In any election as close as the one we had last November, countless variables could have decided the outcome. People will tend to seize on the ones that serve their ideological goals. It’s a somewhat different question, however, to figure out why the polls (particularly the state polls) were off by so much. At The Upshot, Nate Cohn takes a whack at trying to answer that question. There is evidence that a lot of late-deciders went for Trump which is a thing the pollsters can’t be faulted for failing to predict. This could be explained by the so-called Comey Effect, named after FBI Director James Comey decision to link Anthony Weiner’s sex-texting with minors to Clinton’s private email server in the last week of the election. It could also be explained by the Shy Voter Theory that postulates that people were a little ashamed to admit they were going to vote for Trump and weren’t truly undecided. Maybe it was a little of both.
But there’s a more potent explanation available about why the polls were wrong, which is that they may have been incorrect all along due to a failure to anticipate the importance of educational attainment in candidate preference. Poorly educated people are less likely to respond to surveys which results in them being underrepresented in most polls. But, until the 2016 election, this didn’t tend to skew the results because the correlation between education and how people vote wasn’t all that strong.
The tendency for better-educated voters to respond to surveys in greater numbers has been true for a long time. What’s new is the importance of education to presidential vote choice. Mrs. Clinton led Mr. Trump by 25 points among college-educated voters in pre-election national polls, up from Mr. Obama’s four-point edge in 2012.
This made it a lot more important to weight by education. In the past, it barely mattered whether a political poll was weighted by education — which is probably part of why so many didn’t do so.
It’s a pretty simple theory to understand. If surveys exclude a population that is fairly evenly divided in its voting preference that is not likely to have a big impact on the results, but if they miss a segment of the electorate that is heavily skewed in one direction then that could cause a large error. Just as a pollster might have to give more weight to Latino respondents in a poll if they haven’t succeeded in contacting enough of them, they may have needed to weight poorly educated respondents more heavily in their surveys.
If this theory is true, it could provide guidance for better polling in the future, but it also tells us something about how the Democrats should respond to their traumatic losses. I’ve had people tell me that rural and working class voters want higher education for their children just as much as anyone else, but it should be intuitive that educational attainment is a lower priority for parents who haven’t gotten a higher education themselves.
The Democrats, going all the way back to Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in 1992, have responded to the impact of globalization on manufacturing and job loss by talking about retraining and access to education. Of course, the cost of college has soared in the intervening years so now the Democrats are competing to come up with the most generous affordable college plans. Setting aside the merits, these appeals are least likely to have political success among people who don’t have a higher education and resent the hell out of the fact that their kids will need one.
What they’d wish for if they thought their wish would be granted is that their kids could practice the trades and professions they practiced and have the same standard of living. They don’t want their kids to leave home for a college education if that means they’ll come to question their values and never come back.
Donald Trump said he loved the poorly educated because they supported him in such high numbers. That sent a signal to a lot of people that Trump thought they were A-okay the way they were. He wasn’t going to listen to their problems and then tell them that the answer was to leave home for some liberal college town and a job in the suburbs or big city.
The free college idea which was pushed most heavily by Bernie Sanders ought to be a winner with these folks, and it’s certainly something that would greatly benefit them. But it comes with an unspoken condemnation. And it sounds like another tax giveaway to “other” folks who either don’t need the financial assistance or don’t share the same race, religion or working class values of former auto workers, coal miners or steel workers. Trump said he’d make America great again and bring back the old jobs. People wouldn’t have to make changes because Trump would make the changes.
It was easier to see why highly educated people gravitated to Clinton. It was in large part because they were repelled by Trump’s disdain for the values people learn when they get a good education. But that same disdain was a way of validating that people don’t need a bachelor’s degree to count. What actually happened was a sorting and realignment of the electorate where poorly educated people suddenly showed a vast an unpredicted preference for Trump.
Obviously, race played a big part in this, but the damage done to Clinton in rural counties and working class neighborhoods was among a lot of folks who had voted for a black president once if not twice. That Trump was insulting elites and angering highly educated people was probably more important because it created a kind of cultural war zone based on class and educational attainment.
