Allegheny College
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Projects by Department or Interdivisional Program
Academic Year 2016-2017
2016-11-28
A Withering Class: An Analysis of White
Working Class Anxiety and Class Contagion in
America
Kargbo, Mariatu
http://hdl.handle.net/10456/42732
All materials in the Allegheny College DSpace Repository are subject to college policies and Title 17
of the U.S. Code.
ALLEGHENY COLLEGE
POLITICAL SCIENCE 610
SENIOR PROJECT
Mariatu Kargbo
A Withering Class: An Analysis of White Working Class Anxiety and Class Contagion in
America
Department of Political Science
November 28, 2016
Mariatu Kargbo
A Withering Class: An Analysis of White Working Class Anxiety and Class Contagion in
America
Submitted to the Department of Political Science of Allegheny College in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
I hereby recognize and pledge to fulfill my responsibilities as defined in the Honor Code and to
maintain the integrity of both myself and the College community as a whole.
Mariatu Kargbo__________
(PRINTED NAME)
_______Mariatu Kargbo__________
(HONOR CODE
SIGNATURE)
Approved by:
_Bruce Smith___________________________ (Type 1st Reader’s Name Here)
_Andrew Bloeser_______________________ _ (Type 2nd Reader’s Name Here)
Acknowledgments
I thank my family, for their support, love, and determination to make sure I had opportunities in
life they could only dream of.
I thank my close friend Lilly Appiah-Agyeman and her family, for their love and prayers that
kept me sane and smiling regardless of hard times.
I especially, would like to thank Abishai M. Persaud, for the support and encouragement he gave
me during the process of this project.
I thank Professor Andrew Bloeser, for his support, patience, and always willing to talk with me
whenever I struggled with an idea.
I thank Professor Smith, for his guidance, feedback, and support throughout my senior thesis
paper.
I thank everyone who has assisted me throughout this project.
I
Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1
Chapter 1: Thomas Frank………………………………………………………………..6
I.
II.
What’s the Matter with Kansas?…………………………………………6
Authenticity……………………………………………………………...12
Chapter 2: Larry M. Bartels……………………………………………………………..20
I.
II.
III.
A Response to Thomas Frank……………………………………………25
Bartels’s Findings………………………………………………….……23
Bartels’s Critique of Frank………………………………………………33
Chapter 3: E.J. Dionne…………………………………………………………………...44
I.
II.
The Three Crisis…………………………………………………………44
Meet the Anxious White Working Class………………………………...56
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….67
References………………………………………………………………………………..78
II
Introduction
America between 1945 and the 1970s was a period where working class dreams were
met. Blue-collar manufacturing jobs and unions played a crucial role in economic prosperity,
providing decent paying jobs to working class voters “who never went to college, allowing
families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile” (Chen 2016).
According to Victoria Chen, unions were easily able to, in large numbers, organize workers to
prioritize and fight for their interests in Washington creating a “‘moral economy’, in which
wages rose both in firms with unions and those without them” (Chen 2016). The boom in income
wages “had lifted tens of millions of Americans-[...]-from urban slums and rural poverty to a life
of home ownership and unprecedented comfort” (Krugman 2007, p.3). The growth and stability
created equability amongst citizens putting them at a level of economic commonality, where
everyone “lived recognizably similar and remarkable decent material lives” (Krugman 2007,
p.4). As a consequence of the affluent losing “ground: They were few in number and, relative to
the prosperous [working], not all that rich. The poor were more numerous than the rich, but they
still were a relatively small minority” (Krugman 2007, p.4) The new economy was by far “fair”
to all but mostly to the working class, who reaped the majority of its benefits. The working class
“could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew
accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity” that many, especially minorities
were deprived of (Chen 2016). It was a period when working-class Americans can depend on
their self-sufficiency and be assured that if they work hard and play by the rules, they will be
rewarded in a way that allows them to achieve great communal prosperity. This period was a
time of great economic certainty and a great sense of morality. A period many Americans took
1
for granted and wanted to last….but abruptly came to an end as a consequence of a changing
world.
Since the 1970s into the mid-1980s, the economic status of the working class has
declined or at least has stagnated. While the upper one percent has experienced economic
prosperity, the working class seems to be falling behind. This was a result of manufacturing jobs
being displaced to cheap labor countries and also as a consequence of the immense decrease in
union memberships. The sharp decline in union memberships made it difficult to “pursue the
sorts of collective action that unions once cultivated throughout the economy—that is, banding
together to convince companies and governments to treat employees better” (Chen 2016). The
declining influence of unions resulted in the working class losing its bargaining leverage in the
market which in turn gave “Free trade and automation” the power to “undercut the bargaining
positions of the working class. Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the
interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period. Corporations, once relatively
tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly
tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces” (Chen 2016). They took the economic
growth; they were experiencing post-1970s, for granted and felt almost as if they were entitled to
it, so it was no surprise that the economic changes hit them the hardest. They felt betrayed by the
market and the system. They have tried to keep up with these economics changes by working
extra-long hours, increasing debt, cutting back on public service, relying more on two-incomes,
and other unfavorable measures (Frank 2007, p.78-86). They are working long hours that
isolated them from their homes and their families and yet are still making less than they would
make in the 1970s, although they are now dependent on two incomes. To the working class, it
has become harder to save for the future because they are constantly worried about their current
2
economic instability. This pressing concern about the present and staying afloat in the working
class, have led them to increase their debt which at times results in bankruptcy and foreclosure.
They tried everything and still can’t seem to catch a break. All their attempts did little to close
the economic inequality gap but did much to intensify their animosity, anxieties, and frustration.
They were no longer masters of their future, but rather had become victims of unfavorable
circumstances. The world was changing economically, socially, and politically and with it the
working class. For decades they had to be subjected to a new world they always proclaim their
disgust for but they are the majority, yet they are unable to recapture the world they have lost. So
what’s the matter with the working class? Why it is that America’s majority is unable to help
itself? This essay will attempt to answer these questions, but before doing so, it will first examine
how the working class politics and how the white working class has come to understand
themselves in the mists of an evolving world. The study is an analysis of the working class, but
more specifically the white working class.
The term “working class” has traditionally always been defined in terms of economics.
This definition makes the working class an inclusive category that is easily reachable through
hard work and timely opportunities (Warren and WestBrook 2000, p.32). However, with the
changes in the economy, society, and politics defining the social class have proven to be far more
complex and beyond economics. Now the working class is defined in terms of college education,
self-identity, blue-collar work, morality, political outlook, and several over components. Class
has also evolved into a matter of cultural attributes such as: one's religion, racial identity,
hunting, gun ownership, opposition to abortion, and several other measures. This study will show
the defining class in terms of distinctive cultural attributes has become more prevalent to
defining the white working class. So who are America’s white working class? This is one of the
3
tasks this study will answer within the analysis of Thomas Frank, Larry Bartels, and E.J. Dionne.
By understanding and defining who the white working class is we will be able to examine their
sense of class identity, aims, and most importantly their political behaviors and pattern to reveals
what’s begin happening to this class of voters.
This study will assess the contested arguments regarding the characteristics of the white
working class. To what extent, do economic interests and education continue to define the white
working class? To what extent do more cultural characteristics such as gun ownership, religion,
and race predominate in the self-definition of the white working class? Does the current white
working class consciousness compromise the ability of Americans (excluding one percent) to
unite under one identity or to strategically participate in politics that protect common interests
and combat anxieties? The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not the working class
has changed and if this change is the result of an unfamiliar world or a changing perspective.
The study will develop a conclusion by drawing from previous works regarding the forces that
have undermined working class confidence and that explain the lead up to, and consequences of,
a declining working class. We will also assess interpretations of scholarly texts and their analysis
of the forces that have undermined working class confidence, as a way of understanding class
identity and politics.
The research will examine three scholars. The first section will be a focus on Thomas
Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? In which Frank claims that “conservatives have won the
heart of America” through an anti-liberal working class Backlash movement that is leading the
people astray, to vote against their economic self-interests to protect traditional cultural values
such as: religion, gun rights, opposition to abortion, and several other issues. My aim here is to
critically analyze and present Frank’s thesis of a working class Backlash and how his
4
interpretation of such phenomenon is an accurate analysis of the nation’s white working class. In
my study, I hope to find evidence that corroborates Frank’s thesis and reaffirm the possibility of
a white Backlash existing not just in Kansas, where Frank is writing about, but also working
class families all over the country. The second section will examine Bartels’s statistical response
to Frank’s thesis in What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas. Bartels’s collected
data from American National Election Survey, led him to argue the white working class has not
been misled by conservatives, but have rather used rational calculation to get what they want
from political candidates. Bartels’s text will raise doubts about whether there is a white Backlash
and if, in fact, there is merit in Frank’s analysis. Examining Bartels’s research, this study will
analyze whether or not Bartels’s quickness to dismiss Frank’s thesis has made him overlook or
possibly miss a critical event existing in American politics. The study will also examine whether
or not Bartels’s data is reliable in supporting his arguments against Frank. The third section will
focus on E.J. Dionne, in Why Americans Hate Politics and They Only Look Dead. Dionne offers
a fresh new outlook and understanding of the working class and their anxieties. He identifies the
anxieties plaguing the working class and the source of those anxieties. Ultimately, Dionne
analyzes the working class to make an argument about their political, economic, and social
future. The goal of examining these scholars is to understand the psychological mindset, political
pattern and behavior of the white working class in hopes of formulating a practical way to move
past class divisions and towards recognizable common interests. This study hopes to provide
evidence that shows the validity of there being a working class Backlash in light of these authors
and analyze the consequences of this Backlash. The overall conclusion drawn from these authors
will aid us in creating a link between the way the white working class views itself and the
broader working class. The thesis of the paper is that the anxieties embedded in the white
5
working class have resulted in the economic, social, and political decline of the entire population
of American voters not part of the one percent.
6
Chapter 2: Thomas Frank
I.
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Historically, the Democratic Party has been known as the party of “workers, of the poor,
of the weak and the victimized” and warriors of social and economic equality (Frank 2004, p.1).
The Republican Party, on the other hand, has been categorized as the party of the rich, of
privileged white males, and corporations. So it was of no surprise that political analyst Thomas
Frank was puzzled at the 2000 electoral victory of George W. Bush in a poverty-stricken county
in the Great Plains populated by “struggling ranchers and dying farm towns” (Frank 2004, p.1).
A county that, in light of their obvious economic disadvantage, should have voted for
Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who best represents the fundamental interests of
these voters. They did not vote for Gore but instead they cast their votes for Republican
candidate Bush. The inconceivable happened when Bush was able to easily carry “a majority
greater than 80 percent” amongst voters in the Great Plains, a Democratic territory (Frank 2004,
p.1). Frank examines the working class of his home state Kansas to provide an understanding of
this “panorama of madness and delusion” (Frank 2004, p.10).
Frank refers to these voters as “blue-collar,” “sturdy blue-collar patriots,” “small
farmers,” “union members,” and “the impoverished” Americans with “slightly lower real estate
values and lower per capita incomes” (Frank 2004, p.10 & 104). Examining Frank’s focus on
Kansas, a predominately white state, this study can conclude that he is specifically writing about
white working class voters. It is important to note that Frank did not directly provide a definition
of the white working-class, but did however define them in terms of college education. Frank
argued in Class is Dismissed, that education attainment is a reliable definition of class because
“education predicts long-term life chances and thus suggests where people will end up. It has the
7
added benefit of being widely available, since educational background is frequently included in
poll questions” (Frank 2005, p.6). Education is a strong teller of “where people will end up” in
regards to income, profession, and class status. Someone without a higher education is more
likely to be a member of the working class and earn lower wages, while those with a higher
education are likely to be white collar professionals. Based on this, Frank’s working class can be
defined as the following: working class whites with no college degree with “slightly lower real
estate values and lower per capita income.” These voters are the ones that cast the majority of
their votes for Bush.
The unexpected demographic victories of Bush in the 2000 election, in essence, revealed
the occurrence of a class division in America and was a reflection of a “changing pattern of party
loyalties” (Pomper 2001). The 2000 election was a pivotal turning point in American politics that
was far beyond the two presidential candidates. It encloses the “political forces that were shaping
the United States at the end of the end of the twentieth century” (Pomper 2001). From 1932 to
1964 the Democrats Coalition have been the undefeated champion of the people, winning
presidential elections with two issues--“economic and welfare”-- and “on the heritage of Franklin
Roosevelt and the New Deal” (Pomper 2001). This winning streak soon changed with the focus
on new issues such as “race, morality, and lifestyle” creating new party brands (Pomper 2001).
The parties became more polarized on issues like “civil rights, [welfare], affirmative action,
abortion, women’s role in society, crime and school prayer,” with Democrats becoming more
liberal and Republicans becoming more conservative. Fortunately for Republicans, this change
to a moralistic tone that appealed to the working class, which led the party to win presidential
elections from 1968 to 1988, making them the new winning coalition of not only the rich but also
of the “white Protestants from both the North and the South, religious conservatives, and
8
defecting Catholics” (Pomper 2001). The potency of these conservative moralistic issues and the
shocking victory of Mr. Bush can be credited to a cultural inversion Frank refers to as the “Great
Backlash.” The Great Backlash, defined by Frank, is a working class conservative movement
“that came snarling at onto the national stage in response to the partying and protests of the late
sixties” that “mobilizes voters with explosive social issues--summoning public outrage over
everything” (Frank 2004, p.5). It sparks public outrage over abortion, gay marriage, morality,
desegregation, welfare, evolution, removal of prayers in school, religion, trashy TV and several
other important working class issues. According to Frank, the movement’s “basic premise is that
culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern” (Frank 2004, p.6).
The Great Backlash is “a plague of bitterness” sowing seeds of immense hate, frustration,
rage and resentment “capable of spreading from the old to the young, from Protestant
fundamentalists to Catholic and Jews, and from the angry white men to every demographic
shading imaginable” across decades (Frank 2004, p.8). A spreading phenomenon that was first
triggered in the 1972 election by Republican Richard Nixon’s successful “Southern strategy”
created a strong GOP-blue collar alliance. It appealed to the cultural grievances of the working
class who were frustrated with the Democrats’ liberal approach to social issues such as the Civil
Rights movement and segregation while downplaying economic potency (Walsh 2010). Nixon
tapped into the racial resentments these voters from the South had for blacks and courted them
into the Republican coalition when they defected from the Democratic Party. The interesting
thing about Nixon’s strategy is that although it was meant for the South, it did not remain in the
South but continued to spread to the rest of the country. Frank does not necessarily come to this
conclusion, but we can argue that he foresaw the powerful influence of the Backlash movement.
9
The movement is “capable of spreading” because it tapped into the profound rage voters harbor
towards the changing world, the decrease in mortality, and the abandonment by Democrats.
