August 15, 2006
“What’s the Matter With Kansas” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST After a week or so of bipartisan comity, I see that the American Heritage Blog is slipping back into its natural state of ideological rancor. Which probably makes things more interesting.
In his recent post on the long-term impact of Reaganomics, John Steele Gordon predictably bashed the “liberal elite,” claiming that they believe “the average joe is too stupid to know what’s good for him” and that their version of recent economic history is “silly.” This is a worn rhetorical strategy that I’d like to label the “your-mother” response. As in, “you’re mother’s a liberal elite.”
I’ll let someone else respond to Mr. Gordon’s economic argument and will focus instead on his narrower claim: “The rich, by definition, are a small minority of the whole body politic, and, in what is incontestably a democracy, pursuing their interests contrary to the interests of the great mass of the people would be political suicide. Either Reaganomics has helped the great majority or it would have died a painful political death.”
Mr. Gordon writes about economic and business history, so I understand why he might be inclined to think that people vote their economic interests first and foremost. But throughout American history, voters have subordinated their economic interests to a host of cultural and social concerns.
Many liberals like Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, argue that working-class voters often allow themselves to be blinded to their economic self-interest by crass appeals to prejudice. For instance, the Bush tax cuts have worked far less magic for the working poor than for the very wealthy. A prime example: Republicans killed a Democratic proposal to extend the Child Tax Credit to 6.5 million families who earn between $10,000 and $26,500 per year. According to Frank and others, Republicans in places like Kansas (and Ohio, and West Virginia, and so on) have used divisive social issues like gay marriage to blunt the effect of their skewed economic policies. This is no conspiracy theory. One of Karl Rove’s strategies in 2004 was to put gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in swing states. Thomas Franks’s argument—that voters should care less about whether Bill and Steve get married, and more about whether they can afford to feed, clothe, and educate their families—may strike Mr. Gordon as elitist, but there’s something to it.
An historical example of the same phenomenon was the 1934 gubernatorial election in Georgia. That year Eugene Talmadge visited Rome, Georgia, the state’s center of textile manufacturing, and delivered incendiary speeches that appealed to raw race prejudice. He excoriated FDR’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) for issuing wage scales that placed black and white workers on parity. Talmadge won the election and carried Rome’s white working-class districts. Three days later he declared martial law in order to protect the “right to work” and sent 4,000 troops to bust the textile union. It was an odd way to repay working whites for their support—but, really, not so odd in the context of the Jim Crow South, where whiteness trumped economic status any day of the week.
One problem—and here I agree somewhat with Mr. Gordon—is that liberals too often insinuate that voters have been duped and hoodwinked by appeals to prejudice. A better argument can be found in the historian David Roediger’s book, The Wages of Whiteness (the title is borrowed from a quote by W. E. B. DuBois). Roediger argues that working-class white Americans have played an active and aggressive role in promoting their whiteness, even at the expense of their economic self-interest. They are, he claims, often savvy about what they want, and they often prefer “psychological wages” to economic wages. The same surely applies to working-class voters who are genuinely more opposed to gay marriage than concerned with material things.
So—surprise, surprise—I don’t agree with at least part of Mr. Gordon’s argument. Americans certainly vote their economic interests sometimes. But often they don’t.
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