That the Democrats walked into this milieu with a message about the importance of education was ill-fated even if well-intentioned. What people really wanted was an economy where a higher education wasn’t necessary. The Democrats quite reasonably thought they should offer something based in reality with a real chance of enactment and good prospects for improving people’s lot. What they missed was that the battle was being fought on different turf. People were sick of losing in the modern economy. They were sick of seeing their traditional way of life slip away. They were tired of being condescended to and told that they weren’t smart or educated enough to compete. What the Democrats were offering was in some ways just further confirmation that they were losers who were going to continue to lose. Trump might not have been able to explain how he’d fix things, but he met them at the level of their desire.
So, now the Democrats need a plan for how to make it so these folks can compete again on terms in which they want to compete. They need an indigenous left movement, not one crafted to appease folks’ racism or cultural conservatism on sexual mores. They need to help these folks compete again, and that means that they have to go after the monopolization of the economy that has swallowed up every local pharmacy, hardware store, bank, and hobby shop in the country. They need to steal away the votes of the small businessperson, the would-be entrepreneurs, and the small town go-getters. What killed small-town America wasn’t just the loss of industrial jobs. More important was the absolute decimation of the private business owner. People can’t compete with the big monopolies so their communities lose leadership and dignity and choice and opportunity. A true leftist movement that can compete in the areas that Trump carried in unprecedented numbers has to be based on bringing these things back, and it can be done by getting back to the kind of antitrust enforcement we used to have in this country. People need to believe that their kids can grow up and succeed without leaving home and abandoning their way of life.
The Republicans have a gigantic advantage in these communities right now, but it’s all about signals and code and tribalism. The GOP doesn’t actually have any answers for them and their policies are almost universally designed in ways that will accelerate their losses and take away what little they have left. About the best Trump can do for them right now is to get them more work in fracking and other dirty energy jobs. But that’s only appealing because the Democrats aren’t offering anything they want as an alternative.
Tomorrow, we’ll publish a piece I have in the new issue of the Washington Monthly on how liberals can win rural and working class votes without compromising on their values. A lot of that article is dedicated to convincing you of the political and moral necessity of accomplishing this, and a lot is dedicated to revisiting our nation’s history to show you how it has been accomplished in the past. I hope you’ll check it out.
Here’s a problem: Historically, every movement based in the working classes has failed in America. Unless it co-opts the middle class, it tends to founder along various class and racial lines. That’s why the Populists failed and the Progressives succeeded, despite a lot of similar goals.
Why not become the party of the middle class? I think that’s what you are talking about with the small town entrepreneur, but how many of those are without any secondary education? To simply say “poorly educated” doesn’t specify who we are talking about. Less than a BA? An associates degree? Any post-secondary?
Reform movements paradoxically work best when times are good and the middle class is on board – with the one exception being the New Deal, which was more of a crisis response, wrapped in a policy agenda, and even then, there was broad middle class support for the New Deal.
If the Republicans continue down the road they are on, they are going to alienate the hell out of GA-6 before they alienate MT-AL. Long term, it may make sense to try and win the “poorly educated” but right now there are votes to be mined in the suburbs.
I address all of that in my article.
But I have a couple of teasers.
If we are talking Populists, I suppose you could make a case for the 1900-1920 period, but currently agricultural workers make up 2% of the population. I know that’s not synonymous with rural, but I’d be interested to see your math, if by Populist, you mean rural voters.
If you’re talking “populist” then again, I’m not sure. The Civil Rights movement had a populist counter led by Wallace. The “populists” of the Great Depression like Long and Coughlin ATTACKED the New Deal, they didn’t help it.
If populism is defined as largely an appeal to emotion and grievance and group solidarity, I’m not sure there’s any room for populists in a progressive coalition, but then I come down on Richard Hofstatder’s interpretation of the Populists.