The movement does not take any responsibility for not delivering on its promises nor
does it acknowledge its role in the struggles of working class Americans, but it is quick to hold
others accountable and take offense to everything. It is known to be the movement of “the
people” in words only, but it seems working class citizens are oblivious to this fact. They cast
their votes for Republicans, failing to recognize the political contradiction of a movement they
have come to embrace as “one of them.”
Claudine Pied captured the essence of the Backlash movement in her analysis of the
working class in Skowhegan, Maine. In Skowhegan, the working class people have long been
angry with economic insecurities, which were amplified in the economic recession of 2008 with
the increasing income gap, “job loss,” and “housing foreclosures” (Pied 2011, p.17). However,
Pied argued that the “strongest voices of dissent to this upheaval have not been asking for higher
wages, more job opportunities, or a check on corporate profit,” (Pied 2011, p.17). They were not
asking for what Frank refers to as their fundamental interests, but rather “they are demanding
that government be scaled back and taxes minimized to allow hard work and competition to
determine success [...] calling for limited government, lower taxes, and individual responsibility”
(Pied 2011, p.17). The town of Skowhegan was demanding for things that logically were not in
their fundamental interests, but rather the interests of greedy corporations they despise.
Unfortunately, they were blinded to this reality, and it was a result of the anti-government and
conservative cultural rhetoric of Richard Harvey that infiltrated local debates. Harvey was the
“wealthiest man in town,” owning the majority of the businesses in town (Pied 2011, p.27).
Harvey, never flaunting his wealth, had made himself out to be “a man of the people,” especially
10
during town meetings. He came off as a person the townspeople could trust, would loan them
money to help, and would have their best interests at heart. Under false pretenses, Harvey would
interpret the government spending on programs and the increase in taxes not as his problems but
as those of the people of Skowhegan. Through using the rhetoric of the Backlash movement that
capitalizes on the pain and anger of the working class, he was successful in misleading them. He
claimed the working class of Maine was the “victim[s] of over-taxation and secretive, dishonest
government officials” and that the town would only to get worse economically if something was
not done (Pied 2011, p.18). They believed him, and under the guidance of the conservative
rhetoric, railed their efforts against government programs. But the more they protested, the worse
their situation became while Harvey’s thrived. They never caught on to and are still susceptible
to the same rhetoric every year. They wanted to be like Harvey, a self-proclaimed “ordinary hard
working American” who made it to economic security without compromising his moral values.
They truly believed they could be like Harvey, but repeatedly failed to see that Harvey, a cultural
conservative, was misleading them for his own economic and political gain.
Frank found this blinding commitment of the Backlash movement’s supporters to be very
troubling, stating that:
“Their grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two
years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the
illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country
strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive
electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere
from media to meatpacking [...] Vote to strike blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more
concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are
rewarded in manner beyond imagining” (Frank 2004, p.7).
The trick never ages because the Backlash movement is a classic example of bait and
switch. Cultural conservatives successfully appeal to the cultural grievances of the working class,
which results in these voters casting their votes for the majority of the party. White working class
voters believe the party will push strict conservative policies that will restore working class
11
values in the country. But Frank found this is not the reality, since, once in office, Republicans
focus on mundane economic issues favoring corporate interests and neglect to deliver on the
social issues that got them elected. Regardless, the working class, according to Frank, still
continues to support the Republican Party because of the false consciousness created by the
Backlash movement. The movement declared itself “the voice of the unfairly prosecuted, as a
righteous protest of the people on history’s receiving end” (Frank 2004, p.6). Leaders of the
movement, Frank writes, blame their failure to deliver on obstacles posed by liberals and deflect
their failures by focusing on public outrage. The movement has manipulated the working class
into a false class consciousness defined by conservative values. Interpreting Frank’s work, this
study found that Republicans do not necessarily wish to provide answers to the “cultural issues”
they are capitalizing on. They never deliver because it is advantageous to their political power
and influence; what keeps them in power. If they do solve the cultural anxieties of the working
class, they risk the breakdown of their Backlash strategy; the movement’s concept of cultural
authenticity is the compelling bond that binds the Republicans and the working class together
against the liberals. The premise of the movement is to ignite anger and a constant heightened
feeling of everlasting defeat within the hearts of working-class voters. According to Frank, this
movement “only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting;” it exploits the frustration of
its targeted group, convincing it to push and vote for “the conservative economic agenda” (Frank
2004, p.109 & 12). Regardless, the Backlash gains the trust and unwavering loyalty of the
working-class while also trying to reverse “the achievements of working-class movements of the
past” (Frank 2004, p.14). This movement has become the poison of the working class, slowly
strangling its life support. The movement has “rolled back the [liberal] landmark economic
reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price
12
supports, banking regulation)” and the “accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism
(Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust measures) [...] the backlash may
well repeal the entire twentieth century” (Frank 2004, p.8). It’s repealing liberal
accomplishments that are in favor of the working class’ fundamental interests. Ultimately, the
working-class is trapped in the interests of the Republican Party and has become a loyal puppet
of its conservative foes at its expense. According to Berlet Chip et. al, working-class people
profess their immense hate for elites, but under the same breath, are quick to link themselves
with conservative corporate America, the elitist of them all. They have come to accept
conservative elitism and to condemn Democratic elitism. Why is this? Why are people who
would “have been reliable partisans of the New Deal” embrace right-wing populism when it’s
working against their fundamental interests (Frank 2004, p.6)?
II.
Authenticity
The Great Backlash movement was primarily successful in recruiting working class
voters because it changed the narrative of “social class” from economics to something more
inclusive, longed for, valuable, and unique. In the 1960s, the Great Backlash movement
conservatives concocted a new way of thinking about social class that “encourages class
hostility” and “simultaneously denies the economic basis of the grievance. Class, conservatives
insist, is not about money or even occupation, but rather is a matter of authenticity--that most
“valuable cultural commodity” (Frank 2004, p.113). This new concept of class isolates itself
from economics. Class, conservatives emphasize, has become a matter of religion, hunting,
“drinking beer,” opposition to abortion, gun rights, unpretentiousness, and, among other
attributes, simplicity (Frank 2004, p.19-24 & 145). Interpreting Frank’s analysis of the working
class, authenticity has done wonders for the political agenda of the Republican Party and has
13
created a false class consciousness amongst working class voters. The concept of class
authenticity gave George W. Bush an “80 percent majority” amongst struggling whites in the
Great Plains, and made working-class loyalty to the Republican Party strong, regardless of the
party’s history of not delivering on promises. Authenticity makes all these things tolerable
because, to working-class whites and the Republican Party, they are “are America” and the rest
of the country is not (Frank 2004, p.13). Due to this idea of conservative authenticity, class is no
longer an economic “hierarchy” that working-class people are forced into, but rather now a
matter of free choice deemed authentic (Frank 2004, p.26). Working-class whites have the choice
of which social class they “want to belong to,” and the Republican Party has influence that
choice with the concept of authenticity (Frank 2004, p.26).
The Backlash movement, Frank writes, was successful not solely by Republican efforts
but also because of unfortunate actions taken by the Democrats. The Democrats, Frank argues
adopted a “criminally stupid strategy” in the early seventies that:
“has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, whitecollar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are
corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The
way to collect the votes and---more important---the money of these coveted constituencies, ‘New Democrats’ think,
is to stand rock-solid on, say, thee pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on
welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats
explicitly rule out what they deride as ‘class warfare’ and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business
interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were
until recently the party’s backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be
marginally better on economic issues than Republicans” (Frank 2004, p.243).
The Democrats, Frank writes, adopted this strategy to counter the conservative Backlash
movement, assuming it was a good opportunity to court the wealthy and corporations away from
the Republicans and to Democratic coalition. Assuming the “Republican Party will alienate the
wealthy suburban Mods [moderately far-right] for good,” which they found out was not true
(Frank 2004, p.244). Instead, it is the Democratic Party that ended up alienating their base, who
were outraged and displaced by government policies in favor of the laissez-faire system, when it
14
became “vehicle for upper-middle-class interests.” (Separate sentences about Republicans
already doing this) Before the implementation of this strategy, the Democrats had already lost
the Solid South to the Republican Party (due to their aggressive pursuit of the Civil Rights
movement that isolated the working class) and they were confident the rest of the country’s
working class voters would continue to be loyal to them because they have the best pro-working
class economic plans. The Democrats were “slightly more generous with Social Security
benefits, slightly stricter on environmental regulations, and do less union-busting than
Republicans” but this no longer mattered to Frank’s backlash people (Frank 2004, p.245). With
the adoption of the “criminally stupid strategy,” liberals made numerous compromises on
favorable economic issues that once tied the working class to the party to appeal to corporations
at the expense of its base. To make matter worse, the Democrats also took a “rock-solid” liberal
stance on social issues and dropped a “class language that once distinguished them sharply from
Republicans” leaving themselves “vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and
the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns”
(Frank 2004, p.245). The party’s mistake made Republicans champions of cultural class war.
With the adoption of the “criminally stupid strategy,” the Democrats essentially left
themselves unappealing to the working class and became a representation of the world that have
turned against them, forcing social changes on them, and screwing them over economically.
According to Frank, the party did not even attempt to develop “business-bumming class war
rhetoric” to fight for its base in the midst of the Backlash movement (Frank 2004, p.245). The
party did not do anything to fight against the influence of the Backlash because it mistakenly
assumed that “people know where their economic interest lies that they will act on it by instinct”
(Frank 2004, p.245). This, Frank argued, was not the case. Historically Democrats have carried
15
out the best economic plans in favor the working class, for example, the New Deal was a
government program that protected working class families from corporations and stabilized the
economy. According to Frank, white working class voters, despite what the Democrats may
think, do not “spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. They don’t
just automatically know the courses of actions that are open to them, the organizations they
might sign up with, or the measures they should be calling for” (Frank 2004, p.245). As a
consequence of the decline in unions membership, Frank argues, that the working class no longer
understands the actions it needs to take to protect its fundamental interests. As I mentioned in the
introduction, unions were the voice of the people that “pursue the sorts of collective action that
unions once cultivated throughout the economy—that is, banding together to convince
companies and governments to treat employees better” (Chen 2016). It provided the working
class a collective way of pushing back on the corporate world and protect their fundamental
interests. For example, “Social Security, the FDA, social welfare,” and other fundamental
working class interests formed in “response to the excesses of a laissez-faire system” as a result
of “decades of movement-building, of bloody fights, between strikers and state militias, of
agitating, educating, and thankless organizing” (Frank 2004, p.246). According to Frank, voters
in unions are more likely to know their economic interest and vote for the Democratic Party
while white working class voters who are not union members become more vulnerable to the
market making them candidates for the Backlash movement.
The Democrats false diagnosis of the white working class, its “criminally stupid
strategy,” and the party’s weak resistance to the Backlash movement has resulted in the loss of
an important base. It also gave ammunition to the Republican Party to severe the trust between
the Democrats and the working class. Cultural conservatives have courted these voters based on
16
the concept of authenticity, which gave these voters an identity isolated from the rest of the
country and most importantly from their pretentious enemies, the Liberals. According to Frank,
class authenticity has divided America into “two Americas” where you have liberals that
“commit endless acts of hubris, sucking down lattes, driving ostentatious European Cars, and
trying to reform the world,” in a way that brings more unwanted changes. According to Frank,
the working class has become untrusting of the reforms liberals want to implement because they
are convinced it will add to their struggles and discontent unlike the reforms of FDR’s era that
protected them. In the other hand, you have the white working-class and the Conservative Party
“the humble people of the red states going about their unpretentious business, eating down-home
foods, vacationing in the Ozarks, whistling while they work, feeling comfortable about who they
are, and knowing they are secure under the watch of George W. Bush, a man they love as one of
their own” (Frank 2004, p.27). Authenticity has made working-class whites the “pure
Americans” alongside their Conservative foes while alienating and thinking the country is
against them and the values they hold so dearly.
Thinking of social class as a matter of authenticity which outweighs economics is what
led Frank to argue that working-class whites have been led astray by the Republican Party. To
vote against their economic interests to protect and preserve “authentic,” traditional cultural
values such as religion, family values, prayers in school, abortion, gay marriage, and simply
being a humble, hardworking individual (Frank 2004, p.6). Common people have been
convinced by the Republican Party to believe that economics is distinct from cultural values and
that the fundamental problem with America is based on cultural differences. They have also been
led to believe that the Democratic Party, the party Frank still believes is the true party of “the
people,” is the force behind all their dire misfortunes and inability to thrive economically and
17
socially. The party has betrayed by embracing pro-business government policies that have taken
their decent jobs and left them in income stagnation. They also felt that the liberals have
forgotten them by embracing the Civil Rights movement, compromising on past working class
economic achievements and taking a liberal stance on social issues. As a result, the working
class has been convinced the Democrats have created a world where they are left behind socially
and economically. They have come to view liberals as intellectual snobs that “use their control of
the airwaves, newspaper, and schools to persecute average Americans--to ridicule the pious,
flatter the shiftless, and indoctrinate the kids with all sorts of permissive nonsense” (Frank 2004,
p.119). Working-class whites have become victims of a country ruled by liberals. They see a
disconnect between economics and cultural issues, because to common citizens, economic
problems are nothing but a liberal manipulation to get them to turn against the conservatives who
understand and embrace them. Liberals are to blame for everything. In a time when the workingclass needed traditional liberal policies, similar to that of the New Deal that provided stability
and social programs, liberals were nowhere to be found, while conservatives were and they have
changed the narrative. In fear of the influence of the Backlash movement, Frank urges liberals to
abandon their “criminally stupid strategy” and focus on appealing again to the working class. He
also urges liberals to continue to fighting for the economics of the working class. He suggests
that liberals can reclaim the working-class by doing what the conservatives are doing to push a
working-class movement that prioritizes economics over cultural values.
In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Frank gave an intriguing diagnosis of the puzzling
political shift of the working class from Democrats to Republicans over the decades. In
explaining this shift, Frank provided a dynamic analysis of working-class ideology, the forces
that have contributed to the problems that have plagued the people within this class for decades,
18
and how “conservatives have won the hearts of America.” Within four pages in Chapter Two,
Frank justifies analyzing the white working-class by looking at Kansas. He stated that the state
“holds a mirror to the rest of us” and that “if this is the place where America goes looking for its
national soul, then this is where America finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal
resentment of the Backlash, has gone all sour and wrong” (Frank 2004, p.36). Historically,
Kansas is known as the “heart of America.” Within it resides blue-collar workers, white-collar
workers, and corporate America. To understand what's wrong with America, we must turn our
attention to Kansas. Analyzing Kansas, Frank found evidence that strongly indicates the
existence of a working class phenomenon that has been happening for decades and continues to
happen to this day unless liberals develop a great economic rhetoric to counter the Backlash
movement. However, Frank failed to realize that liberals cannot develop a successful economic
rhetoric separated from moral values. My interpretation of Frank’s work is that moral values are
no longer conservative distractions, but have become a working class identity. Moral values have
come to define the working class, and if liberals want to appeal to them with economics, they
must interlace their message with morality.
I commend Frank for bringing all these issues to our attention, but I still must ask: Has
Frank brought the right evidence to make his claims or is he ignoring other concerns that may
have contributed to the recurring working class frustration and economic decline? It is evident in
the following pages that I am not the first to ask this. Larry Bartels in What’s the Matter with
What’s the Matter with Kansas? Challenges Frank’s thesis about the working-class and also
raised some concerns.
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Chapter 3: Larry Bartels
In 2006, American political scientist Larry Bartels published What’s the Matter with
What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a critical and statistical analysis of Thomas Frank’s What’s the
Matter with Kansas? Bartels’ rebuttal challenged Frank’s thesis of a “panorama of madness and
delusion” in American politics outside of Kansas. In his research, Bartels found that his
statistical data questioned the existence of Frank’s Great Backlash theory and the likely effect of
the conservative movement in America. Bartels also examined Frank's portrayal of the white
working class behind the movement, the weight these voters put on values over economics, and
how the movement has made Republican Party the dominant party coalition. To lay out his
argument and assess Frank's thesis, Bartels collected statistical data from the American National
Election Studies database with the aim of determining whether Frank’s analysis of Kansas is
"reliable to understanding broader trends in contemporary American electoral politics” (Bartels
2006, p.203). Bartels tested Frank’s claims against statistical evidence, to determine whether the
theories of the white working class being misled like Frank claimed or being rationally
calculating like Bartels anticipated were true. Before analyzing Frank’s Great Backlash theory,
Bartels first had to define who Frank’s cultural voters behind the movement were.
I. A Response to Thomas Frank
In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank asserts that white working class voters have
been lured by cultural conservatives with values issues such as gun rights, trashy-liberal TV,
abortion, religion, and same-sex marriage, to vote against liberals that represented their
economic interests. According to Frank, these voters have been led astray on a self-destructive
path, one where traditional cultural values have come to outweigh economic issues among
working class voters. Frank argued that this working class phenomenon is a result of the Great
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Backlash, conservative movement that capitalizes on the resentment and frustration of workingclass voters.
According to Frank, the movement’s “basic premise is that culture outweighs economics
as a matter of public concern” (Frank 2005, p. 6). The Great Backlash has given Republicans a
significant advantage to carry out their economic agendas in favor of corporate interests without
accountability to deliver policies in favor of their voters once in office. Frank writes that the
movement has given conservatives ammunition that “mashed the welfare state, reduced the tax
burden on corporations and the wealthy, and facilitated the country’s return to a nineteenthcentury pattern of wealth distribution” (Frank 2004, p.6). Which were traditional social programs
initiated by liberals that have aided in reducing working class economic burdens. Frank argued
that although a working class movement, the Great Backlash has done nothing for the working
class in terms of economics and more importantly, it turned these voters against the Democratic
Party, the party Frank believes best represents the economic interests of the working class. The
movement declared the Democrats as the “enemy of normal Americans,” blaming the Left for
every working class failure, anxiety, and discontent with the vast changes happening around
them (Frank 2004, p.13). Frank notes that the “criminally stupid counter-strategy” of Clinton
Democrats, who abandoned the backbone of their party to outwardly recruit corporations and
“affluent white-collar professionals,” contributed to the success of the movement (Frank 2004, p.
243). To appeal to these affluent voters, the Left decided to remain “rock-solid on, say, the prochoice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA,
Social Security, labor law, privatization, [and] deregulation,” concessions which severed the
bonds that connected the working-class and Democratic Party (Frank 2004, p. 243). The
Democrats underestimated the appeal of conservative movement amongst working-class voters,
21
and mistakenly saw the movement as an opportunity to court and steal wealthy voters from the
Republican Party. The left, unwisely took for granted the loyalty of the working-class and ended
up losing the support of these voters to cultural conservatives. Based on this, the study would
confirm that Frank’s theory that white working-class people are voting against their economics
interests to preserve traditional cultural values.
We established in the previous chapter that the people in Frank’s Great Backlash are
white working class voters, he refers to as “sturdy blue patriots,” “small farmers,” “the
impoverished,” “blue-collar,” “low-income,” “working-class guys” and “union members.”
Which were all labels interchangeable with the term “working-class.” Frank did not provide a
standard definition of the term “working-class." He did, however, attempt to specify what he
meant by working-class by defining the class in terms of education. Frank defended his use of
education in Class is Dismissed, arguing that “education predicts long-term life chances and thus
suggests where people will end up. It has the added benefit of being widely available, since
educational background is frequently included in poll questions” (Frank 2005, 6). Education
attainment is one of the strongest indicators of where someone will end up in terms of income,
socioeconomic class status, and occupation. For instance, someone with a college degree is more
likely to be a white-collar professional with a high income, while someone without a higher
education is more likely to be a member of the working-class doing a blue-collar jobs that brings
in a relatively lower income. From this, Frank writes that the working-class consists of voters
without a college degree at “slightly lower real estate values,” and at a “lower per capita income"
(Frank 2004, p.104). It should also be noted that Frank is specifically referring to the “white
working-class” because the focus of his book was in Kansas, a predominantly white populated
state.
22
The purpose of summarizing Frank’s arguments is to provide a clear understanding of the
claims made by Frank that Bartels’ research challenges. While the primary purpose of this
chapter is to explain and interrogate the statistical data proved by Bartels, we must first
understand what class of voters is the focus of Bartels’ analysis.
For consistency and accuracy in his data analysis, Bartels followed Frank’s lead and
defined his voters as working-class whites. Discontent with Frank’s definition of the workingclass in terms of education, Bartels specified the class in terms of income distribution. Bartels
defined the working-class as low-income whites without a college degree at the “bottom third of
the income distribution,” and in 2004 this connotes families earning an annual income below
$35,000 which is a narrower definition (Bartels 2006, p. 205). Bartels justified his use of income,
a dimension of class that refers to occupational salary, stating that “class ‘in the material,
economic sense’ has become much more politically relevant” since 1980, unlike educational
attainment which he argued has become politically less significant (Bartels 2006, p. 207-208). To
Bartels, income provides a more precise picture of someone’s socioeconomic class and status
than college education, because the flaw with educational attainment is that it is possible to be
without a college degree but not earn low-income, or also with a college degree and still be
subjected to a low-income. Due to this flaw, he went on to argue that Frank’s white voters
without a college degree are “actually more likely to have income in the top third of the income
distribution than in the middle third, much less the bottom third” (Bartels 2006, p. 205). Bartels
claimed that defining the working-class in terms of economics, rather than educational
attainment, allowed him to collect data that more accurately represented Frank’s working-class.
Although he criticized Frank for not giving a proper definition of the white working-class,
Bartels ironically, ended up categorizing the class without attempting to define it himself.
23
Identifying the data attributes that define the working class has proven to be difficult for several
scholars, not just for Bartels and Frank, since the idea of class can incorporate numerous
elements besides economics and education. It can also be a matter of cultural attributes, values,
self-identity, and economic stability amongst several other elements. Class embodies much
complexity and cannot be simply defined. Bartels’ definition of the working class in terms of
economics providing another term associated with what it means to be a working class American
that allowed him to formulate a compelling argument against Frank. Incorporating income with
Frank’s education attainment, Bartels defined the “working class” as white voters with no
college degree with an annual income below $35,000. Using this unofficial definition, Bartels
was able to conceptualize the working class in the same way as Frank to test Frank’s claims
against statistical data. With this understanding of who Bartels’ data is focusing on, we can begin
to analyze Bartels’ argument and findings against Frank’s.
In What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas? Bartels focused on the
following questions inspired by Frank: 1. Has the white working-class abandoned the
Democratic Party? 2. Do “values matter most” to the white working-class? 3. Is the Democratic
Party pursuing a “criminally stupid strategy”? In his approach to the first question, Bartels
provided a table that illustrates changing support for the Democratic Party amongst whites
without a college degree with the high, middle, and low-income segments of the working-class
residing in the South and non-South over the period of 1952 to 2004. Bartels translated the data
he collected for this question into “probit coefficient,” a statistical model that “constrains the
estimated probabilities to be between 0 and 1, and relaxes the constraint that the effect of
independent variables is constant across different predicted values of the dependent variable”
(Nagler 1994, p.3). In layman language, the probit coefficient is a probability estimation of
24
whether white working class voters fall into two values and in this case, it would be South and
non-South, and the parentheses you see in Table 1 would represent the standard error of the
probit (Bartels 2006, p. 210). The second question: Do “values matter most” to the white
working class?, Bartels analyzed this question by measuring the preferences of the white
working class with and without a college degree on social and economic issues. With social
issues being listed as “abortion, gender roles” and economic issues listed as “government aid to
blacks, government spending and services, and government jobs and income maintenance and
defense spending” (Bartels 2006, p.212). The information gathered from this data is also
translated into a probit coefficient. The final question: Is the Democratic Party pursuing a
“criminally stupid strategy”? Bartels tackled this question by surveying white working-class
voters to place the Democratic and Republican parties “on several of the issue scales that they
used to report their own policy views, including both economic and social issues,” listed above
(Bartels 2006, p. 219). Bartels is asking voters to state which party they best believe represents
their views on social and economic issues and where they think the two parties stand within these
issues. The data for three of these questions was collected solely from the American National
Election Survey database (NES) over the period of 1984 to 2004. Bartels examined these
questions carefully, to contest the existence of a working-class phenomenon. What are Bartels
findings and what do they tell us about Frank’s thesis and the working-class?
II.
Bartels’s Findings
Do “values matter most” to the white working class? Bartels answered this by stating he
found no evidence that corroborates Frank’s claims of values mattering more than economics.
Bartels made his argument, based on the data of white working-class voters’, with and without a
college degree, preference on social issues (abortion and gender roles) and economic issues
25
(government jobs, income maintenance, government spending and services, government aid to
blacks, and defense and spending). Data analysis showed that white voters with college degrees
placed a probit coefficient of 1.47 percent more weight on “Government spending/services” than
on abortion, “the most potent of the cultural issues” weighing in at a 0.56 importance along with
0.29 for women’s role (Bartels 2006, p.212-214). According to Bartels, if Frank’s white working
class without a college degree are being misled to vote for cultural issues over their economic
self-interest than we should expect these voters to put more weight on social issues, such as
abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, gun control, women’s role, and other social issues
than those with a college degree. Unfortunately for Frank, Bartels’s numbers are not showing
any indication of this. Instead, Bartels’s numbers show that white working class voters without a
college degree, are attaching double the weight on economic issues like government spending
than they do on social issues like abortion. Before we move on, I wanted to note that contrary to
Bartels, this study finds that government spending is not the best issue for Bartels to argue on,
since it's not a good measure of the people’s own economic situation. Returning to Bartels data,
he found that uneducated white voters are more concerned with economics than values,
suggesting that “economic concerns rather than cultural wedge issues were of primary
importance to Frank's working-class white voters” (Bartels 2006, p.219). He argued that when
asked to choose between economics and social issues, working class whites always placed more
importance on economics. Bartels’s data also indicates an upper and middle class Backlash
instead of a working class Backlash. According to Bartels’ data, white college educated voters
are more concerned with cultural issues like abortion and women’s roles than their counterparts.
These educated voters place twice as much weight on cultural issues than those without a college
26
degree, placing abortion on a probit coefficient of 1.21 versus 0.56 and women’s role on a 0.89
versus 0.29 coefficients (Bartels 2006, p.214).
After examining his data, Bartels concluded that Frank’s analysis of the “growing
importance of social issues in American electoral politics over the past 20 years is mostly not a
working-class phenomenon” (Bartels 2006, p. 216). Ultimately, Bartels is argued that Frank’s
uneducated working whites are not politically influenced by cultural issues but rather by
economics. For instance, in 2004 Bartels found that cultural wedge issues, listed by Frank, like
“gun control”, “abortion”, “school vouchers”, “gay marriage”, “the death penalty”,
“immigration” and “gender roles” were given low ranking probit coefficients with abortion being
10th and gun control being 5 out of 15 issues (Bartels 2006, p. 218). Bartels writes that economic
issues like “government spending”, “social security privatization”, “government aid to blacks”,
“environmental protection”, “government jobs”, and “government health care” were more
important to Frank’s uneducated white working class than values (Bartels 200, p. 218). Bartels
acknowledged that the issue of government aid to blacks is a cultural issue rather than an
economic issue, but against better judgment, decided to include it in his data, arguing that the
misclassification of the issues is a reflection of flawed voters with possible racial resentment
towards blacks. Bartels writes that the voters “were the ones whose views about government aid
to blacks lined up clearly with their views about other economic issues rather than with their
views about social issues,” which would suggest an underlying racial resentment amongst white
voters. However, Bartels’s data shows that even with the removal of government aid to blacks
(0.29) from economic to cultural issues, white educated voters have not given the issue enough
importance to matter as much as other economic issues. With this analysis, Bartels concluded
that if Frank’s Great Backlash claim is true, it applies to the middle-and-upper-income college
27
degree holding whites, who attach twice as much weight on social issues. Bartels’s data is
demonstrating a stereotypical political cliché: the more well off one is, the more likely they are
to be concerned with social problems and be conservative, but the less well off one is, the more
they are concerned with economic issues and be liberal. Bartels argued, contrary to Frank, that
data shows no evidence of a working class Backlash, but rather a middle-upper class Backlash.
