David Frum has an interesting op-ed in the NYT on the "vanishing Republican voter." Here's a taste:
Measured by money income, Washington qualifies as one the most unequal cities in the United States. Yet these two very different halves of a single city do share at least one thing. They vote the same way: Democratic. And in this, we are not alone. As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim.
My fellow conservatives and Republicans have tended not to worry very much about the widening of income inequalities. As long as there exists equality of opportunity — as long as everybody’s income is rising — who cares if some people get rich faster than others? Societies that try too hard to enforce equality deny important freedoms and inhibit wealth-creating enterprise. Individuals who worry overmuch about inequality can succumb to life-distorting envy and resentment.
All true! But something else is true, too: As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us.
The piece is filled with interesting observations, many of which should unsettle Frum's ideological compatriots on the Right. He concludes:
Equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal. But inequality taken to extremes can overwhelm conservative ideals of self-reliance, limited government and national unity. It can delegitimize commerce and business and invite destructive protectionism and overregulation. Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too. We must develop a positive agenda that integrates the right kind of egalitarianism with our conservative principles of liberty. If we neglect this task and this opportunity, we won’t lose just the northern Virginia suburbs. We will lose America.
Also, Frum's piece seems to believe that liberals have a great answer to income inequality. I doubt taxing the rich and giving entitlement programs to the poor really is the answer.
I think you've missed the point of Adler's post, and at least that section of Frum's piece that he's cited here.
Neither of them blamed conservative policies for the current state of DC, nor do either of them claim that liberal policies are better in any way.
The whole point of the article, if I'm not misunderstanding it myself, is that inequality, while not an evil in and of itself, does lead to other things that conservatives don't like, and therefore more attention should be paid to it.
Wow. Not "can't be THE goal," but "can't even be A goal"?
We hold these truths to be self-evident -- that all men are created equal ....
I guess the Declaration is a "scrap of paper" to the GOP, to borrow a phrase from one of its ideological soulmates.
Suggestion to GOP: If you don't want to "lose America," don't jettison the principles on which America was founded. Just a hint, folks.
#1 All men are created equal. Equality is inherent, and it is not the government's role to create equality but to recognize it.
#2 Frum is referring to economic equality. If you believe that our country was founded on the principle of economic equality, then you probably believe that the communist manifesto more accurately articulates our principles than the Constitution.
Later...
Why, oh why do all definitions of "income" fail to take into account non-cash benefits?
"Between 2001 and 2008, the amount that employers paid for labor rose impressively, at least 25 percent. Yet almost all of that money was absorbed by the costs of health insurance, which doubled over the Bush years."
Why, oh why do all definitions of "income" fail to take into account non-cash benefits?
Because they focus entirely on non-cash benefits (that is, they equate "rising income" with "rising standard of living expressed through increased purchasing power"). Rising health insurance costs did not lead to better health care, therefore in this model more money being spent on the person does not lead to increased income.
Thanks so much. My question then is how to solve the problem? Is inequality purely a problem of discrimination or a mixture of that, other issues, and, perhaps, the unwillingness to improve one's lot in life?
In Southwestern states, it is especially clear that low-skilled, poorly educated immigration from Latin America is the primary driver of poverty and inequality. The McCain/Graham Republicans, and allegedly pro-Labor Democrats both need to reconsider their fanatical support of mass immigration.
But let me speculate a bit. (Note that I haven't read anything but this one blog post.) We know that the big cities already go Democratic. (Recall the pictures after the 2004 election showing "red areas" and "blue areas" by surface area. The (facetious?) point there was that the "red area" looked like America, whereas the "blue area" looked like a bunch of islands. Obviously, this was because the blue areas were mostly the cities, and that's also where a ton of people live!)
Anyway... as I said, we already know that the urban poor go heavily Democratic, for good or bad reasons as you prefer. But the big cities are also where you have major financial services, etc., etc., so that it's not surprising that rich people also want to go live there. But note: Even if (unlike in Washington) those rich people all vote Republican, the mass of the urban poor will still make those cities predominantly Democratic. Again, it's not inequality causing politics, but the existence of the mass of the urban poor that both makes cities more likely to be highly unequal places and makes cities Democratic.
Of course, there might be a causal phenomenon at work: maybe inequality does produce problems of its own that cause Democratic ideas to become more popular. Maybe. But just looking at the cross-sectional correlation doesn't give us that answer.
I spent all summer in NoVA/DC and the difference I noticed immediately is that nearly everyone there is a government employee or a former government employee or a government contractor. They're all suckling at the teat of government! And even private industry around there is focused mostly on providing goods and services to these people. This type of environment isn't conducive to the growth of political parties that favor shrinking the size of government. There is no need to grind away at people's income histories to see why northern virginia is the land of big government when you have an explanation this obvious.