I really know anyone’s interpretation of ‘populists,’ but I’m curious about the suggest that successful political movement can be based on anything but ’emotion, grievance, and group solidarity.’
To my mind, it’s all a question of pushing for our preferred emotions, grievances, and definitions of ‘group.’
Well, maybe populism needs to be agricultural based or maybe it doesn’t. But these communities need a revival of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, that’s for sure. It just needs to be aimed at something more than railroads raping them, which they’re still doing, BTW.
The “populists” of the Great Depression like Long and Coughlin ATTACKED the New Deal, they didn’t help it.
Long attacked it as not doing enough. It’s different than attacking it as Communism.
Very much looking forward to reading your article.
We could create something like trade training centers and apprenticeship programs. Unions used to have a wide ranging program in this area but since they’ve been all but wiped out we’d need something community or state based depending on what was valued in those states.
The problem with the message was that Sanders and Clinton only talked about college but trades will still be important in the future and we should be willing to pay for that just as we should be willing to pay for college.
As much as we’d like to base this in the community college system I don’t know if the message would work because it would still be tied to college and all the negatives that Booman laid out above.
Doesn’t this fall into the same trap? “… something based in reality with a real chance of enactment and good prospects for improving people’s lot.” How does it–how does anything–beat Boo’s “signals and codes and tribalism?”
Obamacare saved thousands of lives and uncountable grief in Kentucky.
there’s a clue in there.
people wanted something more than subsidies to get healthcare or Medicaid.
they also want something more than cheap or free college for their kids.
Let’s see. Because “people wanted something more than subsidies to get healthcare or Medicaid,” and because “they also want something more than cheap or free college for their kids,” they understandably voted to kill off the healthcare and to preclude the opportunity for their children to obtain the education. As some commenters have suggested, that kind of behavior suggests not a rational or thoughtful approach to politics, but a serious psychological problem. And while I like others will be looking forward to the article Mr. Longman mentions, I hope it doesn’t imply that the Democratic Party’s responsibilities include political therapy. That kind of thing is beyond the capability of any political organization.
If someone came to you and said they wanted their son to be a welder just like their grandfather and you responded by telling them that welding jobs aren’t plentiful in their community and you’d help their son get into and pay for the state university, they’d probably been less than satisfied with your response.
If you simply ignored them completely and thought they’d be thrilled to learn that their kid could stay on their insurance, you’d likely get a similarly less than effusive amount of thanks.
The Democrats have failed by not being responsive to what people really want. They’ve been better about offering them things they can use or that mitigate their difficulties, but an utter disaster on giving them what they want.
Your example tends to confirm rather than refute my point, which is part of the problem.
Wise and loving parents want what is best for their children in the lives those children have to live. Sometimes that will involve following their parents’ trade or continuing the family business; sometimes it won’t. People who care about parents and children, rather than simply wanting to exploit them, will help them recognize the difference.
Your example does not dispute that welding jobs (the parent’s trade) have become scarce. In that situation, what the Democrats are saying could be put this way: “We all want the best for our children. I’m glad you had a good life as a welder, but what with all the automation that’s happening, that’s not likely to work out so well for your kid. On the other hand, jobs for college-educated young people are really promising; and your kid’s grades look like that’s possible. So we’ll help him (or her) get an education that will help them get a good job in their time. We’ve already passed a law to let them stay on your health-care policy until they’re 26 — so that’s not a problem.”
They might also say, “Look, I know the Republicans are promising that if you elect them, they will bring those welding jobs roaring back. They’re not telling you the truth. They have no plan to do it, and it can’t be done anyway.
And while they’re not getting your kid a welding job, they will be taking away his health care, and yours too — and giving Medicare and Social Security a whack as well. We won’t do any of those things.”
That’s an honest approach and one that can be supported by public policy (as opposed to reorienting the parent’s psyche, which can’t). Now there are no doubt many parents who aren’t interested in hearing the truth in that situation; they may just have to learn by experience (which is also going to involve having their kids really hate them when the parent shoves them into a failing job track).