If according to Bartels, there is no working class phenomenon, then what voters are
leaving the Democratic Party? Bartels’ response to this is “not the working class Frank would
have anticipated.” Bartels argued that he found no evidence of Frank’s white working class
defecting from the Democratic Party in the past 14 U.S. presidential elections, but did find
unique white voters defecting from the party different from Frank’s account, which is shown in
Table 1
Source: What's the matter with what's the matter with Kansas? By Bartels (2006, p.210)
Table 1 is where Bartels presented one of his most compelling cases against Frank’s claim
about the defection of white voters from the Democratic Party and pointing out who Frank’s
Backlash people are. In his argument, Bartels acknowledges the possibility of Frank being right
about a Backlash movement but urges us to separate the South from the rest of the country,
something he argued Frank’s analysis did not do. According to Bartels, separating the South
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from the rest of the country depicts a declining trend in Democratic support over the years within
the working class, that indicates the existence of a Backlash movement, but not in the way Frank
would have anticipated. Bartels argued that separating the South from the rest of the country
reveals that white working class voters did not abandon the Democratic Party, but rather it is the
Southern white voters that have defected. Bartels’ data in Table 1 focuses on whites without a
college degree separated by higher third income, middle third income, and lower third income
segments within Frank’s working class (Bartels 2006, p.210). In Table 1, we see that the
separation of income levels and demographics (South and non-South) and can examine the
reason for the decline in support for the Democratic Party between 1952 and 2004 amongst
whites. Bartels’ data shows an overall 5.9 percentage decline in working class support for the
Democratic Party, this decline includes the South and non-South. Bartels table illustrates that
19.7 percent of the overall decline for the Democratic Party was “among Southern whites
without college degree.” However, the majority of the Southern decline in support for the party
was not amongst the low-income bottom third of whites but amongst the high third, with a
decrease of 31.6 percent, and the middle third, with a 24.6 percent decrease. According to
Bartels, if Frank’s analysis of Kansas is accurate then his data should have shown a greater shift
from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party amongst low-income whites (what Bartels
labeled as Frank’s working class at the bottom third of income distribution) rather than in high
and middle income whites. For the non-South in Table 1, Bartels argues that the data does not
provide evidence that points to the existence of working class Backlash amongst his working
class. In the non-South, the data indicates an overall 1 percent decline in support for the
Democratic party that is “heavily concentrated among” the high (10 percent decrease) and
middle (5.1 percent decrease) income segments of the working class (Bartels 2006, p.210). The
29
Democratic voter losses in the non-South are lesser due to the “increasing support for
Democratic candidates among working-class whites with low income” offsetting the losses from
the middle and high income segments (Bartels 2006, p.210). Ultimately, Bartels argued that the
numbers he collected tell us that “the overall decline in Democratic support among voters in
Frank’s white working class over the past half-century is entirely attributable to the demise of the
Solid South as a bastion of Democratic allegiance” (Bartels 2006, p.211). Bartels is simply
arguing that working class whites have not abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican
Party, but rather it is whites in the high and middle income segments of the working class in the
South that have, at an increasing rate, defected themselves from the Democratic Party. From this,
Bartels found no evidence of a working class Backlash anywhere in the country except in the
confines of the South and even there he does not see evidence of Frank’s low-income Backlash,
but rather a middle and upper income Backlash. If this is an accurate presentation of Southern
working class whites than what is the matter with the South?
The South or the “Solid South,” refers to “eleven states of the former Conference,”
(Kuziemko and Washington 2015, p.1) which was once the very loyal backbone of the
Democratic Party, during the Jim Crow Era and the Civil War era (Bartels 2006, p.211). Their
allegiance started to waver in the 1960s when the Democratic Party began to take “dramatic
[pro-Civil Rights] actions on Civil Rights issues” for blacks and when the party started to take
bold stands on cultural issues such as abortion and welfare (Bartels 2006, p.211). During the
Civil Rights era Democrats were introducing and “signing of the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting
Rights (1965) Acts—outlawing, respectively, segregation in public accommodations and racial
barriers to voting, both of which in practice occurred primarily in the South” giving way to the
Southern disalignment from the party (Kuziemko and Washington 2015, p.1). These pro-Civil
30
Rights actions taken by the Democratic Party resulted in race becoming the prominent
motivation for Southern whites to defect from their Democratic identity because they felt
betrayed by the party, especially when “President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, navigated the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA)” (Kuziemko and Washington 2015, p.3). Bartels
wrote that according to Huckfeldt and Kohfeld, “the policy commitment of the Civil Rights era
provoked “[r]cial hostility, particularly on the part of lower-status whites” (Bartels 2006, p.202).
These white voters view the Democratic pursuit of equality for blacks as the party infiltrating
their lifestyle, forgetting about their problems, judging them for wanting to remain racially
segregated, and forcing vast new social changes on them that they weren’t ready for. Feeling
abandoned by the Democratic Party, voters of the Solid South left and embraced the Republican
Party. Bartels wrote that even though there is a possibility that Frank’s Great Backlash exists, it
is only in the Solid South amongst white, working class, low-income people. Bartels’ analysis
makes a compelling distinction between the South and the rest of the country that Frank
narrowly understood and possibly missed in his analysis.
Thus far, Bartels has argued that he could not find evidence to support Frank’s claim that
values matter more than economics or that Frank’s voters have defected from the Democratic
Party that would indicate the existence a Backlash movement. Bartels argued that he found
evidence that supports the existence of a Backlash movement amongst high and middle income
working class voter without college degree and that the increased importance of social issues in
politics is not a working-class phenomenon but rather the result of better-educated voters.
According to Bartels, if his analysis is correct, then the Democratic Party courting corporations
and affluent voters is not a “criminally stupid strategy,” like Frank had argued. How did Bartels
arrive at this argument? Bartels wrote that he found when economic issues are compared with
31
social issues; Frank’s working class whites always place more importance on economic interests
over social issues. According to Bartels, these white voters are “neither liberal in absolute terms
nor closer to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party on economic issues” (Bartels
2006, p.222). For instance, Bartels’ data found that there was only a four percent difference
between voters who saw themselves as being closer to the Republican Party than the Democratic
Party on economic issues such as government spending. On other issues like government jobs
and aid to blacks, Bartels found that voters tend to be more Republican with a 9 to 15 percent
shift to the party because they deemed the Democratic Party as being too liberal on economic
issues. After examining these numbers, Bartels proposed that if the Democratic Party stops
“taking even more liberal positions on these issues [economic] or stressing them more heavily”
the party would have a better chance of winning back the white working class (Bartels 2006,
p.222). The study interprets this as Bartels suggesting that the Democratic Party does not speak
to the economic interests of the working class and that the party should give up its liberal
economic agenda and focus on cultural issues. But if this is true then what does it say or mean
for past liberal economic agendas like the New Deal? What was the New Deal a response to if
not to the anxieties of the working class whites? What does this say about the working class?
When Bartels isolated economic and social issues, he found that Frank’s working class
“see themselves as closer to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party” on social issues,
especially on abortion (30% of voters place importance on abortion, being pro-life), gun control
and the role of women (Bartels 2006, p.222). Bartels write that at times these voters turnout to
be more liberal than the Democratic Party on these issues, especially on gun control, with 48% of
them voting to make it difficult to attain a gun. Looking at economics, Bartels found that
working class whites are more likely to vote for the Republican Party. After examining these
32
numbers, Bartels argued that the Democratic Party’s courtship of corporations and more affluent
voters is not a “criminally stupid strategy,” that Frank claimed it to be. According to Bartels, the
social views of working class whites without a college degree are consistent with the Democratic
Party so it is advantageous for the party to court like-minded affluent voters. Due to the fact that
these voters “attach as much or more weight to social issues as white working-class voters doand they are good deal more liberal on those issues” (Bartels 2006, p.223). Bartels writes that the
Democratic Party can court these affluent voters and expand the party’s coalition without
abandoning their working class base. Bartels suggests that it is in best interests of the Democratic
Party to try to win over new voters to tilt the current “partisan balance between the Democratic
Party and the Republican Party,” especially with the loss of the Solid South to the Republicans
(Bartels 2006, p.223). Bartels claim economics has not lost its importance over the years to
social issues amongst the working class whites. But if he argues that for the last 52 years the
Republican Party has spoken to the economic self-interests of the working class while the
Democratic Party has spoken to the class’ cultural interests then wouldn’t this mean that cultural
and economics have the same importance? Is Bartels right about the white working class being
rationally calculating and understanding of its fundamental interests?
III.
A Response to Bartels
In his rebuttal to Frank’s thesis, Bartels argued that based on his data, he found that
economics have not lost its importance to values amongst working class whites without a college
degree. Due to the fact that he found no evidence of values mattering more, Bartels argued that
Frank’s thesis of “good people led astray” by conservatives is a wrong analysis of what’s
happening in American politics. Bartels argued that his data found uneducated working class
people that are still concerned with their economic self-interests and are voting occurring to such
33
interests. But they are factors, especially the Presidential election of 1972 between Republican
candidate Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern that challenges Bartels’
data and points to the existence of Frank’s working class phenomenon.
In 1972, progressive anti-war (Vietnam) candidate George McGovern ran for president
against Republican Richard Nixon. According to the New Republic Journalist, Joshua Mound,
McGovern ran a surprisingly strong, presidential campaign that spoke to the majority of voters
concern and tiredness of economic inequality and stagnation. Working class voters showed
optimism towards McGovern's promises “to close tax loopholes for the rich and use federal
revenue to provide low- and middle-income Americans with relief from rapidly rising property
taxes” and follow traditional Democratic welfare programs (Mound 2016). McGovern’s policies,
similar to that of 2016 Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, was a breath of fresh air to the
working class because it offered real solutions to decades of economic stagnation. However,
McGovern faced challenges amongst his own party that would eventually lead to voters
distrusting and withdrawing their support for him. McGovern had made enemies within his party
after leading a commission, formerly known as the McGovern Commission, which changes the
Democratic nomination system in a way that makes the presidential primaries the sole
determining factor of who gets the party’s nomination (Piroth 2000). According to Scott Piroth,
McGovern was successful in changing his party’s nomination system, but as a result ended up
losing massive political and financial support from several of the members of his party that felt
that McGovern’s new system would decrease their influence in the party. These delegates within
McGovern’s own party sought out to inflict damage by painted him as a radical candidate that
would raise middle-class taxes instead of cutting them, which casted immense doubts about
McGovern’s policies. The political attacks from his own party made the majority of voters
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hostile towards McGovern, but it did little to lessen their hopes of McGovern’s economic
policies. It was the political attacks on McGovern’s character and moral values that sealed his
demise amongst working class voters in the North and South. In the end, McGovern faced an
unfortunate defeat to Nixon when a member of his party said that: “the people don’t know
McGovern is for amnesty (for draft resisters), abortion, and legalization of pot,” an attack that
was later used by Nixon to label McGovern as the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion”
and became one of the prominent points that gave Nixon the presidency (Mound 2016).
According to E.J. Dionne, McGovern had hoped to “attract alienated white voters as Robert
Kennedy had done in 1968” but McGovern was not successful because he came to “represent the
rebellious side in the cultural civil war” that threatens their traditional working-class values
(Dionne 1991, p.121). McGovern’s anti-Vietnam war position, unlike Nixon’s pro-war stance,
contributed to the disconnect working class voters had with him. According to Dionne, being
against the war in Vietnam meant you were “anti-American” so McGovern was perceived as an
anti-American candidate (Dionne 1991, p.44). As Jefferson Cowie put it, “the majority of white
working class voters [selected] Nixon by wide margins over the most pro-labor candidate ever
produced by the American two-party system” (Walsh 2010). McGovern lost because he was
portrayed as lacking cultural values and as a consequence, also reversed decades of efforts by the
Democratic Party to build a strong coalition with uneducated white voters.
The 1972 election provided evidence of Frank’s claim that white working class
Americans not only voted against their economic interests to protect their traditional values but
also defected from the Democratic Party, which refutes Bartels’ argument of there being no
evidence of a working class Backlash. The 1972 election reversed the Democratic strategy of
creating a strong coalition of low-income and middle-income white voters. The party anticipated
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that with McGovern they could win the young voters, but it turned out that he only won the
young college-educated voters. McGovern’s label as a candidate of “abortion, amnesty, and
acid” alienated uneducated white voters from the Democratic Party and realigned them to the
camp of the Republican Party (Dionne 1991, p.122). Within this period, Dionne writes, the
Democratic Party saw a devastating 26 percent decrease in support amongst low-income and a
17 percent decrease in support amongst middle-income whites without a college degree within
the working class. This course of events led to the continued decline in working class votes for
the Democratic Party that Frank notes will haunt the Party for years to come. For example, in the
1960-64 elections the New Deal Coalition gained nationwide support from the working class
carrying 55 percent of the vote, that number dropped to 35 for the next two elections (‘72 lost by
McGovern) (Walsh 2016). Democrats reclaimed the presidency with Carter when Nixon was
found to be not trustworthy with the Watergate scandal (Walsh 2016). Reagan won voters back
with compelling cultural rhetoric and carrying 62 percent of the votes which was eventually won
back by Clinton with 42 percent (Walsh 2016). After examining these numbers, we see a 20
percent drop in working class votes for Democrats from 1960-64 to 1968-72, all a result of what
Frank claims is a Backlash conservative movement capitalizing on values. However, the election
years I presented here reveal a working class political pattern that was overlooked by Frank and
Bartels that will resurface in the next chapter with Dionne. Overall, the electoral evidence shown
corroborates Frank’s thesis of there being a working-class phenomenon. A phenomenon that
Bartels dismisses to possibly applying to the middle and upper class, but certainly not Frank’s
working-class.
The defection of working-class whites that have without a college education cannot only
be credited for McGovern’s defeat in 1972; it also has to do with Nixon’s successful “Southern
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strategy.” The “Southern strategy” was a conservative strategy with a racist undertone, aimed at
courting Southern white voters through the acknowledgment of these voters’ “cultural
recognition of their grievances” while paying little to no attention to their economic interests
(Walsh 2010). Nixon’s Southern-strategy can be a perfect example of what Frank refers to as the
Great Backlash. According to Walsh, Nixon’s strategy focused on giving a cultural conservative
identity to Southern voters who were “frustrated with their jobs and unions and angry at
Democrats for supporting mandatory busing” to racially desegregate schools (Walsh 2010).
Nixon got his opportunity to form a “blue collar-GOP alliance during “the notorious ‘hard-hat
riots’ of 1970, when construction workers beat up anti-war protesters near New York’s City
Hall” (Walsh 2010). Nixon promised a Vietnam settlement that will bring peace and honor back
to America. By Nixon’s campaign labeling McGovern as the “acid, abortion, and amnesty”
candidate, he presented himself as the morally righteous candidate that will not force the
working class to accept progressive social changes. By doing so, Nixon not only won blue-collar
Southerners, but he also won Northern blue-collar voters. Showing evidence for Frank’s claim of
a working class defection from the Democratic Party as a result of values mattering the most,
which leads us to our next assessment of Bartels’s work.
In his critique of Frank, Bartels also made the argument that working class whites
without a college degree at the bottom third income distribution have not abandoned the
Democratic Party. The substance of Bartels argument came from the data he collected in Table 1,
but when this study re-examines the finding on Table 1 compared with the Color-coded Table 1,
it finds that the numbers ended up contradicting Bartels’s claim.
