In much of his writing Michael Lind generally makes a very good point: focusing on economic populism is both the smart thing, and the right thing for Democrats to do. Sometimes this leads him to surprisingly insightful critiques--as it did in parts of his article critiquing Obama's neoliberalism that I wrote about last weekend. But other times this leads him to neglect--or worse yet, severely misrepresent--the opposing forces that stand in the way. Last weekend, I criticized him for misrepresenting the role of racism during the New Deal, but it was only a minor point with respect to the main thrust of that argument. This week, Lind's mis-apprehension of racism emerged full-blown as the center-piece of a truly delusional attack on "liberals".
Before turning to the issue of how Lind mis-represents liberals in my next diary (a task I already introduced in my earlier diary, "Going After Michael Lind With Occam's Razor"), I want to clearly show how Lind mis-represents those he claims to champion, and how confused he is more generally about issues of race, class and regional identity. As I've noted in the past, the South really is different, and I'm down with Tom Schaller on his "Whistling Part Dixie" thesis--not that the South can go to hell, but that Dems should stop trying win back the South on terms set by White Southerners.
Here is how Lind's article concluded:
o be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.
The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.
Lind's attempt to equate Sharpton and Wright with Robertson and Falwell is an insult I'll return to in a later diary, along with his attempt to equate the Birther conspiracy theory with AIDs conspiracy theories. What I want to focus on here is Lind's wholly unfounded assumption that it is poor, uneducated White Southerners who are the core demographic who buy into this nonsense. Of course, Lind isn't the only one who makes this mistake. But he is, after all, the one who pretends to be both holier-than-thou and more knowledgeable-than-thou. And so it must be forcefully recalled that (a) the Birther belief is concentrated among White Southern Republicans, and (b) White Southern Republicans skew wealthy, not poor. On the first point,
PPP's North Carolina poll (pdf) had Republicans saying Obama wasn't born in America by almost 2-1 (47-24, with 29% unsure) while Democrats saying he was born in America by over 6-1 (75-12 with 13% unsure). On the second point, the following table, based on ANES data, is particularly clear:
(It should be noted that the sub-sample for the top income group is particularly small, especially for this decade, and thus the data is noisier and less reliable.)
Ever since the 1950s, the wealthiest Southern Whites have been more Republican than the poorest Southern Whites--indeed, the entire top third was more Republican than the bottom third. The last two decades, the relationship has been perfectly monotonic--every income group is more Republican than the group just below it--and the 2000s were more markedly so than the 1990s. Whatever may have been true in the past, the picture that Lind has in his head is 100% the opposite of what the NES data tells us.
On the flip, more tables to put the trend among White Southerners into context.
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP:
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base:
Aside from education, for which the parties were basically at even strength in 2001, the Republicans' losses tend to be greater among groups that were not strong GOP supporters to begin with. These include self-identified liberals and moderates, church non-attenders, and lower-income and young adults. Thus, a big factor in the GOP's overall decline is the Democratic Party's consolidating its support among normally Democratically leaning groups.
Gallup has just released "State of the States: Political Party Affiliation", the first in a four-part series to be released this week on Gallup.com, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008. And the results could not be clearer: GOP plurality states (including leaners) have been reduced to a mere handful: the Mormon mountain heartland, plus Alaska and Nebraska. That's it:
This contrasts sharply with what Gallup found as recently as 2002:
The main objections to my diary "Center-Left Nation: Congress Since WWII" seemed to be two-fold: first that I was only using a single data source. Second, more significantly, that I was making an argument that ignored the racism of the Southern Dems. My answers were that (1) You only need one data source to disprove a thesis ("center-right nation"), and advance (not prove) another ("center-left nation"); (2) It was still true in the aggregate, as shown, for example, by the Congressional DW-Nominate scores.
I stand by those answers, but of course, they don't need to be the last word. And, indeed, they shouldn't be the last word. Hence, a look at party ID since 1972, from the General Social Survey (GSS). It should be noted that the figures here--which include partisan leaners--are not as strikingly Democratic as those from Pew, which is also a very reputable pollster, and I have no explanation for the discrepancy. But GSS figures are available going much further back.
(GSS polls not taken every year, see tables below for exact dates.)
So, the Democrats have lost their crushing 2-1 advantage enjoyed in the early 70s, but still have maintained an edge in every GSS poll since that time. And as for arguments about Southern racist Dems, well, that's what God made regional crosstabs for...
First the Republicans began losing voters, then, only quite recently the Democrats began gaining them. Although the magnitude is less than that shown in a recent Pew Poll, the broad storyline is the same. Indeed, within the last month, the Rasmussen figures have suddenly jumped into the same range that Pew gave:
