Let The Rich selfish bitchs go In America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, ....the Republican resurgence from the 1980s to the 2000 election was due to non-union white working-class men abandoning the Democratic party, with over 20 percent of them switching from Democrats to non-voters or third party supporters or Republicans between 1960 to 2000.

debunk the myth ...of a swing towards rightwing, conservative values. Polls show ..... these voters, like most of the country, became slightly more liberal in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor did working-class white men become more anti-government. They did, however, become...disappointed in government, feeling....little for them. ....those "not protected by a union, a bachelor's degree or affirmative action [who have] lost much ground in wages and benefits over the past quarter-century, while often being culturally and politically lumped into the 'white male' power structure with whom they share little but the color of their genitalia."

When income trends are broken down, working-class white men are the only group for which median income actually fell from 1979 to 1998.......who actually saw a new generation earn less than their fathers. Deindustrialization, globalization and de-unionization meant good jobs disappearing...... attribute the change in voting patterns to bitterness at falling behind economically. They recommend that the Democratic party take up a platform that would help working-class white men as well as other working-class people — universal health care, retirement security, and access to education.

When I told one long-time progressive activist I was writing a cross-class alliance building manual, this reply popped out of her mouth: "We don't have to worry about those red parts of the country anymore, now that people of color are a majority." She was referring to the color code of the 2000 Bush/Gore election map, in which the middle and south of the country tended to vote red Republican and the northern coasts and northern midwest tended to vote blue Democrat, labeled Red America and Blue America by David Brooks in "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" (Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2001). She was also referring to a recent Census announcement that people of color are now over 30 percent of the US population, but would be over 50 percent by 2050. I had not specified white working class people in my description of the project; it's interesting how often the words "working class" evoke a white image, and usually a white male image. And her image was not only white, but middle American and conservative. Her voice was full of scorn for white working class people, and relief that she now didn't need to work with them to keep the Republicans out of office. She was imagining a voting bloc made up of people of color and white middle-class liberals like herself.

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Blueskies, where have you been?

The liberal vision of this country is not egalitarian in the least. Its memory of the New Deal is that a benevolent elite guided an angry mass of working people into doing what the elite knew was in the people's best interest. That relationship fell apart in the 60s, when the liberals chose to patronize the Civil Rights movement and both white Southerners and white blue collar Northerners recoiled from racial equality. People like your acquaintance have never forgiven Joe Sixpack for rejecting them.

Upper middle class liberals need someone to patronize in order to confirm and justify their own superiority. They sympathize with people of color not merely because those people are unjustly downtrodden, but because they seem to need the protection of someone wiser and more powerful, i.e. themselves.

The unforgiveable sin of the blue collar white man in your friend's view is not the traditional religion, or the proclivity to violence, or the unreconstructed view of the sexes, or the racism -- it is his refusal to accept the benevolent protection and guidance of the educated class and to admit the superiority of the people who would like to uplift him. The woman you were talking to thinks that she can still find that kind of deference among people with a racial or gender grievance against white males.

I love how conservatives try to equate educated = elite. Sorry to burst your sophistry, but educated and/or liberal does not involve "superiority" or any other such nonsense. You need look no further than the conservatives who convince "joe six pack" to vote against his own economic interests (ie vote conservative) based on some divisive cultural issue for the real elitists.

This is the same tripe and BS of "I like W, he's a regular-type guy that I wouldn't mind having a beer with" - and look how well THAT worked out.

Blue Skies said "working-class white men are the only group for which median income actually fell from 1979 to 1998.......who actually saw a new generation earn less than their fathers. Deindustrialization, globalization and de-unionization meant good jobs disappearing...... attribute the change in voting patterns to bitterness at falling behind economically. They recommend that the Democratic party take up a platform that would help working-class white men as well as other working-class people — universal health care, retirement security, and access to education."

First, I like your real wage comparisons here and I think they add alot to the debate. Question, how do you respond to the idea that pre-global competition / domestic inclusion, white working class male wages were artificially inflated due to the subjugation of other wage competitors. And that once you provided a measure of equality, those wages fell to real equilibrium.

At the same time that their wages fell to equilibrium, the wages of the previously prohibited compeitors rose, but only so far as to be equivalent or below that of white men.

If that argument is true, then doesn't it suggest that the issue is one of expected return more than real wage increase or decrease? I.e. doesn't it mean that the real issue is that the expected white male premium (r) above the wage rate of other competitive workers has been wittled down or eradicated compared to their fathers and grandfathers generation?

And if thats the case, how do we address that sense of loss since the loss is something that we're not willing to return but is no less sincerely felt?

Yes, there is a lot of economic elitism at work in this country but calling people rich bitches doesn't really help anything even if I agree that supporting McCain over Obama based on personal pique shows a serious lack of concern for poor working class Americans. Obama supporters should talk up his excellent idea to index the minimum wage to inflation while noting that McCain voted against the last increase in the minimum wage.