Democrats cemented this shift by nominating candidate George McGovern, who
appealed instead to young college-educated activists.^278 Now Democrats are composed
of two quite different factions, wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall in 2006:
“downscale” Democrats (minorities, union members, public employees, the poor) and
“upscale” Democrats. Upscale Democrats include academics, librarians, psychologists,
human relations managers, editors; in other words, they are the intellectual reform-
minded elite, who often define themselves in opposition to the business-minded elite.
“Although this well-educated, culturally libertarian, relatively affluent progressive elite
forms a minority [40%] of the Democratic Party,” noted Edsall, “it is this activist stratum
that sets the agenda for the Democratic Party.”^279 It was true in 2006, and it remains true
today.
A crucial inflection point was the 1968 Democratic convention, which featured a violent
confrontation between young protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago police.
Here’s how Bill Clinton described it: “The kids and their supporters saw the mayor and
the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar
ethnic police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft upper-class
kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to
hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam.”^280
The next step was for the Republican business elite to align with working-class whites.
This alliance led Republicans to a defense of patriotism and family values, and with the
rise of Ronald Reagan, to an overall hostility to government.
The role of big money in fueling all this is well documented.^281 But it’s insulting, as
Thomas Frank did in What’s The Matter with Kansas , to depict the white working class
as stooges duped by big money. Big money has been effective only because working-
class whites have been persuaded.
This has left progressives scratching their heads. Liberals are mystified that working-class
voters support tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else. But once you
understand the class culture gap, conservatives’ appeal makes more sense. Because the
white working class resents programs for the poor, to the extent that benefit cuts target
the poor, that’s attractive. To the extent that tax cuts for the rich hold the promise of
jobs, that’s attractive, too. As unions’ strength and reach diminished, their politicized
view of structural class inequalities has been replaced by a sense that unions protect good
jobs for the few, while capitalists provide good jobs for the many. Arlie Hochschild
describes her growing realization: “Oil brought jobs. Jobs brought money. Money brought
- Why Are Democrats Worse at Connecting with the White Working Class Than Republicans?