The Political Price of Austerity
By MARK SCHMITT
NYT Book Review
THE AGE OF AUSTERITY: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics
By Thomas Byrne Edsall
Illustrated. 256 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.
Most books about contemporary politics are designed for quick obsolescence. A notable exception to the rule is the work of Thomas Byrne Edsall, whose five careful books, starting with “The New Politics of Inequality” in 1984, are still found on the shelves and in the footnotes of everyone who writes about politics — left and right, academics and journalists alike. Edsall’s distinctive method combines his own reporting with rigorous use of data from across the social sciences, including psychology and anthropology. Though his previous book, “Building Red America,” seemed poorly timed when it appeared in 2006 just as Karl Rove’s quest for permanent Republican dominance collapsed, its insights into conservative attitudes about authority and autonomy remain as useful as anything written more recently about the Tea Party and the right-wing resurgence.
The great topic of Edsall’s life’s work is the breakdown of the New Deal-era liberal coalition at the intersection of race, resentment and inequality. While analysts often sharply distinguish economic from social issues, Edsall sees a “chain reaction,” to use the title of his 1991 book, in which race, economics and highly emotional topics like immigration interact to crush any real hope of a new progressive coalition. When minorities acquire new rights or benefits, it comes at a cost, real or perceived, for established white voters.
This story reads very differently in 2012 than it would have in 1984, when the “Reagan Democrats” defected from the New Deal coalition. Now it’s the children and even the grandchildren of the Reagan Democrats who make up the middle of the voting population, and a Rising American Electorate (in the pollster Stan Greenberg’s phrase) made up of professionals, unmarried women and young voters as well as blacks, Hispanics and Asians threatens to outnumber the old resentful whites. More than threatens — the Rising American Electorate won a presidential race in 2008, giving the Democratic candidate a majority of the vote for the first time since 1976. Edsall, a regular contributor to The New York Times’s “Campaign Stops” election blog, warns Democrats that this might have been a one-time-only event — and, indeed, the traditional American electorate made itself heard in 2010. The newer voters are more difficult to mobilize than older whites, and conservatives have become adept at activating the gut reactions of their voters. The buttons they push are those of race and immigration, and increasingly those of economics, which is now depicted in terms of absolutely incompatible worldviews. Consider Mitt Romney’s claim that President Obama believes in “equality of outcomes,” while real Americans believe in “equality of opportunity.”
(More here.)
NYT Book Review
THE AGE OF AUSTERITY: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics
By Thomas Byrne Edsall
Illustrated. 256 pp. Doubleday. $24.95.
Most books about contemporary politics are designed for quick obsolescence. A notable exception to the rule is the work of Thomas Byrne Edsall, whose five careful books, starting with “The New Politics of Inequality” in 1984, are still found on the shelves and in the footnotes of everyone who writes about politics — left and right, academics and journalists alike. Edsall’s distinctive method combines his own reporting with rigorous use of data from across the social sciences, including psychology and anthropology. Though his previous book, “Building Red America,” seemed poorly timed when it appeared in 2006 just as Karl Rove’s quest for permanent Republican dominance collapsed, its insights into conservative attitudes about authority and autonomy remain as useful as anything written more recently about the Tea Party and the right-wing resurgence.
The great topic of Edsall’s life’s work is the breakdown of the New Deal-era liberal coalition at the intersection of race, resentment and inequality. While analysts often sharply distinguish economic from social issues, Edsall sees a “chain reaction,” to use the title of his 1991 book, in which race, economics and highly emotional topics like immigration interact to crush any real hope of a new progressive coalition. When minorities acquire new rights or benefits, it comes at a cost, real or perceived, for established white voters.
This story reads very differently in 2012 than it would have in 1984, when the “Reagan Democrats” defected from the New Deal coalition. Now it’s the children and even the grandchildren of the Reagan Democrats who make up the middle of the voting population, and a Rising American Electorate (in the pollster Stan Greenberg’s phrase) made up of professionals, unmarried women and young voters as well as blacks, Hispanics and Asians threatens to outnumber the old resentful whites. More than threatens — the Rising American Electorate won a presidential race in 2008, giving the Democratic candidate a majority of the vote for the first time since 1976. Edsall, a regular contributor to The New York Times’s “Campaign Stops” election blog, warns Democrats that this might have been a one-time-only event — and, indeed, the traditional American electorate made itself heard in 2010. The newer voters are more difficult to mobilize than older whites, and conservatives have become adept at activating the gut reactions of their voters. The buttons they push are those of race and immigration, and increasingly those of economics, which is now depicted in terms of absolutely incompatible worldviews. Consider Mitt Romney’s claim that President Obama believes in “equality of outcomes,” while real Americans believe in “equality of opportunity.”
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Liberals are more concerned with how conservatives feel about race than conservatives. I suppose this is understandable given the results of liberal social policy (breakup if the family, dependency, sense of entitlement and on and on) that has disproportionably devastated blacks.
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