Yet another thread about working class whites
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  Yet another thread about working class whites
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Author Topic: Yet another thread about working class whites  (Read 976 times)
All Along The Watchtower
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« on: June 26, 2013, 03:08:00 PM »

Basically-why is there such a fascination with working class white voters in American political discourse and discussions about demographics, particularly among people who are not exactly working class themselves?

Do they really vote against "their economic interest"? Assuming that they have many good reasons to vote for Democrats these days, assuming they all vote Republican, and assuming that "economic interest" is really that clear for working class voters in American politics, which have a rather...um....conservative (small C) bent to them?
 
More to the point, so what if many working class whites vote Republican? It's not as if either party needs them, even for vote counts (let alone for policy influence, which they have little influence in either party). Both parties are controlled by elites, just different kinds of elites, and the battles between those elites are a large part of the story of contemporary American electoral politics.
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TJ in Oregon
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« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2013, 09:34:26 PM »

This reminds me of something a friend of mine once told me, that American politics is simply a struggle between the academic elite and the business elite. That one-sentence description isn't all-encompassing, but it's also not that far off.
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LastVoter
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« Reply #2 on: June 29, 2013, 02:52:41 PM »

No fascination with them, if you watch the major news channels it's always about the middle class. The working class is ruthlessly divided by the media into several categories based on race, and any white is thrown into middle-class if at all applicable. Some abusive terms are  thrown around to describe misfits, such as "trailer-trash" for the sections that don't fit into the narrative. Obviously the discussion on this forum is using more accurate terms, because it has a better understanding of the class structure(including right-wingers that post here). Since the discussion is absent in the media it results in an peculiar focus on the group.
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memphis
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« Reply #3 on: June 29, 2013, 07:02:44 PM »

Well, there are a lot of these folks. Which is important in voting. Both parties need them, though in different percentages. Neither party has a prayer if they get shut out with these folks. Oddly to me, income has almost no correlation with voting once you account for race. Region of the country, which I think some people, rather strangely, conflate with income/class is obviously much more important in determining how white people vote.
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #4 on: June 30, 2013, 03:33:24 AM »

Probably because the media/pundits/Beltway insiders tend to be upscale whites. Once in college I had a roommate who was black and from a well-to-do family and he would complain incessantly about how "ghetto" some of the black people in the city we went to school in were. Racial groups tend to project criticism inward onto their "inferior" group members.

A lot of the conflicted feelings upscale white liberals tend to have towards those people stem from the fact that the mere existence of white people who are poor and disadvantaged kind of throws a wrench into their notion of racial power dynamics trumping everything else. There's this sense of, "But you don't have an excuse for being poor. You're white!"
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opebo
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« Reply #5 on: July 01, 2013, 12:32:50 PM »

I find it hard to believe that any elite really thinks it 'doesn't need them'.  Obviously they are absolutely necessary for the Republicans to win any election, and it is necessary for the Democrats to win at least a sizable minority of them to win.
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memphis
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« Reply #6 on: July 01, 2013, 01:05:23 PM »

Probably because the media/pundits/Beltway insiders tend to be upscale whites. Once in college I had a roommate who was black and from a well-to-do family and he would complain incessantly about how "ghetto" some of the black people in the city we went to school in were. Racial groups tend to project criticism inward onto their "inferior" group members.

A lot of the conflicted feelings upscale white liberals tend to have towards those people stem from the fact that the mere existence of white people who are poor and disadvantaged kind of throws a wrench into their notion of racial power dynamics trumping everything else. There's this sense of, "But you don't have an excuse for being poor. You're white!"
It's more that blacks from better backgrounds are worried that their ghetto counterparts are making all of them look bad. Nobody looks at Kid Rock and says "Gee, white people sure are trashy." It's a completely different thing as a minority.
And liberals can make an excuse for anything. We always blame everybody but the poor person for his poverty Tongue
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