My own experience is relevant here. My father owned an insurance agency, which unfortunately was not in good enough shape when he died in my early teen years to continue; and my mother had to sell it. As much of a burden as that was for her, she always thought it was for the best. She understood that I would have felt duty-bound to take it over, and that I was a poor fit for that kind of life — about which she was completely right. I went on to get a Ph.D. in government and serve as a Foreign Service officer, both of which are very different things from insurance. That was the kind of wise and loving parenting public policy should support.
entrepreneurial livery-stable-startup proprietor?
The problem with this example is that welders can still get work. Their skills are still in some demand.
The problem is that many traditional livelihoods being pined after (e.g., coal miner) are more comparable to blacksmithing, and many mourned enterprises are better compared to livery stables.
Obsolete/obsolescent.
Of course the broader problem is that, due especially to mechanization/automation/computerization, our economy can produce all it produces with far less human labor than adds up to “jobs” for everyone who “needs” one.
And many of those “jobs” would not qualify as worth doing (in the sense of meaningful, dignifying, valuable to the person doing them) except for the paycheck, necessary for survival in our off-the-rails dominant global (“Taker”) culture.
Actually, I’d say that blacksmithing has more of a future, in its own niche, than coal mining. Between economically extractable resource exhaustion, automation, and declining demand, coal is going down. The need for farriers to shoe working, sport and pleasure horses, however, continues.
Stats are hard to come by since the US Dept. of Agriculture stopped tracking the number of horses and mules nationwide (around 26,000,000 in 1915) but there’s still an estimated 9.3 million of them out there today, with about 3.9 million used for pleasure riding. Others race, compete in other equestrian sports, herd cattle, carry police and other public service personnel, pull tourist buggies, and yes, even serve instead of tractors in farming and logging. (Also — like my own horse — serve as large expensive useless pets, often retired from work, but still decorating their paddock.) And most of them need to be shod about every six weeks. Eve horses that go barefoot usually need to have their hooves trimmed on a regular basis, another service that farriers provide.
So, yes, there’s plenty of work still out there for those who (after a suitable apprenticeship) want to be their own boss and set their own schedule with a steady stream of work from repeat customers. And who are willing to drive multiple miles per day to bring their forge truck, with its multitude of blank shoe stock sizes, multitude of tools, hundreds of nails, portable anvil, portable furnace, and other accoutrements they must invest in up front to their clients’ scattered farms and stables and backyards, with more or less convenient areas to work in, at all times of year, in all kinds of weather, getting up close and personal with the often dirt and manure bedecked, powerful legs and sharp-edged hooves of large animals whose attitude toward shoeing ranges from “I’ll just doze off here” through “Do I hafta?” through “OMG what was that I must JUMP!” to “Touch my foot and I will kill you”, for clients who pay (a) right then, cash, (b) by mailing a check in a day or two, (c) when they think of it, (d) screw you, there’s always another farrier. And there’s a lot of heavy lifting.
So, yes, there’s work to be had, now and into the foreseeable future, for those willing to go through all that. Oh, and be skillful enough, with farriery itself and the handling of their four- and two-footed clientele, to build and retain their business.
At least until their bodies give out.
clientele? (I’ll pass on iron shoes nailed into my toenails, thank you very much.)
Fair point.
The comparison I was making was of course to the dawn of the motor vehicle age, when people now making the argument that the obsolete coal industry and its obsolete “jobs” must be sustained at their current levels (or, insanely, increased, a la Trump!) — and never mind the ecological cost/damage — would then have been making the same argument about the contemporary market/industry of blacksmithing/farriers and livery stables, not about their eventual, huge reduction to current niche status.
I.e., not that they should be allowed to persist as a useful and needed niche occupation with a niche market that’s a tiny remnant of their heyday, but that they must be subsidized with taxpayer dollars at huge ecological cost to maintain/restore the industry and those “jobs” to its obsolete heyday.
Oh, sure. But I get the feeling when people bring up blacksmiths that they don’t understand what market actually still exists for those services, and how it works. Especially when they say “blacksmith” rather than “farrier”.
