Research indicates that Democrats need to regain significant voting shares of both males and the middle class in order to regain national political competitiveness.
The American male in particular, has had a difficult time adjusting to the changes in the American economy during the past two decades, which is roughly though perhaps not coincidentally, the period of time during which the Republicans have pretty much chased the Democrats out of DC, politically speaking.
First, the formerly well paying blue collar, unionized industries have either disappeared from our shores or their work forces taken over by hard working immigrants who require less money and are not in position to join the union.
Second, the new industries, based around service and technology, require college educated workers. The public education system in the US has not educated boys (or girls) to be scientists or engineers, so that leaves service based jobs like Sales, Marketing, Customer Service. etc. as the main source of employment.
Women are now entering and graduating college at higher rates than men and it could be argued that women are better suited for the “high touch” jobs being created in the US globalized economy these days.
The nature of today’s global business is that production is handled offshore, while management, sales and marketing positions are filled domestically.
In fact, sales and marketing jobs, once the nearly exclusive domain of males, are being filled ever more successfully by females across a wide swath of the service sector.
What can Democrats do to address the dislocation of the American male in the marketplace, and thus recapture his vote?
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High Touch – High Tech®
Summer job opportunity …
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Er, so a “high touch” job is one working with children? I still don’t get it.
Sex industry would be my guess. ๐
Here’s the defintion I found.
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High TECHnology
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I thought I defined “high touch” jobs.in my diary as sales, customer service, marketing-type jobs which require a lot of social interaction with customers and highly developed communications skills, most notable empathetic listening skills.
You are either being snarky or you arent comprehending what I am writing very well.
Many recent studies have shown that women are making major inroads in these types of jobs, while at the same time not yet making many inroads into the executive suite.
However, many if not most executives from large corporations move up from the sales and marketing departments. Many more come from the finance department.
What can Democrats do to address the dislocation of the American male in the marketplace, and thus recapture his vote?
Take away a woman’s right to choose, thus diminishing her chances for success in the corporate world. Democrats for Life, anyone?
As a young male in the US, what would convince you to vote Dem?
SO that means you are for Roberts and Miers? snark
Well Snarky, what do you think we should do to make the fellas feel secure enough to vote against the Republicans? ๐
There may not be much hope for my dad’s generation, unless there is some calamitous economic setback which throws them all out of work.
Wasnt that FDR’s secret to success?
This may just be because I am a student but I know a lot of guys who are attending college, not because they really want to, but because their only alternative is to follow dad into the factory.
We need to revamp primary and secondary education to better train men and women to compete in the new economy.
Not so much for the college bound, but for the non college bound.
In most other advanced countries, the non college bound are taught useful skills from about junior high age. In this country we simply try to hold them in school until they are eighteen, but we teach them very little useful knowledge along the way. Mostly just a watered down version of the same classes for the college bound, with a bit of shop thrown in.
A major program to reform our workforce, starting with the children in school, might be one approach. It won’t change the electorate overnight, but we need to start somewhere and soon.
But what jobs are we suggesting training the non-college bound for, since the factory model has moved to China and the tech industry is slipping away to India? And with the costs of tuition going up the way they have (I’m in graduate school and painfully aware of this), college is going to be out of reach for many more people.
How do you and your friends feel that your prospects for a job that pays well enough to justify the costs of college tuition are? I remember when I graduated in the early 90s that a lot of my friends wound up doing things that they really didn’t need their degree for.
I feel confident that I will be able to find a pretty good job. The economy in my home state, Wisconsin, is not so good for the blue collars, but there are plenty of jobs for recent college grads. Some of my friends have moved out of state, to places like Chicago and NYC where it seems that they are doing allright for starter jobs. One friend, a young woman with an art degree, just landed a job as the executive asst. to the publisher of a science journal in Nyc.
$45k to start and she is on the inside of the executive suite.
She’s pretty pumped. But she wasnt afraid to venture outside the art world looking for work. She also tells me she had a similar offer from an ad agency but didnt like the people as well as at the publisher.
All this after about 3 months working regularly as a temp.
Your other question is a bit more vexing, but the skills I would provide the non college bound would include higher level skills than the jobs being transferred offshore. High tech drafting, computer aided design, small business management, accounting (non CPA level), and finance, etc.
The issue is how much are we willing to spend on the types of equipment and teachers required to teach useable skills to people?
High tech drafting, computer aided design, small business management, accounting (non CPA level), and finance, etc.
I might be wrong, but these are all college degree jobs currently, aren’t they? With that in mind, I think funding higher educaton so that more people can afford it is a better option than changing our educational system (of course, a few more years of No Child Left Behind, and there won’t be much of public education left).
Yes in some cases but more on the level of community college. I see no reason why these types of programs, especially involving the use of computer aided techniques, cannot be taught to kids beginning at about 14.
Who knows, some of them might even find high school interesting if they are taught something cool.
I am talking about rethinking the entire education system, arent I?
Well, change in thinking is needed or we will have an ever larger underclass of kids who cannot compete in the brave new world, more prisons and ever more fearful people voting for Republicans
formerly well paying blue collar, unionized industries have either disappeared from our shores or their work forces taken over by hard working immigrants who require less money and are not in position to join the union.
Well that is not the GOP fault… Clinton happily sold out the American WHITE male’s ability to provide for his family…by forcing NAFTA thru Congress with a majority of GOPers aided by Dem DLCers.
Good point, however you are responding in a way I had hoped would be avoided, ie, not stating what you believe we should do, which admittedly is difficult, and stating instead a criticism of what already has transpired, which is easier.
NAFTA is part of the movement toward a globalized economy. Whatever the fate of NAFTA, I dont believe globalization will be overturned or ever rejected by the American people.
Men, and women, need to be trained to compete in the global economy. Since America generally sits atop this global economy, we are the producers of technology, investment capital, financial services, managerial and executive talent which is generally superior to that found in developing global economies such as Mexico…
Well, I hardly think you are in a position to take Parker to task for not asnwering your question — CabinGirl asked you one as well and you responded with a non-answer as well.
Please go back and read thread again. CabinGirls first question was ironic and my non answer was in kind. BTW, she followed up with several serious questions for which I hope you will stand corrected because I gave her some serious answers. She made me think. I like her. She doesnt have an agenda.
I hope you are continuing to pester me out of love and kindness?
I am sure as you reread you will find something else to criticize me for, but hey, thats what mom’s are for! ๐
Democrats need to do a better job speaking to the man who is (or wants to be) comfortable within his own understanding of responsible masculinity — much like the Republicans speak to the man who is (or wants to be) comfortable with his macho arrogance. Democrats cannot get the macho arrogant men and they should not try.
I suspect that one of the big mistakes the Democrats are making with men is to confuse these two senses of masculinities, when really, these two groups of men don’t like each other very much at all and don’t respond to the same cues the same way. The party machine also probably assumes that most blue collar men are the macho arrogant sort and most white collar men are the responsible masculinity sort, which is just a class prejudice and therefore often wrong. (This confusion would account for at least some of the distorted messages in ’04, actually, now that I consider it. Trying to sell John Kerry as a war hero was stupid on many levels.)
According to yesterday’s NYTimes, Eliot Spitzer polls much better among men than today’s more typical Democrats, like Hillary and Charles Shumer, even among all those NY males who apparently are more responsibly masculine than arrogantly masculine.
Good points.
Arrogance in males is typically a cover up for some deep rooted fears and inadequacies.
I wonder how arrogant they will be when say, the housing market crashes or some other economic set back?
Or if Viagra gets pulled off the market?
I wonder how arrogant they will be when say, the housing market crashes
They will blame liberals.
or some other economic set back?
They will blame liberals.
Or if Viagra gets pulled off the market?
Never gonna happen. ๐
I think it more likely that they will blame “foreigners.”
Sure, they’ll blame foreigners. Also women, gays, and ethnic/racial minorities. But mostly, they will blame the liberals for not “protecting America” from all these “dangerous groups”. Same old, same old.
True enough, but if things are really bad that approach wont hold up. Historically, Republicans and laissez faire attitudes do very well in the good times, but the nation will turn back to Democrats in the hard times.
