Democratic Class War

The Class War is Inside the Democratic Party.

Candidates for President, the Senate, and for Congress need to figure out how to bridge the gap, and it won't be easy.

Election Night exit poll

The class war pits the educated upper middle class Democrats against working class working class Democrats.  Hillary Clinton did not just represent women.  She represented the interests and tastes of upper middle class educated professionals.   Hillary saw herself as the champion of the striving working class but they saw her as their oppressor and that is how they voted.

The Democratic constituency split cost Democrats the White House. Those upper middle class professionals have interests in conflict with working class people, but more important they have different tastes and attitudes.  Working people feel snubbed and condescended to by Democrats.  

Hillary Clinton understood there was a problem, but she could not fix it because she is who she is: upper middle class professional.  I watched Hillary in New Hampshire at the state Democratic Convention in 2015 at the beginning of Primary election season.   She wanted a log cabin story, a story that linked her to the striving and struggling working class.   She borrowed her mother's story and how her mother had to make her way in the world at age 16 cleaning houses.  The mother married well and her father's business worked out nicely so Hillary herself grew up in a prosperous Chicago suburb and went to Wellesley College.    Voters are on the lookout for fakes.  John Kerry fooled no one when he held a shotgun and pretended to hut pheasants.  Hillary cannot help communicating who she is: Wellesley, Yale Law, Rose Law firm, Martha's Vineyard, book deals, wealthy friends, a daughter go to Stanford--a splendid example of the educated professionals who enjoyed their successes and then moved up yet again.

Mistake.

The most reliable predictors of a Hillary voter (except for Afro-American women) are educated, professional, urban, secular voters.   The upper middle class.  They read respectable newspapers like the NY Times and Washington Post.  They listen to public radio and watch public TV.  They have 401k accounts.  They want their kids to go to great schools because they believe the surest route to success for their children is education, especially some professional degree.

Click Here: NY Times article

The interests and policies of the upper middle class professional conflict with working people.   People in the upper middle class pay income taxes: likely 33 to 39 percent federal, up to 11 percent state, FICA, Medicare, Obamacare surcharges.   A couple making $200,000 a year is paying some 47% taxes on every new dollar of income, and it would be higher if the cap on FICA (Social Security) were to be lifted, as is being discussed by Democrats hoping to save Social Security by raising taxes "on the wealthy."  People earning $200,000 a year do not feel wealthy.  Upper middle class life is expensive, with housing and education costs and taxes eating up that income.  Progressive, re-distributive taxation takes from the Democratic constituency to give to a constituency that abandoned Democrats to vote for Trump.  It is a conflict.

Immigration is another point of conflict. Upper middle class professionals benefit from immigration by way of a more interesting food environment and ample supply landscape, construction, and hospitality industry labor.  Working people compete with those immigrants.

Another differentiator is how to think of the very wealthy.  Upper middle class professionals are successful strivers.   Hillary distinguished between good billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates (people who oppose racism and homophobia) and bad billionaires like the Koch Brothers and Robert Mercer (people who support conservative causes.)   Working class people see billionaires as people who created systems that are squeezing them into poverty; upper middle class professionals see an economic system that provides real opportunity.   

Working class people want to shake up a system that is no longer working for them.  They wanted systematic change and a bull in a china shop candidate like Trump offers promise that something might happen.  Hillary Clinton and the comfortable upper middle class wants the system to work--just more fairly.

There is a matter of taste and style.  At it simplest it s the difference between wine with corks versus popularly priced beer.  It is Whole Foods versus Safeway.  It is Audi versus Chevrolet.  It is Martha's Vineyard versus Disney World.  It is Yale versus a state college.  Working people feel dissed by the professional class.  It shows up in words like "deplorable."  It shows up when people in nicer neighborhoods oppose affordable housing placed in them. 

Looks fake.

What can a Democratic candidate for federal office do?    Two things.

One, is do not fake it.   Be who you are.  It the Democratic candidate is upper middle class in income and attitude and orientation, do not apologize or ameliorate.  Do what Trump would do: double down.  Embrace who you are.  If you are a lawyer, be a lawyer.  If you are a doctor or businessperson, be one.

Number two is embrace the great bridge issue:  jobs.   Not graduate school, jobs.  Have a real proposal.  Trump had a proposal: build a wall to keep out immigrants, deport immigrants, change our trade agreements.  A Democrat needs a proposal.  My best advice for a candidate in a rural or suburban district is to "run against type", i.e. argue directly for the re-industrialization of rural areas and against the tide of greater urbanization.  It is a commonplace understanding that money flows from rural areas to urban areas.  It shows up when deposits are scooped up from bank branches in rural areas so that loans can be made in urban areas.   Give tax advantages for an openly acknowledged change in national policy, similarly to the Rural Electrification Act.   Stop concentrating population into denser and denser mega-cities.  It is a homeland security issue, it is a congestion issue, it is a lifestyle issue, it is an infrastructure issue, it is a rural and suburban fairness issue, and it is a political issue.  Argue that it is time to reverse the tide of more concentration in the cities and to move jobs back out into more rural areas.

Will it work?   If there were national policies and tax advantages for, say,  a Nike putting a design facility in a pleasant secondary or tertiary city rather than at the urban core, then possibly yes.  The internet has changed the notion of place.  Whether a colleague's office is 20 feet away or 200 miles away, the communication is by electronic message.   It is at least as plausible a jobs solution as building a wall on America's southern border.