Original Table 1
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Source: What's the matter with what's the matter with Kansas? By Bartels (2006, p.210)ColorCoded Table
Source: What's the matter with what's the matter with Kansas? By Bartels (2006, p.210)
In the original Table 1 Bartels found that in the past 52 years the “Democratic
presidential vote share has declined by almost 20 percentage points among Southern whites
without college degrees” while in the non-South, Democrats have only experienced a 1 percent
decline in votes amongst working class whites (Bartels 2006, p.210). According to Bartels, lowincome working class whites have identified themselves more with the Democratic Party,
increasing their support for the party by 11.2 percent in the non-South. While working class
voters in the South have defected from the Democrats with a 10.3 percent shift in votes from the
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party to the Republican Party. However, this 11.2 percent increase and 10.3 percent decrease in
support for the Democratic Party amongst Southern and non-Southern white working class voters
might be irrelevant from the data in the tables listed below because they might not be a true
representation of low-income working class. In his rebuttal, Bartels writes that low-income
working class whites are those in the “bottom third of the national income distribution,” which
he defined as being below $35,000. Bartels’ income definition, however fails to tell us at what
income level after $35,000 are voters no longer part of the low-income working class. For
instance, where would the income level of working poor and poor, which usually starts below
$15,000 (Dionne 199, p.67), start within Bartels’s definition? Without this distinction, we can
assume that Bartels’ low-income data (highlighted green on Table 2) possibly includes the
working poor or even the poor, which provides inaccurate data. By removing this data from
Bartels’ Table, we can focus our attention on the data for “high income” and “middle income”
segments of the working class, highlighted orange in Table 2. In doing so, we find that the data
Bartels provided against Frank’s thesis, ended up supporting Frank’s thesis. Looking at high and
middle-income voters within the working class, we see a pattern occurring in the South that is
emerging in the non-South. For high-income, we see a 20 percent decrease in votes for the
Democratic Party, and with the exclusion of the “low-income”, which might include the working
poor and poor, data, we know the decline in the non-South would have been about the same as in
the South instead of a 1 percent decrease. This supports Frank’s claim that the working class has
abandoned the Left and refutes Bartels’ argument that the working class abandonment is only
happening in the South. Despite this shortcoming of Bartels, he did an excellent job at
distinguishing the South from the North and recognizing the racial implications of the South,
something Frank’s work did not do, although he was talking about Kansas.
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However, this study argues that Bartels made a grave mistake in his analysis by failing to see
the connection between the South and the rest of the country. The puzzling thing is, Bartels gave
Frank credit for his account of Kansas and acknowledge the conservative status of the SouthNorth border state, but he does not closely examine Kansas. Frank may have missed the
uniqueness of the South, but he did, however, intentionally or not, foresaw a political pattern
within the working class phenomenon that may have had roots in the South that has spread to
Kansas to the rest of the country. Frank stated that the Great Backlash is an angry conservative
movement that “keeps coming despite everything, a plague of bitterness capable of spreading
from the old to the young, from Protestant fundamentalists to Catholics and Jews, and from the
angry white man to every demographic shading imaginable” (Frank 2004, p. 9). There is validity
to Frank’s claim about the Great Backlash spreading, that may have been undefined, but there is
evidence of its existence.
According to George Packer, when the South embraced the Great Backlash movement it
started to become more like the rest of the country and the “Southern way of life began to be
embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country
music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and NASCAR, political conservatism, God and guns, the
code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority,
especially in Washington, D.C. (despite its largesse)”, starting the Southernization of the country
(Packer 2013). Southern moral values, beliefs, racial hostility and overall lifestyle are becoming
and were the epitome of white working class authenticity. For instance, in the 2008 and 2012
election, the country watched in confusion as Midwestern state Missouri, that has become more
conservative over the years, began to embrace this Southern way of life (Weigel 2016). Before
the 2008 and 2012 election, Missouri has always been a strong and important supporter of the
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Democratic Party, and for “187 years no Democrat won the presidency without carrying the
state” (Weigel 2012). Democrats were confident that in 2008 Obama would continue to carry
majority of the votes in Missouri, much to the party’s surprise, Obama lost the solid Democratic
vote in the state and again in 2012 by a larger margin (Weigel 2012). According to Washington
Post Journalist David Weigel, Obama lost because of racial conservative views that were
emerging in Missouri, white voters did not see Obama, a black man, as a “real authentic
America.” By analyzing Packer, this study note that the South brought to non-Southern states,
like Missouri an exclusive working class identity based on the unspoken concept of “whiteness.”
Obama lost Missouri to McCain in 2008 and again to Romney in 2012, although Romney was
also unpopular in the state for being a Mormon, he was more so tolerated by white voters
because he what Obama didn’t and that is “whiteness” (Weigel 2012).
Ultimately, embracing the ways of the South also became a central aspect of political
success in the US. For instance, from 1976 to 2004, presidential candidates were “by birth or by
choice a Southerner because a Southern accent, once thought quaint or even backward, became
an emblem of American authenticity, a political trump card. It was a truism that no Democrat
could win the White House unless he spoke with a drawl” (Packer 2013). For example, in 1976
Jimmy Carter was an attractive candidate to working class voters across the country because of
his “conservative personal behavior and deep and genuine religious feeling” and most
importantly he understood their racial resentment and reassures them that he won’t force them to
integrate if they did not want to (Dionne 1991, p.125). By declaring themselves, a Southerner, or
displaying Southern characteristics, candidates are attempting to identify with the cultural
identity of the white working-class voters. What makes the non-South working class similar to
the Southern working class is their discontent with the vast economic and social changes
41
happening around them and their resentment towards the Democratic Party. The South left the
Democratic coalition around the 1960s because it felt betrayed by the Party's aggressive pursuit
of equality for minorities during the Civil Rights era. Subsequently, I interpret that the non-South
working class defected from the Democratic Party because it felt betrayed as the Democratic
Party abandoned them for white-collar, degree holding professionals and the embrace of
corporate interests. The Southern values are spreading to the non-South because of this
commonality in abandonment, discontent with economic inequality and racial hostility.
Frank foresaw the Southern Backlashers animosity that was spreading from Kansas to the rest
of the country, regardless of Bartels dismissal of its existence in the South. By dismissing the
existence of the Backlash movement to the confines of the South, Bartels is underestimating a
critical moment in American politics. Based on my interpretation of Bartels’s work, it seems he
does not fully grasp the discontent of the white working class outside of the South. It would have
been to Bartels benefit had he followed Frank’s lead and examined the political pattern of
working class whites in Kansas isolated from the rest of his data. Bartels’s argument would have
also benefited had he focused more on the South and attempted to draw a connection between the
rest of the country and the South. However, Bartels’s work did help us to defend Frank’s thesis
of a working class phenomenon that’s happening in Kansas and spreading nationwide.
Ultimately, Frank has diagnosed the working classes’ discontent, but is dismissing the
importance of moral issues and prioritizing economics. Dionne in the next chapter seems to get
closer to examining the discontent of the white working class, by recognizing various anxieties
amongst this class of people. Dionne offers an intriguing and more sympathetic understanding of
the white working class and gives us a glimpse of what the future may hold for this group.
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Chapter 3 E.J. Dionne
II.
The Three Crises
In They Only Look Dead, Dionne examined the white working class by first focusing on
forces that he argued birthed “a period of chaotic change” in American politics that have,
unfortunately, nurtured the anxieties of the middle class (Dionne 1991, p.36). American politics
is undergoing three crises: “the economic crisis, a political crisis, a moral crisis, and a crisis over
how Americans view their country’s role in the world (Foreign crisis).” (Dionne 1996, p.36). For
the sake of being consistent with issues tackled by Frank and Bartels, we will only be focusing
on the economic, political, and moral crisis. The first crisis, economics, is what Dionne defined
as:
“...economic transformation itself [...] the increasing ease with which money, equipment, and whole factories can be
moved to anywhere in the world has created all manner of dislocations. Blue-collar jobs, once the keystone of what
we (and, under different labels, the Western Europeans) thought of as middle-class standard of living, can be
shipped off at a moment’s notice. When factories are mobile, national labor, safety and environmental regulations
are increasingly difficult to enforce. If employers don’t like certain regulations, they can just pick up and move.
Competition in the world market forces many of them to do just that” (Dionne 1996, p. 39).
This “economic transformation” is referring to the growing impact of globalization on the
economy. Giant corporations “began to displace local businesses as the dominant economic form
between the 1870s and 1890s” which in turn resulted in the uncertainty of jobs, reduction of
workers benefits, and a decline in wages (Dionne 1996, 45). For instance, the number of “routine
steelmaking jobs in the United States dropped from 480,000 to 26,000 between 1974 and 1988.
The United Auto Workers union [...] lost a third of its membership-500,000 people-during the
1980s” (Dionne 1996, p.39). These working-class jobs were a major source of middle-class
incomes, and their departure left several working class families to deal with economic hardship
and inequality. The theory behind globalization is that it's supposed to benefit all socioeconomic
classes and help them to economically grow faster (Zaccone). In practice, this theory only
benefited a few: the well-educated professionals and top market performers. Well-educated
professionals and top market performers saw a surge in employment opportunities and increased
income from $52,500 to $59,000 in the decade of the 1980s (Dionne 1996, p.41). On the other
hand, the globalized economy brought many challenges for the working-class, who saw a decline
in “job prospects” and “stagnant incomes” (Zaccone). According to Dionne, these working class
43
voters saw a decrease in income from $25,000 to $21,000 a huge decrease from well-educated
families. The decline in annual income for the working class was because the demand for
working-class workers had dropped immensely, due to fewer skills and a lack of the knowledge
required to be a part of the competitive market birth from globalization. As a result, many
Americans found themselves out of choices and forced to take low-skilled, extra-hours, lowpaying jobs, such as working for fast food restaurants. The decent paying jobs that were
available required higher education that they could not afford for themselves or for their kids.
The loss of manufacturing jobs during the globalized era has led to great income
inequality, which was a crisis that contributed to the growth of insecurity and anxiety amongst
white Americans. Why is this? Dionne asserts, the loss of manufacturing job to low-wage
countries and the replacement of those jobs with service low-paying jobs, have left many
Americans economically behind the “improved standards of living,” despite an “unambiguous
evidence of recent economic improvement” (Dionne 1996, p.42). For example, between the
1950s and the 1960s the U.S. economy grew at an “annual rate of 3 to 4 percent,” which later
decreased in the 1970s by 2.8 percent growth rate and in the 1980s and 1990s the growth rate
also decreased to 2.5 percent (Dionne 1996, p.43). In his explanation, Dionne clarified that these
figures, although decreasing, show a growing economy for white-collar professionals, college
degree holders, and the wealthy but not for the white working class which was experiencing
economic stagnation. Economic prosperity was at its peak between the 1950s and 1960s which
brought “political stability and social harmony”, but not all Americans saw the growing
prosperities of these periods in their lives (Dionne 1996, p.43). According to Dionne, factors
other than globalization contributed to these inequalities, reiterating Derek Bok’s argument that
“greater political and moral acceptance of inequality, combined with a tendency to value material
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incentives over all others, increased some income disparities” (Dionne 1996, p. 43). Derek Bok’s
argument is addressing the understanding everyday folks have developed for their employers,
that acknowledges that their bosses can’t protect them from the inequalities they face. According
to Bok’s argument, the working class has come to the defense of CEOs, claiming they are only
doing the best they can do, and if their CEOs could, they would help them. This is a tone far
different from that of the 1930s and 1940s that had a “class consciousness defined more
pointedly against ‘the bosses’ and ‘the rich’” and cheered Franklin Roosevelt’s attacks on
“economic royalists” (Dionne 1996, p. 87). The earlier working class was a class that joined
forces with government that believed in their own unity to solve social problems and they were
embedded in their neighborhoods and had a strong sense of connective-ness. This change in tone
regarding inequality has resulted in the possibility of what Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson refer
to as “The-Winner-Take-All Economy.” An economy, they argue, where the top 1 percent
reaped the prosperity of the economic growth, seeing an increase in their annual income from 2.7
percent in the 1970s to 12.3 percent in 2007.
Working class whites are not concerned about “inequality as an abstraction” but are,
however, concerned “about the impact of downsizing, wage stagnation and declining benefits on
their own lives. Layoffs seemed to become a fact of life even when the economy was improving.
For example, The Census Bureau reported that in 1994, after more than two years of recovery,
the median household income was still 6 percent below where it had been in 1989” (Dionne
1996, p.44). Looking at the economy today, it seems the working class is still behind given that
the federal average minimum wage is $7.25 per hour (U.S. Department of Labor), making less
than they did in the 1970s although, they are working extra hours and depending on two incomes
they are still unable to keep up with the standard of living and are barely getting by.
45
Unfortunately, for the working class, the good well-paying jobs available require skills and
knowledge that many lack. These people are uncertain about both their and their children’s
economic futures and believe that “future generations will not live as well as previous ones”
(Dionne 1996, p.41). In other words, the next generation would not be given the same
opportunity to work high paying, respectable, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, and have the
security that came with those jobs. This uncertainty regarding their futures, Dionne states, has
left working Americans angry with “impatience,” interlaced with “an intense desire to have the
government do something about their economic circumstances with a disbelief bordering
cynicism that government will do anything worth doing. There is even a suspicion among some
especially, angry Americans, that the government is in collusion with dark international banking
forces to achieve globalization explicitly at the expense of American workers”(Dionne 1996,
p.45). The view many Americans have of politics has become somewhat schizophrenic. They
desperately need the government to help them with their unfortunate economic struggles but at
the same time, are skeptical of government support, which makes it difficult for the government
to intervene on their behalf and offer satisfactory economic stability and growth (Dionne 1996,
p.45). Their economic crisis now has becomes a crisis of politics.
The concept behind the political crisis is that the government is unable to protect the
working class from the negative socioeconomic consequences that come with the economic
crisis. The government has become powerless in the following ways: “foreign currency traders
have more control over the value of the money in citizens’ pockets than their own governments.
Economic policies pursued halfway around the globe by a foreign politician most Americans
have never heard of can cut American exports and destroy jobs [...]. The American government’s
efforts to enforce decent environmental standards can be undermined if a company closes its
46
doors here and starts up again in a country with less democratic standards---one reason many
Americans businesses have asked either for a loosening of American rules or a tightening of
environmental agreements with other nations” (Dionne 1996, p.47). These economic changes
resulted in the decline of government power and influence because the government is incapable
of protecting the interests of citizens from the extreme un-predictableness the came with the
global market. In the 1880s and 1890s “local governments saw their influence crumble” and
soon after so did the influence of those on the national level (Dionne 1996, p.47). The
government has become helpless and subjected to the rules of the market.
However, these problems are not the result of political weakness, but rather of political
choices. In this view, working class interests are the victims of corporate power and right wing
politics. Economist, Paul Krugman argued that in the wake of globalization, government had the
power to influence and impose policies that target these inequalities. Following Krugman, Jacob
Hacker and Paul Pierson went on to explain the importance of policy and its beneficiaries.
According to Hacker and Pierson, the government has more power in the new economy than
Dionne lets on. The U.S. government has a dominant role in who prospers in the economy
because they write the rules of the market. It has the “enormous power to affect the distribution
of ‘market income,’ that is, earnings before government taxes and benefits take effect. Think
about laws governing unions; the minimum wage, regulations of corporate governance, rules for
financial markets, including the management of risk for high-stakes economic ventures.