I believe much of the Republicans support, especially among swing voters, is only an inch deep. It wont take much bad times to invalidate theconservative “model” of government in enough voters eyes.
Its happening already at the state and local level, where Democrats are making gains.
Its happening after the hurricanes. A burst housing bubble or a jump in inflation will have much more powerful effects than even Katrina or Rita by far.
I completely agree that much of the support Republicans are rumored to have from the ‘mushy middle’ is very soft, but my read of recent political history and the criteria via which the average American voter determines how to vote is somewhat different from yours.
It wont take much bad times to invalidate theconservative “model” of government in enough voters eyes.
I hope you’re right about this, I really do, but my read of the field since the 70s suggests that people are not as logically and/or ethically consistent as they like to believe, or as they like to project. People in general — that is, the people in the middle, who aren’t particuarly inclined toward conservatives or liberals — tend to think all politicians are liars and thieves, so they don’t go to the polls with the idea that they’re voting for something they believe in. Mostly, they’re voting for what they think is the lesser evil. And in this way they vote against their own economic interests all the time, often for Republicans who appeal to their bigotry with policies and campaigns that are sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.
This whole culture war thing has been a primary MO of the GOP at least since Reagan’s first campaign. It is enormously effective, no matter how badly conservatives keep fucking up government and fucking over the working/middle class. People, whether they follow politics closely or not, are deeply invested in their sense of identity, whether it’s about race or sex or nationality or religion or sexual orientation or whatever else. This makes them very easy to manipulate by sectioning them off and then pitting them against each other.
Republicans are very good at convincing people to focus on things like race and sex instead of class and power — and unfortunately the Democrats have not yet figured out how to redirect the public’s attention from the bullshit the GOP howls about to the real problems & policies that actually matter.
I agree with your assessment regarding people in the middle. Dont know if you saw the NYT Magazine article on Spitzer yesterday but one of the stats presented was very telling. Hopefully it is true as well. With NYT you can never be very sure.
But in 1996, the average income at which a registered Democrat switched and voted for Dole was $45,900. In 2000, that number dropped all the way to $23,300.
This is not the middle class. These are people that will bleed seriously during an economic downturn, one of which will surely come along some day. The current low interest rates and the amount foreign loans to float US debt are not sustainable in tandem.
When the foreign money goes elsewhere and interest rates increase, look out! Remember stagflation in the 70s?
This will be worse because this time a lot of wealth tied to houses will go up in smoke at the same time.
The Republicans have benefitted from 20 years of a pretty consistently strong economy more than from any great political feats or tricks of their own.
I agree that we’re likely headed for some kind of 70s economy flashback sooner rather than later, and I think you’re right to be concerned about how many people will probably be screwed out of their homes.
But I still think your read of how this stuff affects the outcomes of elections and who gets to wield what sort of power in which direction and for how much time is wrong. ๐ I think you’re underestimating how well the diversionary tactic I’ve described works, and how easy it is. It doesn’t require that Republicans be particularly talented or intelligent. They just have to be willing to be bastards — and they’re certainly not having any trouble with that.
I also think you’re pretty young, so I’ll just leave it at this: keep what I said about manufactured identity wars in mind and give yourself another few election cycles of observation, I think you’ll see what I mean emerge as an overall pattern. It’s behind a lot of other noise, but it’s there, and it’s powerful. And it really is the kind of thing you have to see for yourself, kinda like a stereogram; at first, it just looks like random dots or whatever, but once you see the picture inside all the dots the first time, you’ll be able to pick it out more easily each time you see a new mess of dots.
Thanks for the link. I havent read but will. I find your comments quite insightful. I agree that dirty tricks have been a republican staple for a long time. Nixon, Atwater, Rove, Delay, et al. I am so glad the grand jury in Austin indicted DeLay. His constant attacks on the prosecutor sound like a diversionary tactic which might not work to his advantage. He is protesting too much.
Maybe because I am young, but I still believe that people are waking up to the fact they ARE callous bastards, as events continue to “out” them.