Also, by the way, there are still buggy whip manufacturers, and a market for their goods. Just sayin’. Greatly diminished, yes. Dinosaur-level extinction, nope.
And of course you’re just funnin’ — you know the two-footed clientele pay the bills for the quadruped clients.
was what you probably intended.
College is and is perceived differently than trade training. It’s not about free stuff, it’s about not taking their kids away from their communities
I think that is a really insightful comment.
It’s really true, even when the children do return they come back with all kinds of new ideas and “strange” new attitudes and expectations.
It’s like an old joke among the clergy, that the fastest way to lose you faith is to go to divinity school.
exactly, new ideas are scary no matter who you are and just because we invest in their community doesn’t mean none of them will go to college it just means we’re not saying what their community wants and needs is not important
I suspect that the voters in this category that we are able to win back are those who will decide this on their own, rather than any 10-point program. Often, it takes some disillusionment.
Nothing wrong with such a road map, it’s just that many ideas to entice rural voters are subjective in nature (and thus can be ridiculed by Fox, Rush and others) and the GOP can probably block others.
That said, I will certainly read.
This is all maddening and frustrating, but I think the analysis (unfortunately) is very accurate.
I just can’t stand it because I’ll go to — for example — a small Indiana town where I’ve got relatives, and I’ll see, over the years, how they’re getting totally screwed by Wal-Mart and awful conservative policies…and it’s making them more right wing. I can’t stand it.
The most lethal trap that’s been placed in uneducated right wingers’ minds is this fiendish idea that they should indulge their suspicion/envy/resentment of “the elites” — that educated, talented, dedicated people with degrees and complex, proven programs for solving their problems (or, just explaining what the fuck is actually going on; how they’ve got it wrong) are being “condescending” and intrusive and should be ignored or actively fought against.
I have no idea how to combat this. It’s a cultural problem — a psychological phenomenon — which makes it very hard to rationally undermine or remove. And it put Trump in office.
A thousand times this.
“I want to see government run like a business — specifically the business that killed my business”
Demeaning education and accomplishment has been a deliberate, decades-long strategy. Limbaugh has had great success disparaging pointy-headed elites and drumming up resentment and racism. FOX news chimed in with the same message. Education and teachers are now being disparaged and criticized as much as they were respected and revered 60-75 years ago.
It is definitely a cultural phenomenon and not going away easily or quickly.
It’s the triumph of the D+ and C- students over the B+ and better nerds. It’s just that there is a bell curve and there are more C- and D+ students all through life. The losers resent not being able to recover whatever glory they might have experienced in high school because the situation and circumstances changed. Spite is all they knew then and they continue with those tactics throughout their lives.
“monopolization of the economy…”
Of course you are correct that this is one of the bedrock causes of the TrumpAmerica problem. The preposterous idea that the free trade agreements would actually benefit all Americans is the other. And the idea that gub’mint benefits can provide adequate makeweight for meaningful work is also shown false.
The problem is that history has now occurred. The massive monopolies have now cleared the field(s) and wrecked the Main Streets—with the gleeful participation of the hapless townsfolk, who flocked to the big box asteroid belts that now surround practically every town of size in order to save 10%.
The internet has also altered retail beyond any recognition. The law has been altered by “conservative” judges to make attempts to de-monopolize our new overlords extremely difficult, absent a quite different constellation of judges on the Supreme Court. And of course one needs a DOJ to bring the antitrust cases, which even Obama declined to do.
I suppose one could say that it is not any worse than the situation confronting us at the dawn of the reaction to the Gilded Age, a time of appalling monopolies and absurd market power. That “the people” can (once again) mobilize against today’s robber barons. One big difference is that now the law provides one apologia after another for the monopolists, strewing absurd arguments that the (obvious) monopolist has no “real” market power. Again, the judges and existing precedents will be a critical problem.
