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All
in the Family
January
8, 2002
by Jack Rabbit
Could Archie Bunker be persuaded to vote for the Meathead?
Or at least for the same progressive candidate for whom the
Meathead would vote? This idea would have been absurd in the
seventies, when Americans tuned in every week to watch the
working class bigot played by the late Carroll O'Connor make
a fool of himself berating his politically progressive son-in-law
(Rob Reiner) on the popular TV series All in the Family.
However, it is a possibility that the Left in general and
Democrats in particular should find worth exploring as we
look to 2004. Last week, we examined the role of third parties
in American politics. We began by examining the two major
parties as coalitions of voting blocks, that is, of voters
with similar social and economic challenges or ideological
views.
Some voting blocks shift their identity over time. A given
voting block may change from Democratic to Republican; or,
the voting block may not be solidly identified with either
party and become identified as swing voters. Such a voting
block may go for one party in one election and the other the
next. Third party movements come into play when neither party
addresses the concerns of a particular block.
We took a long look last week
at the progressive Democrats who felt that the Democratic
Party had abandoned their principles and felt it worthwhile
to cast their lot with the Green Party. For the discussion
this week, one might easily imagine Mike Stivic (also known
as "the Meathead"), Archie Bunker's son-in-law, as being one
of these voters. The election was close enough that these
disaffected progressives, by withholding their votes from
Democratic candidate Al Gore, cost Gore the election.
The fate of many third parties is that one of the major parties
adopts part of the upstart party's platform and takes most
of its voters into its fold. This may present a problem for
the major party in that by gaining the support of the upstarts,
it may alienate some of its existing supporters. These alienated
supporters either start a third party movement of their own
or even change allegiance to the rival major party.
So, the critical question for the Democrats today is: can
they make concessions to the Meathead and the disaffected
progressives who voted for Nader in 2000 without alienating
the centrists they need just as badly? We'll return to this
question.
Last week, we also introduced a thought to be held for this
one: that one of the major voting blocks whose allegiance
has shifted over time is the white working class. This is
the voting block with which most people would identify Archie
Bunker. On the seventies TV series, Archie was a solid Nixon
man. In 1972, Archie and many people like him voted for Nixon.
The writers of All in the Family did not go much into Archie's
prior voting behavior, but based on his demographics and his
overall perspective we might surmise that in 1968, he was
not yet ready to vote Republican but was uncomfortable with
liberal tendencies among the Democrats.
Archie may have voted for independent presidential candidate
George Wallace in 1968; at least we know many people like
him did. In 1972, Wallace, a Southern Democrat, returned to
the fold of the party, but most who voted for him four years
earlier, like Archie, voted for Nixon. Prior to 1968, Archie
was probably a solid, loyal Democrat. He may have been old
enough to have voted in his first election for Roosevelt;
although Archie as we knew him scorned FDR and his legacy,
in the thirties and forties Archie was a beneficiary of the
New Deal and no doubt knew a good thing when he saw it.
However, since 1972, Archie and those like him have displayed
rather interesting voting behavior. Hurt by the recession
of the mid-seventies, they voted for Jimmy Carter over Nixon's
successor, Jerry Ford. After Carter proved ineffective, they
voted for Ronald Reagan in both 1980 and 1984. Thus, the former
Wallace voters were now designated as Reagan Democrats (if
Archie is like many other blue-collar voters, he never changed
his registration). They also voted for Bush in 1988. However,
the early nineties brought more uncertain times, and Archie
- perhaps holding his nose - voted for Bill Clinton in 1992
and 1996. In 2000, the blue collar vote split between Bush
and Gore.
What is even more interesting is what Archie and the other
blue collar voters who have been on this winning streak in
presidential elections have to show for it. Nothing. In fact,
less than nothing. Ronald Reagan, arguing for his re-election,
asked voters if they were better off in 1984 than in 1980.
Most appreciated the economic stability brought by the lower
rate of inflation since he had come to office and rewarded
him accordingly. However, in a longer term view, Archie Bunker
was not better off in 1984 (when he voted for Reagan) then
in 1948 (when he voted for Truman). And he isn't better off
today. The American working class has gone backwards.
When Archie - or at least our hypothetical version of him
- voted for Truman in 1948, he belonged to a labor union that
assured him wages and benefits on which he could feed his
family and think about purchasing a new car and a home. The
dark days of the Great Depression were far behind and the
average American could look forward to a life of relative
comfort. The quarter-century or so following the end of World
War II were perhaps America's golden years.
Today, fewer than 12% of Americans belong to a labor union
and purchasing power for wage earners has dropped. In an article
called "Structural Adjustment Is Hitting the US Too" (in Kevin
Dahaher, ed., Democratizing the Global Economy, Common Courage
Press: Monroe, ME, 2001, pp. 177-81), social activist Anuradha
Mittal cites some interesting statistics. A worker earning
the minimum wage earns less than $10,000 a year; the official
federal poverty line is just over $17,000 for a family of
four. Nearly 17% of all Americans live below this the poverty
line. Over 44 million Americans lack health insurance and
over 7 million are homeless. At nearly 20%, the United States
has the highest rate of child poverty among industrialized
nations.
This is not because of any dramatic, sudden downturn of the
American economy that took place. On paper, at least, both
the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton enjoyed
long periods of economic growth; however, the high tide, rather
than rising all boats, merely kept many small boats from sinking.
In a word, as a reward for voting for the winning conservative
and centrist candidates in presidential elections for thirty
years, the American blue-collar worker has been screwed. Perhaps
no greater cause of this has been the emergence of a global
economy. In this arrangement, capital may easily cross national
boundaries. A company that manufactures automobile parts headquartered
in Illinois may easily build a factory in Mexico instead of
Illinois.
Now, of course, the environment in Mexico may encourage the
manufacturer to locate his factory in Mexico as well. After
all, Mexicans workers make lower wages, their labor unions
are less aggressive and the government does not pass pesky
environmental legislation that might require the factory in
Mexico to take care that production waste not pollute the
air and water.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing jobs that remain in this country
are not as desirable as they once were. The export of so many
such jobs overseas has caused a downward pressure on wages
and benefits. Furthermore, the manufacturing jobs that leave
the United States are being replaced by service-oriented jobs
that don't pay as well. The factory worker is being replaced
by the non-union retail clerk, the hamburger flipper and the
waitress. The lives of the new American low-wage earner is
documented in a new book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting
by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (Henry Holt and Company:
New York, 2001). This is recommended reading.
The kind of corporate behavior where good-paying jobs are
exported to low-age economies is encouraged by trade agreements
like NAFTA, which make it easier to export capital. These
trade agreements discourage developing countries from protecting
their fledgling industries with tariffs. Instead, developing
nations are encouraged to bring in the ready-made capital
from the United States. This arrangement may have some very
marginal short-term benefits to industrial workers in developing
nations, but in the long term, their wages will remain low
and working conditions poor.
The real winners in the free trade regime are the multinational
corporations in the United States. It should surprise no one
that an American CEO now makes over 400 times what his lowest-paid
employee does. One would assume that this is the work of the
Republicans. It sounds like the idea is to enrich those at
the top with the hope that it will trickle down to the bottom.
The Republicans don't talk about this "trickle down" theory
too loudly any more because its long been held to be a lot
of baloney. It is certainly true that the GOP supports the
free trade agenda.
However, NAFTA is a feather in the cap of Bill Clinton, who
was just as much a free trader as any Republican. Al Gore,
Clinton's chosen heir, promised to continue Clinton's free
trade policies.
Progressives, like the Meathead, have long decried this state
of affairs. As pointed out last week, this is no small reason
why progressive Democrats deserted the party and voted for
Ralph Nader in 2000. The progressives favored replacing free
trade with fair trade, which allows developing nation to grow
their own industries, asserting the rights of workers to organize
for better wages and benefits and for small farmers to get
a fair price for their crops. One can see that for these progressives,
the focus on trade issues has been on what is does to urban
workers and rural peasants in Asia and Latin America. However,
what happens to poor people in Asia and Latin America is of
no immediate concern to the working poor in America; they
have their own problems paying their own bills. Yet the same
policies that are oppressing the poor of developing nations
are also eroding the power of the American blue-collar worker.
Furthermore, the low-wage service worker who has replaced
the factory worker has so little stake in the present political
process that he typically doesn't vote at all. As politics
goes, this is an untapped resource. It's time for the Left
to tap it.