Government rules make the market, and they powerfully shape how, and in whose interests, it
operates” (Hacker & Pierson 2010, p.44). A brief example demonstrating the dominant role of
government in the market would be the response to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 when banks
made bullish investments with people’s money which wiped out the savings of many Americans,
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spiraling the country into the Great Depression. According to Quentin Skrabec, the crash resulted
in numerous mortgage bankruptcies, deflation that “rapidly lowered house prices, which hurt
farms” (Skrabec 2012, p.171). The country was in the midst of an economic crisis. The
government addressed the people’s panic by pouring “money into creating demand,” which
helped counter the drop in farm prices (Skrabec 2012, p.171). The government also passed
economic programs such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which created “high tariffs rates” to
protect the country from the globalized market (Skrabec 2012, p.171). There were banks
holidays imposed by the government to help boost morale and trust in the banking system
(Skrabec 2012, p.171). During this era, the government protected the people and stabilized the
economy in favor of the working class. However, over the years government imposed rules of
the market have “.... grown more generous towards those at the very top” (Hacker and Pierson
2010, p.52). As a consequence of government not being detailed with policy to help shape what
people earn, leaving loopholes for the corporations to take advantage of, and
doing “substantially less to reduce inequality and poverty below the highest rungs of the income
ladder” (Hacker & Pierson 2010, p.52). It’s not that government is now incapable of protecting
the working class, but that it has done little to support the interests of the majority. It has not
aggressively push policies that fought back against the growing inequality of the new economy,
but ended up perpetuating it.
The federal government was not always this ineffective. During the New Deal and the
progressive era, the government took a more “active role in redistributing income through tax
code and public programs” (Hacker & Pierson 2010, p.55). The progressive era sought to bring
“some order out of the chaos created by the new economy.” In Dionne’s telling, , with the New
Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt restored order by working “with new federal regulatory
48
mechanisms, and extended the Progressives’ project to include a variety of protections for
workers, the elderly, widows, orphans, farmers, and the unemployed” (Dionne 1996, p.46).
Dionne used this framework of the Progressive era intertwined with Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal, to demonstrate a period when government was very influential and had the means to
protect the working class. One of the things government did was “pursued what Walter Russell
Mead has called the ‘social democratic bargain.’ The bargain was a marriage between the market
economics preached by capitalists and the welfare and worker protections preached by socialists”
(Dionne 1996, p.46). Mead’s social democratic bargain, states that government has the power to
reduce economic setbacks and ensure economic stability of: citizens with modest means.”
Mostly because at the time, it had the power to impose strict regulations and pass legislations
that favored and protected the working class. The effectiveness of government continued until
1973 when the country began to see an influx in rising trade flows and the economy transformed
into a “winner-take-all economy” that government could no longer protect the [working] class
from. Government has the ability and means to help the working class but has lost its will to help
the working class, but government has not lost its will to give the wealthy and corporations an
economic advantage over the years. Essentially, Dionne notes, that this “unfair” government is
what the working class fear is blocking their individual efforts to economic prosperity.
Working class whites are aware of this decline in power and are frustrated that foreign
forces now determine their economic fates and that their government has little to no influence
over it. They are even angrier at their government “supposedly” doing nothing to help them, and
in retaliation, they are becoming more anti-government. It is important to note that although, the
working class has become anti-government, it does not translate into hate for government itself,
but rather a hate of ineffective policy. They are rebelling and cutting their financial support of
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the government, by voting against tax increases and depriving government from spending
excessive amounts of money as a way of punishing it. It is also a way of voicing their
frustrations with their new economic reality that they seem to be trapped in. The ineffectiveness
of the Democratic government, that has always protected them, has left the working class in
more sense of abandonment. The progressive ideologies of socialism of the left, had protected
the working class from giant corporations, and had also pushed policies that preserve economic
stability. For example, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, relieved the economic burden of the
working class, regulated the market for this group and set the groundwork to protect the future of
Americans. The leftists were the real defenders of the people's interest, at that time. The left
forfeited their critical role of protector when the party adopted a strategy to pursue white-collar
professionals and corporate support which resulted in the party turning into a “vehicle for upperclass interests” similar to the right (Frank 2004, p.243). The Democratic Party’s betrayal left a
vacuum that was filled with particularist movements, the most prominent, religious right. The
religious right helped the working-class to conclude that the “central issues in American politics”
were the “coarsening of the culture, the breakup of the family and a decline in civility”
precipitating a moral crisis, our third and final crisis in American politics (Dionne 1996, p.50).
Dionne described the moral crisis as a working class movement that “relate not just to
changed ‘values,’ but also to an economic revolution that is altering family life, attitudes toward
the work ethic, and the popular sense of which sorts of behavior are rewarded in society”
(Dionne 1996, p.50). This focus on values and economics makes the moral crisis far different
from the 1960s counterculture emerged to reverse the changes in the country’s values and
attitudes. In They Only Look Dead, Dionne stated that the moral crisis is caused by the large shift
in the roles of women and men in labor, the destruction of the core structure of family, and the
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breakup of families as a result of economic insecurities (Dionne 1996, p.51). The breakup of
families refers to how due to the displacement of local manufacturing jobs, Americans are now
subjected to working extra hours for little pay, that keeps them away from their families and
neighbors. Women are no longer looking after the home but are forced to work alongside their
husbands, to help the family stay afloat. Their rural towns are depopulated and kids are leaving
home to find jobs elsewhere. Families are now concerned, without much choice in the matter,
with working more in hopes of having enough to get by and “defending their children’s standard
of living.” They are consumed with the guilt of not spending more time with their families
because their jobs have come to consume their lives. Along with this guilt, they felt wronged by
politics, because they trusted their politicians to have their best interests but felt this was not the
case with the rise of globalization, that left them economically stagnate. Their morality, core of
what defines the working class is being threatened, an identity defined by a “strong orientation
toward planning for the future, trying to control one’s destiny, pulling one’s weight, respecting
others who try to get ahead in the same way,” playing by the rules, and following a set of values
(Sullivan, Warren, & Westbrook 2000, p.32). They work hard and play by the rules, but yet it
seems the economy only rewards “speed and impatience, sudden fame and rapidly made
fortunes” and punishes their “loyalty and commitment, long-term painstaking effort and
patience, generosity and community-mindedness” (Dionne 1996, p.53). This is the moral crisis
that the working class fears, that “the old-fashioned virtues the society claim to celebrate were
being less and less rewarded” being morally good is no longer enough.
The center of the moral crisis is the feeling amongst the working class that the country
has lost its sense of morality and values and is now consumed with promoting immoral
behaviors. They feel, within the vast changes, the country has lost its morals way and has
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compromised the values that defined what it means to be a “true American.” It refers to the
increase in the “immoral” behavior of women getting pregnant out of wedlock and how society
has come to not only accept this, but has altered certain government policies such as welfare to
perpetuate this trend. Dionne points out that the outrage of many working class Americans over
the use of welfare, a social program that was created to lessen the burden on working-class
families and widows, is now being used to help “single mothers” and breakup families (Dionne
1996, p.52). This class of Americans believes that by helping single mothers, welfare is setting a
poor example for future generations which to them is grounds for the program to be repealed. To
the working class, welfare rewarded immoral behaviors instead of punishing them. The act of
having a child out of wedlock is immoral in the sense that it deprives the child of a two parent
family structure, and in this situation that mother would have to take the role of the father and
work long hours to provide for her kid, but also neglecting the kid. This is a trend conservatives
and working class Americans, in Dionne’s telling, have come to condemn as immoral affluent
behavior that “set poor examples and undermined the values on which social stability depends”
(Dionne 1996, p.52). Seeing an opening to build a GOP-working class alliance the Republican
Party hone in on the moral crisis and blamed the liberals and the wealthy for setting bad
examples for the rest of society by promoting wedlock, abortion, looser views on sexuality, and
“just plain trashy [liberal] behavior.” This conservative view of society separated these selfrighteous God-fearing voters from the rest of the country. The conservative moral attitude of the
working class also became an identity for the class to preserve itself in the face of societal and
economic changes.
The emergence of the three crises, Dionne writes, “gave politicians and ideologues a
great deal of ammunition to use at election time and many opportunities to shift the focus of the
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public debate to wherever the terrain was most favorable” (Dionne 1996, p.63). Politicians and
ideologues, Dionne argues, have manipulated these three crises to viciously attack the
shortcomings/faults of their opponents in the case of the working class. They also manipulated
these crises to avoid the demands of another crisis. For instance, Republicans always tend to use
the moral crises as ammunition to pull in the working class. William Bennett, Dionne argued,
outplayed this when he said: “Our problem is not economic---Our problems are moral, spiritual,
philosophical, behavioral….crime, murder, divorce, drug use, and just plain trashy behavior”
(Dionne 1996, p.63). William Bennett went on to recite the Republicans’ best rhetoric that,
Dionne states, “point to the moral crisis as the core problem facing the country, and define the
moral crisis in a way that played down its economic components” and nurtures further antigovernment skepticism from political crises. The strategic use of moral issues has created “two
Americas,” where you have the Republicans-working class and of the other you have the rest of
the country. This “us against them” mentality has created class hostility amongst working class
whites (Dionne 1996, p.63). It pitted the working class alongside their conservative foes against
liberals and ineffective government. In response to Republicans focusing on the moral crises,
Liberals turned their concentration on the economic crises and the appeal of effective
government to court the working class. They can accomplish this by addressing the “economic
factors causing distress” in the working class and promising an effective government like
Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Roosevelt was effective as a government entity
because of his. New Deal program that protected the people from the giant corporations on Wall
Street and passed effective policies that provided economic stability and working class wellbeing (Dionne 1996, p. 64). Ultimately, the methods Democrats use to appeal to working class
voters are similar to the methods of the right. The Democrats are always looking to turn moral
53
crises into economic issues. Unfortunately, for the left, history has shown the rhetoric of the right
to be more compelling. Especially since, there is also a long period of resentment, amongst the
working class, against the left for abandoning them. Ultimately, Dionne writes, the Democratic
and Republican Parties both appeal to a discontent and politically frustrated working class
Americans he refers to as the “anxious” working class.
Interpreting Dionne’s analysis of the three crises, this study shows that conservatives
have not “won the hearts” of the working class and liberals have not lost them. He stated that the
working class “tends to be quite moderate or pragmatic on the issues that excite liberals and
conservatives. It sense the moral crisis, but is inclined to see both its cultural and economic
sides” (Dionne 1996, p.86).The interesting characteristic of the working class is that they have
loyalty to no one but themselves, as we will see, they follow the party they believe best
understands their concerns at any given time. These working class whites have left the
Democratic Party but have not permanently joined the right. At the moment, Republicans run a
powerful movement that has become more appealing to the working class. Which will cause
them to vote on culture issues over economic self-interest, but this does not mean they have
abandoned their economic interests. The party has honed in on this moral crisis to bring in the
votes of the working class by putting more weight on the moral crisis while attempting to
“redefine what voters might experience as an economic crisis into a moral one” (Dionne 1996, p.
64). Voters accept the rhetoric of the left and right but are aware that “all three crises were
central to their discontent" (Dionne 1996, p.65). As stated earlier, working class whites are
subjected to a world where they are no longer masters of their future or the ones of generations to
come, especially since those they vote into office are ineffective to help or protect them. The
working class is fighting against the social changes that are occurring in the country by
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embracing the conservative cultural rhetoric. It is also a strategy for the “anxious” working class
to preserve old identities that restore honor, morals, class distinction, and authenticity back to the
working class.
III.
Meet the Anxious White Working Class
Dionne’s clear usage of the term “white American working-class,” tell us that these are
the class of voters he is writing about. He also used the terms “blue-collar,” “lower-middle” and
“forgotten majority,” which we know from Bartels are interchangeable words that refer to the
white working class (Dionne 1991, p.49 & Dionne 1996, p.68). Who are the anxious working
citizens? Following Frank’s lead, Dionne defined “non-college-educated whites” of moderate
income ranging from $15,000 to $30,000 low-income and lower-middle income between
$30,000 and $50,000 (Dionne 1996, p.74). It is this class of working white voters that Dionne
refers to as the anxious middle, a discontented majority that “holds the future of American
politics in its hands” (Dionne 1996, p.67). In Dionne’s telling, the adjective “anxious” speaks to
the desperation and unpredictability of the class. Desperation and unpredictability caused by the
discontent created by pressures of the three crises, discussed in depth earlier. These three crises
came with vast changes that resulted in their economic insecurity, the fear of a moral and social
breakdown of American society, and the decline of government power that turns into
government ineffectiveness to protect them. The anxious middle is conscious of its discontent
and aware that it stems from these three crises. These three crises have made them impatient of
their stagnate situation, resentful of the changing world that has left them behind and threatening
their way of life, and fearful that despite their best efforts “both the government and the economy
are blocking their paths to self-sufficiency” (Dionne 1996, p.67). The strong ideological rhetoric
of the left and right have only amplified these working-class anxieties, with the right focusing on
55
moral crises and downplaying the importance of economics, and the left focusing on economics
and downplaying moral issues. Both parties were in a constant vicious political battle with each
other in an attempt to appeal more to the anxious middle, in disgust, political gridlock in
Washington and the desperate need for economic change the people abandoned “traditional
ideological and partisan loyalties” and granted Democrats and Clinton control of the government
in 1992. The 1992 election shows that the working class has no loyalty to either party and only to
their anxieties.
1992 marked the rise of an anxious middle class power that is desperate for solutions to
vast changes. In 1992, the anxious middle class reduced votes for Republicans, granting
Democrats and Clinton “full control of the elected part of the federal government for the first
time in twelve years” (Dionne 1996, p.67). Clinton was victorious because, unlike his opponents
Perot and Bush, he understood and foresaw the anxious middle and shaped his campaign to
“respond to their concerns” (Dionne 199, p.67). Clinton offered these voters favorable social
programs such as: “welfare reform”, “new educational training” that opened doors to economic
possibilities, free education for the military, tax reduction for the middle while increasing taxes
on the rich, and “plans for national health insurance” (Dionne 1996, p.68). Clinton’s proposed
welfare reform, which was a racial resentment program, was embraced by the white working
class because it restricted aid to blacks and rewarded white working class hard work and
individual efforts. According to Victoria Massie, his welfare reform sought to break people’s
dependency on government, forcing blacks to take responsibility for their situation and take
actions to help themselves instead of exploiting the government programs, that the working class
believes was meant to reward their hard work. Clinton’s welfare reform was very well received
by the working class because besides rewarding hard work it also sought to “promote two-parent
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households and marriage, drawing heavily from dubious ideas that women were using out-ofwedlock births to cash in on welfare” (Massie 2016). Clinton’s economic rhetoric intertwined
with morality hidden behind racial resentment was strong, it repeatedly spoke to the frustration
the working class felt with the political, moral, and economic crises and viciously attacking the
Republican Party and labeling it the party of “the rich and special interests,” to disconnect the
working class from the party (Dionne 1996, p.70). He focused on how the working class
deserves more economically and rewarded for its moral values and how it should be outraged to
be settling for less. Clinton had big ideas and was optimistic about the future of the world class.
