms they are not so different from the former white working class of previous generations.

 

These “forgotten majorities” are the real swing voters in American politics. Their loyalties shift the most from election to election and, in so doing, they many times determine the winners in American politics. They are also the majority, about 55% of voters and of the adult population. But they don't receive much attention these days.  They are invisible to the journalists and commentators who define our national discourse. To bring them into focus more sharply, I will offer some basic information about them and it will become clear that the new working class is quite different from the stereotypes from the 1970s and 1980s.

 

In sum, the white working class is shrinking, but does remains numerically dominant, even if its form has changed. Sure, many of its members qualify as wired, in the narrow sense that they work with computers and information technology. Many also qualify as soccer moms, in the narrow sense that they have to juggle job and family, including driving their kids to and from athletic events. And certainly many qualify as suburban independents, in the narrow sense that they live in the suburbs and lack a strong identification with either party. Nonetheless, they are members of a working class whose economic interests and experience are basically the same in terms of culture, class, and history.  They range from those of soccer moms in Bethesda, suburban independents in Miami, and wired cyber-professionals in Silicon Valley.

 

So, rather than emphasize a distinction between “values voting” and “economic voting”. A disjunction between economic experience and values has fundamentally shaped the political behavior of the forgotten majority.

 

The values we all have in mind are deeply held and broadly shared.  That being, opportunity, fair reward for effort, hard work and individual achievement, and social commitment.  Over the past quarter century these values have repeatedly been contradicted or called into question by the tremendous slowdown or actual reversal of direction of that escalator to the middle class.

 

The failure of a grid-locked government to get that escalator moving again, together with its apparent concentration on the problems or rights of minorities, the poor, gays, even criminals has persuaded forgotten-majority voters that government is more a part of a problem than a solution. The direct and long-lasting result of this problem is the current sour and skeptical attitude toward government that has become so common today.  This is why 75% of the country says that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

 

The role of the “forgotten majority” is crucial to understanding the potential of the strategies being pursued by both major parties, particularly in this election cycle as compared to former ones.

 

The ideal strategy of course, is one that recognizes the forgotten-majority voters and seeks to reunite their values with their economic experience.  In other words, a strategy to heal the dis-function that has marked the years since the early 1980s. The political party that does this should be able to command the long-term loyalty of these voters and thus to grasp and keep political dominance.

 

Take union-household voters.  Union workers had been one of the largest supporters of the Democratic Party.  But with the percentage of union workers declining over the past decades, it is unlikely that a dramatically increased union turnout would provide a way of mobilizing the forgotten majority.

 

Can the Democrats move forward without the forgotten majority? They already start with a third of all voters in their base including the combined strength of union-household members, blacks, and Hispanics.

 

But an expansion of the existing Democratic base holds little promise for creating a new Democratic majority. The current Democratic coalition, most emphatically not a majority, is already doing a fair job of turning out these voters. It could always do better, of course, but there are limits to the likely effect.

 

Obviously, the “forgotten majority” is the answer. Forgotten-majority voters, excluding those in unions, make up close to half the electorate (45%).

 

Just as the Republicans made great gains in the 1970s and 1980s by "hunting ducks where the ducks are" among the expanding ranks of disaffected whites, particularly in the South.  So the Democrats have to go after the biggest flock of ducks, i.e. the unorganized, or non-union, ranks of the new working class, regardless of their ethnic background. 

 

In addition, unorganized “forgotten-majority” women make up a quarter to a third of the active electorate and are substantially more supportive of the Democrats.  As examples, in past elections, women of all ethnicities voted from 42% to 48% Democratic for the presidencies since 1996..

 

So, what would it take for the Democrats to actually mobilize, and keep, the “forgotten-majority voters” ? As stated, the core values of the forgotten majority must be reunited with their economic reality. To do that, one must consider promoting the following possibilities:

 

• If a criminal has a right to a lawyer, you have a right to a doctor. This was a great line from a successful Senate campaign of 1991, and it sounds the right note for the forgotten majority. Hardworking, law-abiding citizens should be provided with access to available health care. Not the current “Obamacare”, but a real, “single-payer” option for all Americans.  No Americans should be left out in the cold just because they're unlucky enough to lose their jobs or to work for companies that don't provide affordable health insurance.

 

• People who work hard all their lives should have an adequate income after retirement. It is not fair to punish those who earned too little to save much for their retirement or who worked for employers that didn't provide pensions.

 

• Americans have a right to the best free education their tax dollars can buy. In this rapidly changing economy the children of American workers must have access to quality education.  That includes as the Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said: “From elementary, secondary, to college, and beyond.” The more quality education a person has, the better he or she will do economically.

 

• People willing to work hard should be able to get the training they want for the jobs they need. In the new economy people, frequently have to or want to change jobs. They should not be penalized because they can't get access to training they would be perfectly willing and able to go through.

 

• In today's global economy, everybody has a right to a decent wage and everybody has a right to speak out and organize. American workers shouldn't be competing with workers in other countries whose wages are artificially depressed by the absence of even minimal standards and democratic freedoms. That's not fair to workers abroad or at home.

 

• People who work hard should also be able to spend enough time with their families. Hard work shouldn't destroy family life and parents' relationships with their children. That's not the American Dream. We have to find ways to give workers more time to spend as parents, instead of the other way around.

 

• Parents who work outside the home should have access to affordable, quality child care. Nobody who wants or needs to work in today's society should have to sacrifice the welfare of his or her children to do so.

 

• We should make whatever investments are necessary to fix our infrastructure and to keep the economy growing. Solid economic growth benefits all Americans who are willing to work. It's a good use of tax money to spend whatever is necessary to maintain the nation’s infrastructure and to safeguard this growth.  It also a good way to provide good middle-class jobs.

 

These goals build on the core values of the “forgotten majority”.  Opportunity, fair reward for effort, the rewards of hard work and achievement, and social commitment. And they would give everybody in the “forgotten majority” a fair shot at an upstanding, reasonably prosperous and secure life.

 

In other words, that middle-class life, as it was once understood.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016