The solution would seem to be obvious. The Democratic Party
must become the party of fair trade. The fact is that free
trade policies hurt most Americans, and that most of those
who are hurt are traditional Democratic constituencies or
constituencies that are the concern, at least theoretically,
of the political Left. The Democratic Party must again become
their champion. The Democrats can become the dominant American
political party by bringing peace to the Bunker household
and getting Archie and the Meathead to support the same candidate.
The Democrats should endorse fair trade planks in their platform,
including withdrawal from the WTO. These planks should be
written in language stressing that better-paying manufacturing
jobs will remain in America, while also paying homage to the
benefits such policies will have to the masses in developing
countries. In addition, the Democrats should support a revitalization
of public education and a single-payer national health insurance
program on the lines of the Canadian system.
Other planks in the platform should endorse laws to make
it easier for workers to organize and to discourage government
from employing contractors with poor labor and environmental
records. The government should be prohibited from awarding
a contract to any firm that employs non-union workers in a
attempt to break a strike. As long as the idea is to show
that the Democrats are the champions of the worker class,
a plank should endorse direct aid for child care for working
parents.
The centrists and conservative Democrats will remain in this
revitalized progressive Democratic Party because the platform
will not abandon the fiscal responsibility for which the Democrats
now stand. Will they abandon the Democrats for the party that
wants to reduce taxes below the level the government can fix
roads or build schools? Not very likely. This wing of the
party has worked hard to improve the image of Democrats as
fiscally responsible. There's no reason for the Democrats
to give this away. Politics, after all, is about making choices,
sometimes hard ones. One fundamental choice the Democrats
can make is to make certain that government is solvent enough
to fund the programs that meet public needs.
The Republicans would not dare counter with their Horatio
Alger pitch of rugged individualism and personal responsibility.
They are the party of opportunity? For whom? For those who
are already rich and powerful, perhaps. Are they really rich
and powerful because they are innately more intelligent or
morally superior to the rest of us? Do they want us to believe
that those at the top earned their way there by there own
prowess? Are Dan Quayle and George W. Bush really the zenith
of human evolution? No, it has to do with the privilege that
comes with being born to wealth and power, something for which
the individual is not responsible.
How dare the Republicans tell the woman scrubbing their floors
for them that she is responsible for her poverty? Perhaps
this woman grew up in a poor neighborhood and attended a dilapidated
and underfunded public school. Perhaps her mother raised her
on welfare and her father skipped out. How dare they tell
this woman that the fact she toils so and is not the CEO of
General Motors is her own fault? Just let them make that pitch
to the working poor.
The Republicans will respond, as they often have, by appealing
to the fears and prejudices of that we have long associated
with Archie. There will be gay marriages; there will be abortion
on demand. To which the Democrats can respond that gay rights
and abortion have nothing to do with the decline in the quality
of life for low-wage earners in America. If every gay person
in the world miraculously became straight overnight, even
if abortion were outlawed, that will do nothing to help the
diminishing purchasing power of the American blue-collar and
service workers and their families. Gay rights and abortion
do not threaten the survival of the traditional family simply
because the traditional family unit is the best way for most
people to have children and raise them into productive adults.
The Democrats, without contradicting any gay rights or pro-choice
planks in the platform, must not be apologetic and start mumbling
about the right of an individual to pursue the dictates of
his own sexual orientation or a woman to make her own reproductive
decisions; it's time for progressives to stop condescending
to these people and assume that they know what their interests
really are. Instead of that old limp line that sounds like
an apology for supporting human rights, the Democrats must
assert to the blue-collar and the low-wage service worker:
"Vote for us and you will have better wages and benefits,
which will make life easier and better for you and your traditional
family."
If the Republicans say that this is class warfare, then let
the response be a paraphrase of Patrick Henry: If this is
class warfare, let us make the most of it.
Such a progressive platform, centered around planks of fair
trade, labor rights, human rights, environmental protection
and fiscal responsibility, would revitalize the Grand Coalition
that led FDR to victory after electoral victory in the thirties
and forties, not by making empty promises to the beleaguered
American worker or by appealing to fears of these people,
but by showing hope that there is a better future in a democratic
America. Such a platform is a winner for the Left, whether
they are Democrats or Greens, and for most Americans. It is
a winner for both Archie Bunker and the Meathead.
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