None of this is actually impossible; but turning this ship even 10 degrees to port will be a superhuman generation-long undertaking. How the progressives of the early 1890-1900s did it is awe inspiring. Can the rigged economy of St Reagan’s Conservative Era really be undone?
Ultimately, do we really have enough work for a nation of 330 millions (and more) to perform? Especially when one adds in the dog-eat-dog competitive mentality that Americans think stems straight from the Founding Fathers? And the religious belief that the Holy Free Market is an unalterable force of nature which humans are powerless to affect? Leave aside the hilarious cognitive dissonance that sees a competitive free market in a Land of Monopolists, ha-ha.
The less educated have foolishly decided that the planet needs to be destroyed so they can harbor the illusion that (lower education) jobs will once again be plentiful in the land of MAGA. As Der Trumper withdraws from the Paris Accords—humanity’s last ditch attempt to save the 11,000 year old stable climate—this will be our epitaph…
the first step here is convincing Democrats and we’re making good progress despite appearances. and we’ll keep at it.
I suspect I’m not the only commenter on this blog to have developed a pretty short temper with apologia for the appalling attitudes of too many poorly educated people, including especially mindless hostility to education itself. Whatever Democrats do about anti-trust or other issues, they cannot change the basic fact that the modern world is complicated, and that understanding that world requires a level of education beyond the ability to hitch up the ol’ one-hoss shay. Resenting this fact does not make it less true.
My own background predisposes me to impatience with the kind of outlook Mr. Longman describes. I am the only person in my family to have gone to college. My mother, a high-school graduate, was left a widow with few assets when my brother and I were young. She nonetheless understood the necessity of education for advancement, and she worked very hard to ensure that her children had the opportunity for it if they wanted to have it. I did — and I ended up obtaining a Ph.D. in government and serving for 27 years as a Foreign Service officer. Yes, it meant moving away permanently from my hometown and visiting only occasionally; it also led to a change in religious affiliation. But my mother recognized these things as inescapable elements for my life.
The kind of self-indulgent bitterness by the poorly educated that Mr. Longman describes is not inevitable, and it is frankly pretty detestable, especially when it expresses itself in political actions that harm both themselves and many tens of millions of others. Robert Heinlein puts it well in “Starship Troopers”: “To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives. . . . Force if you will!–the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force.”
The poorly educated are just as fully responsible for how they wield their electoral force as they would be for how a gun in their house gets used. If they are careless with either and people get hurt, that failure is on them — not on those who somehow failed to persuade them to vote intelligently or to put a trigger lock on the gun.
Yes, the left in general and the Democratic Party in particular should do all they can to understand the electorate and to make proposals really responsive to their needs. But they cannot be assigned a duty to prevent the kind of folly that would lead anyone to believe that voting for someone like Donald Trump is the answer to any of their problems, or that getting enough education to function well in the modern world is culturally unacceptable.
I feel like one of the biggest missed opportunities of the Obama years was the inability to hold the financial and business elites accountable for corrupt practices. Sure, this was not done in order to not alienate Wall Street from the Dems, but they all turned on Obama in 2012 anyway, and we were left in 2016 with Rs and Ds having the same squalid record of wrist slapping, but the Rs delivering the red meat vs the Ds talking up free community college. True some of the legislation was a big improvement, but banks not failed and bankruptcies not filed are counterfactuals.
Every D legislator needed a banker’s scalp flying from their car antenna. THAT would have appealed to the Trump voter. How about locking some white-collar folk up for a change? Tax evasion, wire fraud, SEC violations, the opportunity was (and IS) there.
Remember Douthat’s column about Trump-the-child? Yglesias’s rebuttal was spot on, especially in how he ends with an indictment of the “American culture of impunity of the rich”.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/18/15654566/trump-toddler
“Some accountability would be nice”
If Dems can be seen to be delivering this accountability, they will win back many of these “low-cog” voters. This is the kind of “fair” they will understand. And it might even do our political/economic order some good. For starters, the political organizations that will need to evolve to support such politicians (already well in motion in the Trump era, but still in need of strategic vision; cue tomorrow’s Booman article) can act to diminish the importance of money-bags backers and corporate moolah.