Dionne writes, he “sought to solve the defection of white voters of moderate income (blue-collar
and lower-middle) from the Democratic ranks” by detaching himself from his party’s past with
liberalism and deemed himself a New Democrat who will deliver solutions. In 1992, this strategy
handed Clinton the presidency bringing in a 43 percent plurality. Clinton won “the three big midwestern states of Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio,” and reclaimed the Democratic “votes in the
South and won Rocky Mountain states that had only recently seemed permanent Republican
strongholds” (Dionne 1996, p.71). Clinton’s victory amongst Southern white voters is significant
because it “marked the destruction of one of the most essential building blocks of Republican
ascendancy” (Dionne 1996, p.72). Southern voters originally were one of the backbones behind
the Democratic coalition but left because it felt abandoned when the Democrats decided to
pursue the Civil Rights movement. Republicans, on the other hand, faced a soaring defeat in
1992, with Bush’s vote “declining by fifteen percentage points between 1988 and 1992” and “his
37.4 percent was the lowest share for a Republican presidential candidate since 1912” (Dionne
1996, p.71). Bush and his party did not understand the anxious middle class and failed to connect
with its concerns. According to New York Times Journalist, Robin Toner, Bush was “trying to
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convince the voters that the country was in better shape than they thought. Still, the voter surveys
showed that seven in ten voters considered the economy either poor or "not so good” (Toner
1992). The anxious middle was discontented with Bush’s broken promise of not raising taxes
and creating a thriving economy. As Clinton stated: “They wanted a new beginning,” (Toner
1992). They showed more confidence in Clinton’s “new welfare system based on the ‘old’
values of work, family and personal responsibility” and in 1992 they gave Clinton and
Democrats a chance to execute their reinvention of the progressive tradition (Dionne 1996, p.77).
What did Clinton do with this opportunity?
The Democrats missed their opportunity when Clinton was incapable of delivering the
“political reform” and the middle-class tax-cut he promised. There were many factors that
account for Clinton’s failure to deliver. The first was due to Republicans, who “made sure
through obstruction that the outgoing Democratic Congress did not have reform achievements to
bring to the voters. The Democrats, [...], made this easy by delaying the reform package until the
end of the congressional session” (Dionne 1996, p.78). Instead, Dionne writes, after gridlocking
the Democrats the Republican Party introduced to voters its own political reforms of tax cuts, a
cheaper revised version of Clinton’s welfare reform, and aimed at decreasing working class
moral and economic uneasiness. The second reason Clinton fail is due to the fact that he was able
to identify the economic, moral, and political crises facing the working class, but he was not able
to solve it without spending a lot. Due to the country’s big deficit, Clinton’s spending budget was
constrained, which meant he was not able to fund programs to the “extent that would make it a
visible answer to economic anxieties” (Dionne 1996, p.94). The final and most important reason
for Clinton’s failure to deliver is credited to the Democrats lacking unity in support for Clinton to
implement his policies. The party, Dionne states, over the years has become far more “complex
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than the New Democrat versus Old Democrat shorthand description” (Dionne 1996, p.94). The
party has divided into five different groups: “southern moderates and conservatives; suburban
centrists; urban, labor-oriented white liberals; black and Hispanic members from cities and parts
of the rural South (who are also mostly liberals); and a diverse group of western and Midwestern
Democrats from rural areas” (Dionne 1996, p.103). Clinton could not get these Democratic
factions to unite behind his policies, and instead found himself consistently “struggling for votes
as one faction or another abandoned his favored position” (Dionne 1996, p.95). These
Congressional obstacles became a challenge to Clinton’s presidency because they did not trust
Clinton “because he refused to side permanently with any faction” and some of them were more
preoccupied with corporate interests and financing that came with it (Dionne 1996, p.95).
Touching on Frank’s point, Dionne writes that the Democratic Coalition was more concerned
with the interests of Corporate America that they failed to support Clinton’s welfare and health
care programs. A missed opportunity, Dionne and Frank argued, that will haunt the Democratic
Party for decades. Clinton’s failure opened the doors for a Republican congressional victory in
1994 amongst the anxious middle and most importantly the South. In 1994, Republicans
appealed to the anxious middle through its discontent with Clinton. Dionne writes that
Republicans like Rick Santorum formed a strong anti-government, anti-liberal, and moral
argument that argues that “the government was failing to deliver to the middle-class, but that
government itself was the enemy of middle-class aspirations and a barrier to middle-class
freedom” (Dionne 1996, p.79). This rhetoric plays into anxious whites’ fears of a government
and economy that is against them despite their efforts to be self-sufficient. Democrats now
carried the blame for weak government and most importantly in government corruption. In 1994,
it was evident that voters who were discontented with Clinton’s big government idea because it
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did not work in their interests, in retaliation, gave the Republican a majority to execute their
small government ideas and preserve the moral values of the American society. The elections of
1992 and 1994 were a period showing the power and rise of the anxious middle, its loyalty to no
party and its “willingness to punish Republicans in 1992 and Democrats in 1994” (Dionne 1996,
p.84). Dionne predicted the continuation of this “punishment politics” until anxious middle-class
Americans felt or saw that their “downward slide is reversing” (Dionne 1996, p.89).
The important thing about the anxious middle, Dionne points out, is that although it is
discontented and frustrated, these Americans desperately “long for a strong political leader who
will ‘fix’ things” (Dionne 1996, p.87). It desires an effective stable democracy that can fix the
pressures of the three crises, offering a restoration of working class economic stability and
morality. That’s “based on old values of work, family, and personal responsibility” (Dionne
1996, p.77). Most importantly, quoting Labor Secretary Reich, Dionne states that the anxious
working class wants a government that will uphold the economic bargain that “if you worked
hard and your company prospered, you would share the fruits of success” and the cultural
agreement “echoing the same themes of responsibility and its rewards: Live by the norms of your
community---take care of your family, obey the law, treat your neighbors with respect, love your
country---and you’ll feel secure in the certainty that everyone else would behave the same way”
(Dionne 1996, p.90). Dionne is optimistic that the anxious working class can find the leader they
are looking for with a return to progressive liberalism and with the second chance for the
Democratic Party to deliver. Liberalism in the mainstream sense, is the ideological belief in
equality and freedom built on the “old traditions of democratic reformism” (Beer 1996, p.71).
The goal of liberalism is to advocate for social reforms and equality that encourage individual
achievements and to emphasize the need for government to solve problems. Liberalism became
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prominent to the working class during FDR’s New Deal era. It aggressively advocated for
government programs that, as we have mentioned earlier, protected the working class from the
unfairness of the market and set rules to help stabilize the economy. Regardless of its past
achievements, liberalism on account of several factors has lost its vital role of working class
protector, and before it can return to that position, Dionne writes, that liberalism must first
understand its past mistakes.
The intellectual foundations of post-New Deal liberalism began to unravel in the 1960s
with the attack on the “legitimacy of the liberal state” from both the New Left and Right (neoconservatism) (Dionne 1991, p.37). The New Left was “consciously a political movement” with
a socialist outlook based on “participatory democracy” (Dionne 1991, p.33-34). As a way of
improving collective action to designed to “safeguard human rights and ensure social
order” (Dionne 1991, p.35). They demanded social improvements claiming that the “early 1960s
was a nation of alienated conformists. ‘Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of
life,’ [...] ‘people are fearful of the thought that at any moment, things may be thrust out of
control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems
to hold back chaos for them now” (Dionne 1991, p.35). The New Left preyed on people’s fears
of “isolation,” “loneliness,” “estrangement,” and on people's desperate need for belonging
(Dionne 1991, p.35). It uses these fears to bring people together and demand freedom from these
realities through active engagement in politics. Within collective movements, the New Left turn
its angry to the government, namely, liberalism. It criticized liberalism for not living up to its
ideals and compromising on its very existence. As a result, it became more skeptical of
liberalism and saw liberalism as a form of corporate interests that is no longer concerned with
"fixing" social issues. For this reason, they declared the liberal state an enemy and sought out to
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destroy it. Their anger, eventually, became hatred of American culture, creating “cultural and
moral rebellion as a political revolt” (Dionne 1991, p.40). When the New Left presented a highly
articulate and able wrecking crew’ to unravel liberalism, liberalism showed little to no resistance,
turned on itself, and took actions to join the New Left. The liberals who did not accede to the
New Left moved to the right and became the Neocons.
The Neocons were “newly conservative ex-liberals,” who moved to the right following
the attack of the New Left (Dionne 1991, p.55). To Dionne, the Neocons, sharing the same
skepticism of the New Left, also attacked liberalism revolting on its right. The Neocons knew
where to attack liberalism because “they knew liberalism from the inside, the neoconservatives
were often more effective than the old conservatives at explaining what was wrong with the
liberal creed” (Dionne 1991, p.56). From their past, in liberalism, they argued that liberalism was
no longer relevant to today’s issues. They have come to believe that the country is facing a moral
crisis and that only “restraints of tradition” can “keep people from misbehaving” (Dionne 1991,
p.62). They advocated for the restoration of morality to solve social problems. They believed in
government programs, but only if such programs rewarded hard working people who follow the
rules and does not create government dependency. They criticized liberalism's need to solve
inequality through false pretenses, claiming that “liberalism’s response to new array of interests
groups (blacks, feminists, gays, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc.) was shift to from advocating
‘equality of opportunity’ to trying to achieve ‘equality of results’ through affirmative action”
(Dionne 1991, p.69). The Neocons feared that liberalism's response to the interests of the
increasing social groups is not solving social problems, rather it's disrupting a "reward structure
that they considered largely just" (Dionne 1991, p.69).
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Liberalism, Dionne writes, was not ready nor did it have answers to the issues of race,
gender, morality, and several other social problems raised by the New Left and the Neocons.
Contrary to the critics of the New Left and Neocons, liberalism saw itself as a powerful force for
cultural changes, especially when it fought against racism and equality in the 1960s. During that
period, it prevailed in the signing of the Civil Rights Act but failed to recognize white-working
class’ resentment, which resulted in the defection of these voters from the party. Liberalism
made the mistake of “overselling its programs” and when it was time to deliver end up short,
falling into social and political traps (Dionne 1991, p.90). Liberals were stuck in the middle,
between inpatient blacks that seek further social equality and whites who felt their interests were
being abandoned for blacks. All these forces contributed to liberalism’s demise and when it
couldn’t come up with one conclusion to social problems the country faced people, especially the
white working class, lost faith in it. However, liberalism can regain the confidence of the
working class, but it must recognize past mistakes and offer sound solutions to social problems.
Liberalism, Dionne argues needs to be able to understand the anxieties of the anxious working
class and also needs to restore the class back to the core of liberal ideologies. To accomplish this,
liberals, Dionne argues, must fight for effective government policies. Policies that are similar to
the New Deal (a New New Deal), that protected the working class’ economic interests and
moved “American attitudes towards possibilities of government, the virtues of collective
endeavor, and the rights of” the working class (Dionne 1991, p.259). This New New Deal must
be inclusive and proactive in pushing for effective government policies that reassuring the
working class of its economic, political, and moral crises.
Dionne makes a persuasive argument for liberalism, but it would be difficult to get public
support for a New New Deal. History has shown us that the working class has come to denounce
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liberalism and is very reluctant to trust in it again. Based on the 2016 presidential elections, this
study argues that liberalism's rebirth is possible, if it's disguised under a different name. In 2016,
Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders ran on the concept of liberalism, his policies were purely
liberal policies of FDR’s New New Deal, however Sanders did not label himself to be a liberal.
He detached his policies and political image from the past of liberalism to appeal to white
working class voters. Sanders identified himself as a Democratic Socialists claiming it’s an
ideology that “...builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed
economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968
when he stated that, ‘This country has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the
poor.’ It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far
better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the
children, the sick and the poor” (Seitz-Wald 2015). Sanders received slight resistance for the
word “socialism,” but he defends his position by stating the term does not mean absolute
government. Instead, he says, it means working class families deserve a system that is fair to
them. Besides his favorable policies, Sanders was also appealing to the majority of working class
voters because he was anti-establishment and against corporations. He represented the
“something new” they were looking for, the strong force that will stop the gridlock in
Washington and get things done. In Sanders, they saw a promising future. Unfortunately,
Sanders was not given a chance to deliver because he lost his party’s nomination to Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton. Ultimately, when it comes down to solving the working class plight, this
study argues in agreement with Dionne that we do need a New New Deal but one that is labeled
under a different name from liberalism and socialism (although it worked for Sanders). We need
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a New New Deal, similar to that proposed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, which had a
powerful economic rhetoric that excited the working class.
Conclusion
The vast economic, political and social changes that occurred since the 1970s brought
forth characteristics of anxiety and uncertainty within America’s white working class. The reality
of decent paying manufacturing jobs being displaced to low-wage countries, working longer
hours for lower wages, shrinking savings, mounting debt, income inequality, dependence on two
incomes, and economic stagnation became the concerns that kept working class families awake
at night. They are filled with anger as they watch their lives deteriorate while bearing witness to
an economic and political system that has and continues to put wealthy and corporate interests
above their economic self-interests. The social changes that came with these economic outcomes
also brought tremendous concerns and increased anxieties. They saw threatening societal
changes that were progressing at a fast rate and becoming too liberal on abortion issues, gun
rights, trashy TV, religion, prayers in school, desegregation gay-marriage, minorities, women’s
role and several other traditional cultural values. The world economically and socially was
moving too fast for them and was creating new rules where their individual efforts of “working
hard, being honest, and obtaining working class set of moral values” were no longer enough.
These changes made the white working class feel as if they were being forgotten and forced to
cope with changes they were not ready for and did not want. The white working class makes up a
political powerful class of voters, yet they are incapable of changing their current economic and
social predicament in their favor. Decades of voting for the Republican and Democratic Party
and they are still discontent, now more than ever. Their situation is worse now than it was in the
1970s. They still continue to face economic inequality and continue to be stuck in a gridlock
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over the same social issues. No government power has given them what they truly need and
desire from politics. This study examined three accounts of this confusing chain of events in
contemporary American politics. The analysis of Thomas Frank, Larry Bartels, and E.J. Dionne
provided this study with an understanding of the political, economic, and social forces that
account for the discontent and possible threats to the future of America’s forgotten majority.
