Obamacare, Hands Off My Medicare
Beginning in the early 1970s, just as support for redistribution began to decline, “corporate America began to devote attention and meaningful resources to politics,” Drutman writes. “The 40-year trend has overwhelmingly moved in one direction: growth. Corporate lobbying expenditures now dwarf the comparable investments of unions” and public interest or citizen groups.
From 1998 to 2012, the ratio of corporate/trade association lobbying spending to union/public interest group spending went from 22 to one to 34 to one, Drutman found.
.. From the late 1960s onward, the Democratic left has moved its emphasis away from an encompassing class-based agenda rooted in the New Deal coalition to a relative focus on a so-called identity group agenda, attacking discrimination against women, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and other once-marginalized constituencies.
.. But this shift does not foster widespread support for resource-oriented redistributive policies. Instead, identity group politics often play directly into the hands of Republican strategists.
.. The conservative strategy, they write, is to portray “social welfare policies as benefiting particular interest groups rather than society as a whole.” The more the electorate sees a policy or program as “particularistic” — as opposed to universalist — the less backing the public will give the program.