Here's
some fascinating reading. Right up your alley.
Wall Street Journal
By KARL ZINSMEISTER
September 2, 2004; Page A12
Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party
of the wealthy. Those images of America's
two major political wings have been frozen for generations.
The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated.
(Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough
truths.
No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of
"little guys" -- ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops,
construction workers, homemakers, military veterans -- began moving into the
Republican column. And big chunks of America's
rich elite -- financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software
millionaires, entertainers -- drifted into the Democratic Party.
The extent to which the parties have flipped positions on the
little-guy/rich-guy divide is illustrated by research from the Ipsos-Reid polling firm. Comparing counties that
voted strongly for George W. Bush to those that voted strongly for Al
Gore in the 2000 election, the study shows that in pro-Bush counties only 7% of
voters earned at least $100,000, while 38% had household incomes below $30,000.
In the pro-Gore counties, fully 14% pulled in $100,000 or more, while 29% earned
less than $30,000.
As Daniel
Henninger has noted1 on this page, it
is "becoming harder by the day to take the Democrats seriously as the
party of the common man." The financial pillars for Democrats are now
super-rich trial lawyers, Hollywood entertainment
executives, and megabuck financiers. Both parties have their fat cats, obviously, but Federal Election
Commission data show that many of the very wealthiest political players are now
in the Democratic column.
Today's most aggressive election donors by
far are lawyers.
As of July, law partners had donated $112 million to 2004 political candidates;
by comparison, the entire oil and gas industry donated only $15 million. And
wealthy lawyers now tilt strongly Democratic: 71% of their money goes to
Democrats, only 29% to Republicans.
Wall Street, traditionally thought of as a GOP bastion, is no
longer any such thing. Ultra-income brokers and bankers now give heavily to the
party of Andrew Jackson. Six of the top 15 contributions to Democratic nominee
John Kerry came from partners at firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan
Stanley, and J.P. Morgan.
John Kerry is a perfect embodiment of the takeover of the
Democratic Party by wealthy elites. If elected, he would become the richest man
ever to sit in the White House; experts describe his bloodline as "more
royal than any previous American President"; his educational path was
pluperfect upper crust. And there are now many Democrats like Mr. Kerry -- from
Sen. Jon Corzine to Sen. Jay Rockefeller -- who are
simultaneously top of the heap in wealth and on the left in politics.
Migration of the rich and powerful to the Democrats has been so
pronounced, John Kerry has actually pulled in much more money than sitting
President George Bush this spring and summer. Mr. Kerry's monthly fund-raising
totals have routinely doubled or even tripled Mr. Bush's sums. And while Mr.
Bush has relied heavily on flocks of small donors, the money on the Kerry side
has come much more from well-heeled individuals like the Hamptons beach-house owners who
handed him $3 million in one day at the end of August.
So, which is the party of the people now?
* * *
America
has a long history of distaste for elitism. George Washington quickly learned
that his proud, obstreperous, self-governing Yankee privates, imbued with a
powerful "levelling spirit.
. . where the principles of democracy so universally prevail," would not
be dictated to, but had to be led. From Andrew Jackson to George Bush the
elder, U.S. politicians have known that leaders who put on airs or “otherweiss
” [sic]
separate themselves from ordinary Americans will be penalized by the
electorate.
Reinforcing
the egalitarian principles on which our government was founded is the fact that
America (as Daniel Boorstin pointed out) has traditionally been a culture
without a capital. At the time of our founding, more than 95% of the population
lived outside the major cities, and we continue to be a highly dispersed,
localized, and independent-minded people, quite resistant to bossing from the
center.
Average
Americans believe elitism is not only wrong in principle, but also ineffective.
And they are correct. A cross-section of everyday people will generally prove
better at solving knotty societal
problems than a fraternity of experts -- as economics writer James Surowiecki demonstrates nicely in "The Wisdom of
Crowds." Careful observers like Friedrich Hayek noted long ago that
ordinary citizens possess forms of knowledge, intuition, and moral sense that
make them better collective arbiters of critical national debates than any
educated elite. This is not just rabble-rousing, but a time-tested truth that
explains much of the success of America and the common
people who have come to her shores.
Once upon a
time, America's distaste
for elitism translated easily into a distrust for
conservatism. But today, with country-club Republicans having been swept aside
by Nascar Republicans, there is nothing undemocratic
about American conservatism. Among elites, it is now liberalism that is the
dominant creed.
Over the last
generation, reports Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, professional
elites have become both "less nationalistic" and "more liberal
than the American public. This is revealed by 20 public opinion surveys from
1974 to 2000." One authoritative study of a dozen different elites,
including top civil servants, lawyers, religious authorities, military
officers, entertainment moguls, union leaders, non-profit managers,
business executives, and media chieftains, found that every one of these groups
but two (businesspeople and the military) was twice to three times as liberal
as the public at large.
It's not as
if the Democrats have taken over the top of the socioeconomic ladder and the
Republicans the bottom. Rather, Democrats dominate at the very upper and lowest
rungs, while Republicans find their following in the middle.
You can see
this when slicing the electorate by education as much as by income. At the bottom, school dropouts and unskilled workers
are heavily Democratic, but so are grad students and professors on the other
end of the educational spectrum. (College faculty groups are the
very top financial contributors to John Kerry, according to Federal Election
Commission data.) Meanwhile, high school graduates and individuals with
bachelor's degrees (the middle) are predominantly Republican.
In the
publishing industry, new book imprints and clubs have been founded recently by
several major publishers to cater specifically to politically conservative
readers (who were previously neglected by booksellers). The publishing industry
has been pleasantly surprised by the spending, loyalty, and depth of the
non-liberal reading public. The ambitious conservative middle has become a mass
market too large and too lucrative to ignore.
So we're in
an interesting new era. The Right has become a thinking party, with rich
intellectual resources, that is simultaneously dead set against political
elitism and cultural snobbery. Conservatism has laid claim to America's quiet but
multitudinous middle class. And during the same period, the Left has come to
dominate among the overclass and underclass that
bracket the conservative middle.
As a result,
the old way of thinking about U.S. politics --
little-guy Democrats vs. wealthy Republicans -- is about as accurate and
relevant today as a 1930 weather forecast. New fronts have moved in. Expect
some major squalls ahead.
Mr. Zinsmeister, author of "Dawn Over Baghdad"
(Encounter Books, 2004), is editor in chief of The American Enterprise (TAEmag.com2).
