Culture Klatch

The Hidden David Brooks (26 Jan 06)

Mr. Brooks turns his thoughts to how the Democrats are looking away from their traditional base economic platform (i.e., social programs available for those in need) and mining the traditional Republican field of values (here's the link to Dollars and Sense--full column available to Times Select subscribers):

Over the past few decades, Democrats have generally conceived of America as a society divided between comfortable haves and insecure have-nots. Having read thousands of gloomy articles about downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation, they've tried to rally the insecure working majority against the privileged minority — or, as Al Gore put it, the people against the powerful.

But since this strategy has notably failed, some analysts are thinking maybe there is no frightened majority longing for government succor.

Last year, the liberal economist Stephen Rose posted an essay on the Emerging Democratic Majority Web site [ed note - here's the link] in which he observed, "It is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population that is economically distressed." Rose concluded that only 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor — a percentage that is "probably much smaller than most progressive commentators would estimate."

Furthermore, he wrote, the percentage of Americans with reasonably well-paying corporate jobs has expanded over the past few decades: "Contrary to what some on the left might think, the share of bad jobs fell significantly as more workers with postsecondary education moved into an expanding set of managerial and professional jobs."

Rose calculated the household incomes for people between 26 and 59 and found that the average annual family income is somewhere around $63,000 a year — an impressive figure. Opinion polls consistently show that people at these income levels feel as if they're doing quite well and don't feel oppressed by forces beyond their control.

This suggests that liberals have adopted an overly negative view of reality.

Well, many in the middle may feel a comfort of late with that impressive average of $63K, but stagnant wages and rising energy prices are going to start fraying nerves sooner than later. But there I go, getting all negative. Getting back to Mr. Brooks and the importance of values to the Democratic party:

But over the past year the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner has noted that voters don't separate values issues from economic issues. They use values issues as stand-ins and figure the candidates they associate with traditional morality are also the ones with sensible economic policies.

In the current issue of The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta also notes the interplay between values and economic issues. "Traditional values have become aspirational," she writes. "Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle-class people they want to be like."

With these sentiments, Democrats seem to be moving away from materialistic determinism. In past decades, Democratic political campaigns have been based primarily on appeals to economic interests. But especially in the information age, social values and cultural capital shape a person's economic destiny more than the other way around.

From the American Prospect article, Franke-Ruta continues:

American voters have taken shelter under the various wings of conservative traditionalism because there has been no one on the Democratic side in recent years to defend traditional, sensible middle-class values against the onslaught of the new nihilistic, macho, libertarian lawlessness unleashed by an economy that pits every man against his fellows. Yet in private conversations, progressives recognize that there is a need to do something about broad social changes that they, too, find objectionable. The American Environics data provide the critical missing link that should allow progressives to reach out more confidently to voters who share with them common values and concerns about the direction of the nation.

Incoming Democratic Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a former Christian missionary in Latin America, learned the importance of cultural appeals early in his campaign. Kaine, Virginia’s first Catholic governor and one of the two major Democratic electoral success stories of 2005, had worked as a court-appointed attorney for inmates on death row while a young attorney. This, he knew, would be a major strike against him in his bid to run a state whose citizens overwhelmingly support the death penalty, and in a contest against the state’s attorney general, who would inevitably accuse him of being soft on crime and a bleeding-heart liberal.

In the spring of 2005 Kaine’s pollster, Peter Brodnitz, of the polling firm Benenson Strategy Group, decided that the campaign needed to develop a strategy to handle such charges. It convened a focus group of white, conservative, religious voters, and explored different ways Kaine could reach out to them. The result was startling. Brodnitz found that once Kaine started talking about his religious background and explaining that his opposition to the death penalty grew out of his Catholic faith, not only did charges that he was weak on crime fail to stick, but he became inoculated against a host of related charges that typically plague and undermine the campaigns of Democratic candidates. “Once people understood the values system that the position grew out of, they understood that’s he’s not a liberal,” says Brodnitz. “We couldn’t even convince them he was a liberal once we’d done that.”

Strategists who had been predicting Democratic success with a more values-based approach considered themselves vindicated. Virginia elected its second Democratic governor in a row, and its first one to survive opposition to the death penalty in an electoral fight. “People appreciate that I have a moral yardstick, and, even if they don’t have the same one, they appreciate that I have one and it’s not all about what a speechwriter puts in front of me or what a pollster tells me,” the governor-elect told the Prospect. That moral yardstick may be just the tool Democrats need.