The Washington Post Journalist, Frank was the first to offer an analysis of what’s been
happening to the white working class in his proclaimed best-seller, What’s the Matter with
Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Frank attributes the economic plight of
the white working class as a consequence of these Americans without a college degree with
relatively low, shifting to the Republican Party under the false pretenses of a cultural inversion
called the Great Backlash. The Great Backlash is a successful conservative working class
movement that capitalizes on cultural issues such as busing, religion, abortion, gay marriage,
trashy TV, and several social issues that have outraged the working class. The movement
harnesses the working class’ rage while downplaying the economic self-interests of the working
class. The Great Backlash, based on its history, is an example of a classic bait and switch
movement that has done nothing for the working class but has fought to set the progressive
achievements of Democrats in favor of these voters. Frank argued that once in power, the
Republican leaders of the movement never deliver on social issues that put them in office.
Instead, they focus on pro-business economic policies in favor of corporate economic interests.
Frank writes that the movement hides its lack of delivery behind the false conservative identity
of authenticity, a new concept of class identity as a matter of conservative moral values and
unpretentiousness that is distinguished itself from the old economic hierarchical definition of
class. Authenticity, according to Frank, has isolated working class whites along with their
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Republican comrades from liberals, minorities, and the rest of the country. It labels the working
class as being the “real Americans,” giving them an identity that separates and acknowledges
their desire to preserve working class values in the midst of a changing world. Frank argues,
however, that the Backlash movement and the concept of authenticity do not deliver what the
working class truly needs, which would be favorable and effective economic policies, and which
he claims only liberals can deliver. The movement’s success cannot only be credited to
Republicans but also to Democrats, who Frank claim adopted a “criminally stupid strategy.” A
strategy that openly courts wealthy and corporate interests while pursuing aggressive liberal
social issues that isolated the working class. As a consequence, the class abandoned the party and
deeming it a threat to working class authenticity. Ultimately, Frank is arguing that the working
class itself has forgotten its fundamental interests and as a consequence has adopted a false
conservative identity that has and continues to lead them on an endless self-destructive path of
increasing anxieties and distrust of the Democratic Party. By examining the political behaviors of
working class whites in the country, this study found evidence of Frank’s Backlash movement.
However, there are scholars such as Bartels who disagree with Frank’s analysis of a
white working class Backlash. In his rebuttal to Frank, What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter
with Kansas?, Bartels claimed that he found no evidence that indicates the existence of a white
working class phenomenon. First, he defined Frank’s white working class voters without a
college degree as those earning an annual income of $35,000 or less in 2004. Amongst these
classes of people, Bartels found rationally calculating voters that are not being misled by the
Republican Party, that have not defected from the Democratic Party and that are aware of
economics being their fundamental interests, not cultural values. Bartels argued that his analysis
shows that, contrary to Frank, non-college educated white voters place more weight on
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economics than they do on culture. If a Backlash movement existed, Bartels argued, we should
have seen these voters put more weight on social issues and dismiss economics, but that did not
happen. Instead, Bartels found that college-educated and affluent white voters place twice the
weight on social issues over economics. From these results, Bartels concluded that if Frank’s
backlash exists, its actors are in the middle-income and those who are college-educated, not
those at the bottom third. Bartels argued that there is no evidence of Frank’s white working class
defecting from the Democratic Party, arguing that he found that voters in the middle-and-high
income segments of the working class are the ones abandoning the party. Bartels is not shocked
by this data because the majority of these voters reside in the South, a region the Democratic
Party lost to Republicans due to racial resentment of the party’s pursuit of Civil Rights in favor
of blacks. Bartels writes that middle-and-high income working class voters in the non-South
have also been defecting from the Democrats, but because of the increasing support of lowincome whites (making less than $35,000) the impact is not great. However, my study found the
evidence presented by Bartels as irrelevant, because the category of low-income in Bartels’s data
may have included the working poor and the poor should not be considered working class. This
study found that Bartels’s data does not specify what annual income (within the $35,000 or less
definition) is no longer considered working class, but working poor or poor. The present study
argues that when we exclude Bartels’s low-income data, we found evidence of a working class
phenomenon that supports Frank’s thesis. This study also argues that Bartels was too quick to
dismiss Frank’s thesis to a middle-and-high income working class phenomenon solely confined
to the South. He did so, without closely looking at what was happening in the South and the
possibility that it might be spreading to the rest of the country. My study provides evidence that
proves that Frank’s movement does not only apply to South but has spread to the rest of the
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country. The South has become the definition of what it means to be an American and a working
class citizen. Shared racial hostility, abandonment of the Democratic Party, moral values,
economic discontent, and authenticity has bonded the white working classes of the South and the
non-South. Frank, contrary to Bartels, foresaw this Backlash movement that was possibly
spreading to every working class family. My study found that the effects of this spreading
Backlash in the presidential election between George McGovern and Richard Nixon showed us
that moral values held potency over economics amongst white voters and that these voters have
abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. Ultimately, the present study found
evidence that contradicts Bartels claims of finding no evidence in his statistical research that
reveals a working class phenomenon. Bartels underestimated a critical political analysis of the
white working class that Frank has diagnosed. However, in his analysis, Frank had some
shortcomings when he focused on the importance of economics but underestimates the potency
moral values have on shaping working class identity. He portrays moral values as distractions
created by cultural conservatives (which they were), but by continuously viewing values this
way, he failed to see the connection between the working class’ economic interests and its moral
values.
I have argued that Dionne provided a stronger, more reassuring analysis of white working
class voters that supports and expands on Frank’s thesis and dismisses Bartels’s claims of their
not being a white Backlash movement. Dionne offers us the compelling argument about the
working class and its anxieties that allow us to argue that the anxieties of these people have
become the consequence of the decline of the entire middle class. In They Only Look Dead, E.J.
Dionne introduced us to a white working class he refers to as “anxious” swing voters with
“moderate incomes” that have defected from the Democratic Party, but that have not become
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reliable Republicans. Their anxiousness derives from three deep sense of crisis: “the economic
crisis, the political crisis, and the moral crisis.” The economic crisis is a consequence of a
globalized economy that has displaced blue-collar manufacturing jobs with decent pay and
benefits to cheap labor countries. Globalization brought economic inequality, and threatens a
decent standard of living within the working class while also rewarding those top well-educated
performers and corporations. The political crisis addresses the abandonment and nurturing
mistrust of government the working class felt when the government became ineffective to help
fight against the globalized economy. Before the great impact of the globalized economy, the
working class had always relied on the Democratic Party Progressive liberal ideologies to protect
them from corporations and promote pro-working class economic policies that stabilized the
economy and ensured fairness. According to Frank and Dionne, the Democrats tarnished this
important responsibility when the party openly courted the wealthy and corporate interests and
abandoned the working class economic interests. Dionne claims that the Democratic betrayal
paved the path for the rise of influential conservative particularist movements of “race, gender,
culture” and “nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and xenophobia.” Finally, the moral crisis
created two Americas, where you have the white working class with Republicans and liberals
with the rest of the country. Within the moral crises, the working class has divided itself from the
country on the basis of authenticity, a way of living that separates righteous God-fearing working
whites from immoral behaviors. Dionne argues that political parties, in response to these three
crises, have exploited for political advantage. The parties usually tend to focus on one issue
while also downplaying the importance of others. Liberals focus on an economic rhetoric, that
downplays the problems of social issues redefining it as an economic crisis in need of
government interference. While Republicans focus on cultural issues, disconnecting it from
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economics. According to Dionne, both parties have been stuck in gridlock, doing nothing but
attacking each other and trying to appeal to the working class but without delivering once in
office. Stuck in the middle and discontented with the political system, the working class swings
within the two parties pledging loyalty to either but giving each chance to fulfill its promise to
them and quick to punish those that don’t once in office. In 1992 they punished the Republican
Party for breaking its promises to them by giving Clinton and the Democrats a majority victory
that gave them full control of the government to implement their pro-working class policies of
economic relief. Unfortunately, Clinton failed to deliver because his party was pursuing
“criminally stupid strategy” that focused on corporate interests.
Ultimately, Dionne is arguing that there is an existence of Frank's working class
phenomenon. He argued in support of Frank that the Republican Party is manipulating them, but
not fully to the point that they forget their fundamental interests. The working class, Dionne
argued, has not forgotten about its economic interests. Conservatives downplay the importance
of economics, but the working class does not see economics as separate from moral issues
because their moral crisis was born from an economic crisis. Dionne’s argument about
economics being potent to the working class is in agreement with Bartels but for different
reasons. Bartels argues that economic is potent to the working class to prove that their is no
Backlash, while Dionne uses economic to prove the existence of the Backlash movement.
Dionne’s analysis of economic contradicts Bartels’s, but agrees and expands on Frank’s analysis.
Bartels argued that working whites have not forgotten their economic interests when they vote,
contrary to Frank’s thesis. Unlike Dionne, Bartels’ argument fails to recognize the importance of
values to working Americans outside of the South; he mistakenly equates social issues as the
concerns of the wealthy, not the working class. The working class is following the Republican
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values rhetoric until liberals, who are also manipulating them, can offer even more potent
rhetoric of economic issues. Interpreting the works of Dionne and Frank, I conclude that thus far,
both parties have not made substantive efforts to give working whites what they truly desire and
that is a “fix” to the pressures of the three crises. However, conservatives have given them an
identity in authenticity. However insufficient, it is an identity that allows them to differentiate
themselves from the rest of the country and preserve a set of morals and a way of life that they
fear is being threatened by a changing world. An analysis on which Dionne and Frank both agree
and have come across and Bartels dismissed.
The purpose of this study is to interrogate, explain, and analyze the works of Frank,
Bartels, and Dionne. We use these analyses to determine whether or not the anxiety of the white
working class has become the consequence of the decline of America’s masses (everyone except
the one percent and wealthy). Examining Frank in light of Dionne, conclude that the anxieties of
the white working class have resulted in the decline of America’s entire middle class.
Interpreting the works of Dionne and Frank, this study argues that the anxieties of the white
working class have led to them engaging in irrational political decisions that always end up
failing them and frustrating them more. Their anxieties have also made them susceptible to the
populist appeals of both Democrats and Republicans. Their anxieties have made them politically
selfish, only voting for candidates they believe will benefit and understand their interests without
thinking about consequences of their decisions on the whole country. This study aimed to
provide a clear understanding of the white working class to give us the advantage of being ready
to better respond to the political, economic, and social consequence of these voters’ political
decisions. After examining the scholarly works of Frank and Bartels in light of Dionne, this
study argues that the white working class’ false consciousness has and continues to compromise
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the ability of the American middle class to unite under one identity or to strategically participate
in politics that protects the common interests of the people and combats anxieties and
uncertainty. What this study found from the analysis of Frank, Bartels, and most importantly
Dionne, is that it is important for us as a society to understand the discontent of these voters
because being a politically powerful class of voters, the political decisions of the white working
class affects all of our futures, not just theirs. Their voting decision could mean the difference
between the reserval of social and economic achievements or the country being stuck in a
gridlock socially and economically. As a country, we often make the fatal mistake of writing off
the problems of the white working class as mere racial resentments without fully understanding
that economics is the center of it all, as economics fueled moral, political, and racial anxieties.
Economic solutions are what they need, but because of both parties’ failures to deliver, they have
been conditioned to settle on preserving other aspects of their lives such as cultural issues.
Dionne made a compelling case of showing us the origin and consequence of these anxieties and
how they are all connected to economics, which helps us to understand why they vote against
their interests. As a nation, we cannot afford to allow the white working class to be isolated from
the rest of the country. We must come together under one national identity and fight for a
political system that brings about effective economic policies that give people relief.
By analyzing the works of Bartels, Dionne, and Frank, this study can conclude that there
is a working class Backlash from whites without a college degree with moderate incomes, a
Backlash movement that has spread from the Deep South to the rest of the country. As a
consequence, this study argues, that the white Backlash as a response to its anxieties has resulted
in the declining prosperity of the entire country outside of the top 1 percent class. To stop this
decline, Dionne and Frank urges the working class whites to return to the core of liberalism, a
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return to being defenders of equality and protectors of working class interests through liberal
means. Dionne asserts that the working class swinging from both political parties shows a class
that is not getting what it wants from either party. Voters awaiting with desire for a “strong
political leader who will ‘fix’ things”, one that does not have affiliations with the two parties,
and restore the country back to when the odds were in their favor. Dionne argued that liberalism
can once again be that ‘something new’ for the working class, a concept that he believes holds
the potential to relieve the anxious working class of its social, political, economic, and moral
problems. According to Dionne, liberalism can succeed only once it recognizes the interests and
anxieties of the working class and pushes for traditional progressive policies. That promote
economic equality and stability and that protects the working class from the gridlock of both
parties and corporate interests like it once had with FDR’s New Deal. Dionne is proposing for a
‘New New Deal’ that rebuilds the trust between the government and the white working class.
Frank also proposed the similar solution of liberalism but states that liberals must denounce their
“criminally stupid strategy” of courting the wealthy and embracing corporate interests. By doing
so, Frank argued, liberals can turn back to the core of liberalism and fight for effective policies
like FDR’s New Deal that protected the working class economically. For liberalism to be
successful, Frank claims it must create a powerful rhetoric that focuses on economics to counter
the conservative cultural rhetoric. I agree with both authors that we need liberalism to answer the
outcry of the working class, but as I stated in the Dionne chapter, this will be hard to do because
the vast majority of Americans have lost faith in liberalism and would be reluctant to trust into
again after being betrayed by it. We need the policies and achievements of liberalism, but we
need to mask it under a new name that is not “liberalism,” if we are ever to get citizens to give it
a chance.
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As I noted earlier, the current 2016 election outcome proves my argument that liberalism
can be the solution to working class anxieties when is masked behind a new name. In 2016
Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders detached themselves from the stain word of
liberalism but offered progressive social programs (a New New Deal) that were grounded in the
core of liberalism. Sanders the anti-establishment candidate, was seen as a breath of fresh air to
the majority of working class families, they trusted in his policies and believes he would protect
them from corporations and the gridlock in Washington. Sanders brought out the excitement and
rage in the working class, but unfortunately, Sanders lost the candidacy to party rival Hillary
Clinton. Clinton, who was more corporatist and establishment, followed what Frank and Dionne
refers to as a “criminally stupid strategy.” She did not excite the people because with Clinton
they saw a political system that they are frustrated and angry at. It did not matter that Clinton had
a better working class economic policies, what she stood for became the deciding factor that
made her lost the presidency to anti-establishment Republican candidate Donald Trump. Trump
was neither a Republican nor a Democrat; he was an outsider that the working class believes will
restore economic stability and will protect them. Ultimately, the current political inversion in
America, as Dionne puts it, is a consequence of the white working class rebelling against bad
government. For decades, the government has shown itself to be ineffective in addressing the
economic, moral and political crises which have led to the distrusting of government. We need a
political system built on the similar concept of liberalism that can effectively respond to the
anxieties of the white working class and their deep sense of crisis to help the country to move
forward together as one America instead of two.
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