Exactly. One of the most informative and yet saddest books I’ve recently read was “Chain of Title,” by David Dayen, about the foreclosure crisis, primarily in Florida. As he explains, several unpaid citizen activists gathered a small mountain of evidence of massive foreclosure fraud in the 2007-2010 period. The evidence was clearly adequate for multiple prosecutions for hundreds of felonies. Although the local and state governments weren’t interested, the FBI began to take the matter up. Then the 2010 election happened, and the Obama administration went into full retreat. In the end nothing much happened at all. And I’ve never seen anyone even try to get Obama on the record as to why his administration behaved so very badly.
Micah 6:8 (KJV) puts the point well: “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” Of those three things, two apply well to government behavior. Obama in this case forgot about doing justice, and the Democrats and the country suffered for it.
Isn’t ‘poorly-educated’ the very kind of judgmental, condescending language we’re supposed to be avoiding?
I think Booman means “no education beyond a high school diploma”.
The cultural hook for many Trump voters evidently was “he hates the same people I hate”. Or use “resent” instead of “hate”, it doesn’t matter. And thus people voting against their own economic self interest.
Rural America needs jobs. The GOP is going to spend a trillion dollars to widen, pave, and put tolls on ever road/bridge Ike made. All the toll dollars go to our foreign investors and our tax dollars pay debt for the next 50 years. The dems need to go big…FDR big. Example, look at the Mississippi, how old are those levees and locks?, time to dredge?, hydro electric power? It’s about the future not rebuilding the past.
I’ve been having discussions along the longs of what Booman wrote about for years, and I always come back to the role of cultural factors for entirely personal reasons: As teens and young adults, my siblings and I went through the process of becoming alienating from our father precisely because our educational level came to exceed his, and he resented it–thought we were talking down to him. But the thing is, he wanted us to get college educations and even better to move into a profession like medicine or law. That scenario was, I would suggest, very common among the Jewish working class (a now nearly vanished social class in the US). And in case you’re wondering, my parents married at age 19, were parents by 20, and my dad made his living as a grocery clerk and butcher. He carried a union card. My parents eventually became the classic mom-and-pop entrepreneurs, and although my siblings and I all worked in the business, my parents were absolutely clear that they did not want us following in their footsteps. But my father, at least, was suspicious of the modes of thinking we picked up when we left home for college.
I mention this personal history as a way to plead for some “granularity” in the brainstorming that has to go into the Democratic Party’s revival. I’d say that we should not assume that all working class parents want their kids to stay home and go into the family trade, be it welding or whatever. We need to think about whether that’s appropriate for some demographic groups but not others. Another example: where I live in Portland, Oregon, go into any pharmacy and one is likely to encounter a pharmacy tech, or a pharmacist, whose name tag bears a Vietnamese name. (The Vietnamese are the most numerous Asian group here.) Now, I haven’t analyzed this, but I’d be willing to bet that in the Vietnamese diaspora, there are a lot of parents doing working-class jobs and also pushing their kids to go to college and eventually get into a profession.
One factor that I speculate plays a role in parents’ attitudes about the kids’ education is religious affiliation. Those Portland Vietnamese are Buddhist or Roman Catholic. In contrast, many of the folks who came here from the former Soviet Union belong to conservative Protestant denominations, and they seem to conform to the model of parents wanting their kids to follow them into trades.
This is exactly the point that I have made as well. Parents who really care about their children want those children to have the best lives they can in their own time and according to their own abilities. They don’t simply try to get the kids to recapitulate the lives of their parents in what will inevitably be different conditions. That’s deeply relevant to this discussion. In our time, a college education is an important credential for a great many decent-paying jobs, and the knowledge and skills required for quite a few jobs can only be acquired that way. A socially responsible political party will have to recognize that situation in its platform and will have to try to make that clear in its outreach. Insulating anxious parents from reality is not helpful or morally defensible.