The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension
To win in 2018 and especially 2020, Democrats need more identity politics — not less. They must address the widespread working-class revolt against global elites.
.. we must attend to what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb call the “hidden injuries of class.” These are dramatized by a recent employment study, in which the sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.
.. This first concerns social honor. Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. We hear talk of “trailer trash” in “flyover states” afflicted by “plumber’s butt” — open class insults that pass for wit. This condescension affects political campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s about people who “cling to guns or religion.”
.. If class-based insults were as politically incorrect as racial or homophobic slurs, Rush Limbaugh’s rants against P.C. elites might hold less appeal. Mr. Limbaugh, like Mr. Trump, feeds off class resentment. Let’s stop making their jobs easier.
.. In fact, the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.”
.. In some cities, a construction boom is hobbled by a lack of plumbers. We might ameliorate this problem if we stopped talking about plumber’s butt.
.. Democrats have given Republicans the priceless gift of letting them be the party that talks more about good jobs for working-class Americans. What’s the Republican jobs program? Supply-side economics, which is bad science but savvy politics, because it communicates to working-class whites that Republicans understand what they want: jobs.
.. When economic resentments are not addressed, they morph in ugly ways. Immigration provides an example.
.. In other words, he turned immigration into a wedge issue by turning it into a jobs issue. Democrats need to reverse this process. Expressing a commitment to good jobs for Americans of all races can help keep economic anxieties from exacerbating racism.
.. Martin Luther King Jr. “Equality means dignity,” he said. “And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.”