Conservatives often say that Americans who work for a living have gone Republican, and some people on the left agree, though they give the phenomenon a different spin. Tom Frank, cofounder of the Baffler, labeled it the Great Backlash in his scathing, impressionistic What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Few books on American politics can approach Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 for readability. Frank’s does; published in June 2004, it was widely read by despairing Democrats before and after the election and drew plaudits from such luminaries as Molly Ivins, Barbara Ehrenreich, and the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof. But a good read isn’t always entirely true, and Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Princeton University, recently called Frank’s facts into question.
Who are these voters? Frank calls them “working class guys,” “the poor,” “sons and daughters of toil,” “union members,” “appliance salesmen, auto mechanics, and junior engineers,” “hardworking citizen[s] of an impoverished town,” and “blue-collar patriots”–a list that confuses as much as it clarifies. We’re supposed to just know who he’s talking about, though if we think about it a little we really don’t. And his labels, with their whiff of radical rhetoric, are slippery enough to make his case seem stronger than it is.
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Those who study politics for a living, like Larry Bartels, have a tool for answering these kinds of questions: the American National Election Studies (umich.edu/nes), a series of polls conducted every two years since 1948 under the auspices of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. During the 2004 election cycle, trained interviewers questioned 1,212 randomly selected individuals face-to-face, a standard sample size that’s usually accurate to within two or three percentage points.
Bartels found that fewer people in the bottom third identify themselves as Democrats now than 50 years ago, but middle- and upper-income whites have been leaving the party faster. In any case, since the low-income people leaving have been almost all southern whites defecting from the party of civil rights, the phenomenon signals just that the south is now more like the rest of the country rather than solidly Democratic.
In an acerbic reply to Bartels entitled “Class Is Dismissed” (tcfrank.com/dismissd.pdf), Frank wrote, “Bartels’ response . . . is simply to close his eyes and define the issue away.” Then he rejected Bartels’s definition of “working class” and plumped for defining it in terms of education, which largely determines life chances, rather than in terms of something as changeable as income. The working class, he wrote, consists of all those Americans who don’t hold college degrees–a definition that encompasses a whopping 73 percent of Americans, including Bill Gates. It also implies that the working class has shrunk drastically, down from 92 percent of Americans in 1960. The row drew some attention at the blogs Crooked Timber and TPMCafe, where people exchanged strong opinions about the proper definition of “working class.”
Frank ended his reply by simply moving the goalposts. Even if Bartels were right about everything, he said, What’s the Matter With Kansas? is a cultural study of right-wing populism, and as such it doesn’t “depend upon a majoritarian argument of any kind; it only requires that the cultural formation in question is significant. . . . I make no systematic claim . . . that the mindset or beliefs I describe are the only or even the predominant way of thinking among working-class Americans.”
