This is the fourth part of an analysis of the swing state Pennsylvania. It focuses on the industrial southwest, a once deep-blue region rapidly trending Republican. Part five can be found here.
Pittsburgh and the Southwest
Pennsylvania's southwest has much in common with West Virginia and Southeast Ohio, the northern end of Appalachia. Electoral change in the region is best understood by grouping these three areas together as a whole.
Socially conservative (the region is famously supportive of the NRA) but economically liberal, the industrial southwest voters typify white working-class Democrats. These voters can be found in unexpected places: Catholics in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, loggers along the Washington coast, rust-belt workers in Duluth, Minnesota and Buffalo, New York.
The whole house of cards seems to be crashing. The funny thing is, the capitalists, through their greed, did it to themselves. If they had left in place the safeguards and regulations established in New Deal welfare state capitalism, this depression - brought on by the housing bubble collapse - would not be happening. Instead we would have seen the continued slow grinding erosion of working class living standards we have had since the late 70's. Which was working out pretty well for the capitalists - inequality had reached record levels in the 90's and 2000's. But no, they had to completely tear down all the stabilizers built into their own system. They thought, hey there's no Soviet Union any more, communism and socialism are dead, so we can just go hogwild and take everything we want, let the average American citizen pay the price.
(Another instalment in this excellent series that's garnering more and more attention as time goes on. Don't be left out... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
People from different cultures have different ways of organizing themselves for collective action. Here, I talk about differences between people from working-class and middle-class professional backgrounds.
It's important to stress that I am not talking about individuals, but instead cultural patterns that play out (or don't) uniquely in different contexts. These patterns can illuminate why groups act the way they do, but they can't predict how any individual will act, and don't capture everything (and sometimes don't say much at all) about a particular group. In this post I am talking about approaches to social action fairly broadly, and not simply within the tradition of Alinsky-based organizing.
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