That deals with the "rich." When dealing with the "poor" I don't think that measuring their wealth relative to everyone else is very meaningful at all. I feel a better indicator of what party they will vote for is whether your "poor" happen to be entitlement minded urban blacks or some other group that doesn't go 90 percent for the democrats in every election, like hispanics or whites.
Frum can stuff his socialism where the sun doesn't shine.
The system we are moving toward is a variant on the feudal system, in which a relatively small number of rich people generously (or grudgingly) provide out of their wealth for the poorer masses, who are expected to be grateful.
I think the diagnosis, though interesting, is not wholly correct. When you snidely make fun of everyone who lives in a city (now that Starbucks is one of America's largest retailers can we quit with the elitist latte jokes?), urban dwellers aren't going to much like you. When you pretend that there is some mythical real America where real Americans live, voters who do not live in your vision of real America aren't going to have confidence in you.
The "upper crust" voter who used to reliably vote Republican is largely gone.
"Rising health insurance costs" could mean two different things: either the same quality of care is offered for a higher real price, or more/better care is offered, and that causes the real price to increase. If any of the latter occurs (and it's hard to argue that it hasn't), then employees are indeed receiving a higher standard of living.
I'd like to reiterate that I think it is a huge mistake to find meaning in these statistical comparisons between salaries since most people who don't work in HR have almost no knowledge of how much other people are making. If your living expenses are staying more or less the same, who cares that Bob in Acquisitions &Mergers got a 15 percent raise and a bonus when you only got 5 percent increase? You can buy 5 percent more stuff than before, you just can't buy a new BMW or whatever it is that Bob wastes his money on. In my experience employees are very careful not to compare salaries with one another. Beyond secretaries and HR people, discussing or knowing such things is a huge taboo in the american workplace. I've worked in many places and no one discucsses such things. Not only do you not know that Bob got a bigger raise than you, unless he spends it on something big, you aren't going to notice it in any other way.
It's not called neofeudalism for nothing.
It's hilarious that Sasha thinks that one gets rich in Washington by working in government.
I know an individual who used to be "upper crust", or at least somewhere reliably in the middle, born and raised in a major city in Ohio. If he stayed there, he'd be paying another 4% of his income to taxes, banned from owning a variety of previously lawful handguns and rifles, dealing with at best hooligans and at worst outright gang crime. Read The Ten Ring, or No Looking Backwards.
I can certainly believe that there are no Republicans left in the major cities -- I presume that at least some sizable portion of the GOP is remotely sane, after all -- but when faced with an increasingly blue cities and dozens of economic incentives to leave them, I think the presumption that the previously Republican voters turned Democrat is not the best one.
This disparity doesn't create more democrats it is the result of more democrats implementing their policies. If analysts didn't live in such a left-wing bubble then this would be readily apparent to them.
Turned Democratic? Depends on what you and I mean. No, I don't think that vast numbers of people who once voted Republican have switched sides. What has happened is that as these people have aged, no similar group of younger people has come along to replace them.
A huge segment of the middle class think their position is entirely attributable to their own hard work, disbelieving that people working just as hard as them make much less and much more than themselves. These people, by and large, are your Republicans. They think they make their own luck, ignoring the fact that the source of most of life's opportunities and luck is down to who your parents are, something in which they they had only a passive role.
Give it about four years of socialist policy under Barack Obama and his fellow travelers on Capitol Hill, and they'll be singing a different tune.
Sure, it's not like Obama's made one of Rubin's proteges his chief economic advisor or anything.
Time will tell. Let's see how the upper crust will react when Obama imposes a FICA payroll tax on incomes above $250k.
I am a litigator, not an economist. However, I have never understood the misuse of the noun, Democrat, as an adjective (other than as tribute to Joe McCarthy), e.g., "Democrat Party". Why does anyone think that the deliberate use of non-standard English is persuasive? (Apart from the use of dialect, a la Finley Peter Dunne's fictional character, Mr. Dooley.)
Also, any county that does not have blue collar whites is a heavily Democratic county. That is where immigration comes in. As immigrants push out blue collar and middle class whites, the counties stop being Democratic and the ecnonomic inequality increases.
"When Frum isn't stumping or saying things he doesn't believe in to advance a personal cause, he can be awesome."
The same could be said of yourself, but in that case it would be vacuously true.
I blame Karl Rove. Seriously.
How dare those immigrants force those whites out of their homes! This has to be the funniest description of white flight I've read in a while.
Look at cities in Texas that are anywhere near the border with Mexico. the number of whites has been going down for decades. As people become the only white in their neighborhood, as their children become small minorities in the school, as business begin to require employees to speak Spanish, as higher paying jobs leave the area, then yes, it can be seen that immigrants are forcing whites to leave. The alternative is to stay in a city where they are not welcome.
You get rich by working in government then leaving to join an organization that lobbies the government agency you just left. The people you left behind are receptive to your lobbying because many of them hope to get jobs like yours one day.
Did you mean to write "Illinois" and accidentally substitute "Ohio" instead? Because there isn't anywhere in Ohio like you describe, whereas Illinois has both that abominable FOID and that big city up on the lake that's so peaceful and crime-free that they've banned handguns entirely.
David Bernstein,
Armey as a religious-right boogeyman? Seriously? Surely anyone who even remembers him can correctly position him in the small-government/semi-libertarian wing of the R's, not the religious-right wing.
When Frum answers that question, he'll realize just how stupid this essay was.
So why do you continue to associate with religous bigots?
"So why do you continue to associate with religous bigots?"
Why do you continue to be one?
One thing Frum doesn't mention, but I know is true in my case, and may be true in others, is that some of the affluent may have benefited from social programs derided as "creeping socialism" to get where they are today.
My father died very young and when I was 6 years old, leaving my mother with 3 young children and no job in the 1960s. In the halcyon days before the New Deal, that would have been the end of it. Social Security literally made life possible. Remember at that time, the word "day-care" hadn't been invented yet. My mother had to work at home with three small children. (The traditional widow-thing to do was take in washing--she took in proof-reading).
In the 1970's, based on one's income, one could literally go to any school and end up paying the same amount in tuition, room and board regardless of where you went. As a result I went to an elite private college, and a "top-five" law school. My sister got her PhD at an equally (so she claims) prestigious school, and my brother got a coveted spot in small program at a good state school. Because the death benefit ran out when I turned 22 (if still in school), I worked hard and skipped a year of college to save tuition, cut the time the family would have struggle and start earning earlier and graduated law school at 23.
Thus, I do not resent a single penny of taxes, payroll or otherwise, that I pay, as I figure I owe it back. I can't say I like it, but I don't resent it. Even adjusting for inflation, I pay more in taxes each year than my family lived on annually before I graduated. I was a government "investment" that paid off. And I don't want to pull the ladder up behind me. With generations now out there who have benefited from the "liberal" social safety net, who knows how many of us are out there being "traitors to our tax-bracket"? Much of the old-time conservative rhetoric not only misses, but insults us.
Yes, I have a big, big problem with the liberal notion that there should be equality of results. I wrote and gave a speech against it in 1974 while still in high school (at a summer forensics institute.) But Frum's blithe assumption (and others posting here) that "equality of opportunity" exists without any effort on the part of the government also falls short. Sure, maybe I would have been successful if I went to a community college and a commuter law school. But if there is so little difference in potential outcomes, why is everybody wasting money going to the elite ones? Economics says this behavior would be utterly irrational if that were true. Certainly I would not have had the opportunities that these schools gave me.
Conservatives are much in favor of "the meritocracy" when opposing affirmative action, but there are income barriers to the meritocracy about which conservatives exhibit absolutely zero concern. Obama (and it may be a ploy) has at least mentioned the idea of replacing race/ethnic based affirmative action with economic affirmative action. Certainly an improvement, and possibly something I would favor if I knew what it would mean in practice.
I have voted for Republicans and Democrats, and Frum is right that one reason I am voting Democratic in this election: "can be reduced to the two words: "Robert Rubin." By returning to the center on economic matters in the 1990s, the Democrats emancipated higher-income and socially moderate voters to vote with their values." Post Clinton, and post an undivided Republican government for six years that spent like a drunken sailor (and this is an insult to drunken sailors) scare tactics about runaway Democratic spending don't cut it any more.
But I am getting off the topic of income inequality. Surely no one would be happy with income gaps on the order of old-time central and south America. Forget about fairness--it is down-right dangerous and destructive and ruptures the social fabric. The only time we had a substantial number of real communists in this country was during and just after the Great Depression. [Here's another hint to conservatives wooing us centrists: calling Democrats marxists is just as effective and accurate as them calling you fascists.]
Conservatives are fond of spying slippery slopes. Why are they missing this one? Snarky comments that Democratic policies caused the income gap are not persuasive either. Uh, where did the Great Depression come from with all those wonderful unregulated markets and absense of social programs? Please. We almost lost capitalism right there. Telling people to suck it up and stop whining is a grave political mistake. I thought Frum's analysis about health care costs eating up any real gains in disposable income does point to an issue that people should be concerned about. And he is right about the conservative mistake as well: plenty of "pooh-poohing" this issue from conservatives here. I am anxious to hear conservative solutions to this problem, but what I am hearing is that "Income inequality is not worth talking about. Gay marriage or Terry Schiavo is the important issue!" Sorry folks, you lost me. Buh-bye.
Frum is, at least from my perspective, 100% right. So long as income trends continue--even if they are caused by the Democrats--a Republican party that exhibits no concern over this issue will continue to shed voters. Only Obama's unique weaknesses as a candidate are making this election even close.
Amen.
Is there some "Whig talking-points" website that I've missed?
Indianapolis has a Democratic urban core but has engulfed its Republican outskirts.
Um, what?