Introduction by Yves
Smith
While Richard Florida’s
recommendation that the Democratic Party should target the “service class”
makes perfect sense, it presupposes that the Democrats have exercising
political power as their main objective. In fact, their real overarching goal
is maximizing political patronage opportunities. That means catering to the
rich while still making enough gestures to non-elite voting groups so as to be
able to cobble together enough votes to win enough elections so as to stay in
the game. Thus the Democrats have managed to ignore how they have hemorrhaged
representation at all levels of government during the Obama era. The way to
square that circle is that as long as the Democrats controlled the
Administration, they had plenty of goodies and revolving door opportunities to
dispense. That enabled them to pretend that what was happening at the state and
local level was of no consequence.
A loyal Democrat and former
state official remarked, as if it was obvious, that the Democrats were more
corrupt than Republicans by virtue of having to pretend they were not serving
the rich, while the Republicans are up front as to what they are about.
Even worse, as class
stratification becomes more pronounced in the US, many Democrats can’t even do
a good job of pretending they want the votes of working people that they hold
in contempt. Hillary Clinton couldn’t stand mixing with them. By contrast, one
of the keys of Trump’s success is he loves selling. With his Queens accent,
nouveau riche (read non-elite) habits, and ability to fake (or actually drum up
during his rallies) interest in lower class people, he can outrun Democratic
party snobs.
The degree of Democratic
out-of-touchness also manifested itself in the failed Ossoff campaign. Here
they were targeting voters within striking distance of their class and
ideology. Yet how could they have dreamed Ossoff would go over well in Georgia?
He not only looked far too young, but as one reader put it, he had the earmarks
of someone from Williamsburg, a hipster part of Brooklyn (gentrified so long
ago by artists priced out of Manhattan that its edginess is a thing of the
past). By contrast, Handel looked like a typical suburban Republican. She
projected “one of us,” while the Democrats staked their wager on a candidate
who radiated “alien”.
A saying from the science
fiction classic Dune seems apt:
When a creature has developed
into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.
By Richard Florida,
University Professor and
Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s
Rotman School of Management; Distinguished Visiting Fellow at NYU’s Shack
Institute of Real Estate; and the co-founder and editor-at-large of The
Atlantic’s CityLab. He
is author of the recently released book New
Urban Crisis. Follow him on Twitter: @Richard_Florida.
Originally published at Evonomics
The Service Class, not the
Working Class, is the key to the Democrats’ future. Members of the blue-collar
Working Class are largely white men, working in declining industries like
manufacturing, as well as construction, transportation, and other manual
trades. Members of the Service Class work in rapidly growing industries like
food service, clerical and office work, retail stores, hospitality, personal
assistance, and the caring industries. The Service Class has more than double
the members of the Working Class – 65 million versus 30 million members, and is
made up disproportionately of women and members of ethnic and racial
minorities.
A growing chorus of
commentators contend that to be competitive the Democrats must win back the
strongholds of the White Working Class. As Thomas B. Edsall wrote recently in The New York Times, 6.7 to 9.2 million
Obama voters, mostly concentrated in the Midwest and the Rustbelt, switched
their votes to Trump in 2016, more than enough to give him his Electoral
College victory. Trying to recapture those white Working Class voters—many of
whom are both more intolerant and less economically progressive than the
party’s base—would not only be difficult, but counterproductive. A more
effective and more realistic strategy, my own research suggests, is to attract
the larger and growing ranks of the Service Class—especially by targeting the
areas where they live.
The Republican and Democratic
parties each have distinct class advantages that have not only persisted but
grown stronger over time. Across America’s 350-plus metros, places where the
Working Class is dominant went overwhelmingly for Trump. The correlation for
the Working Class share of the workforce and Trump votes was substantial
(0.53), while the correlation between the Working Class share and Clinton votes
was negative (-0.51). Going back four years, the correlations were similar for
Romney (0.46) and Obama (-0.45).
On the flip side, the
Democrats have a distinct and persistent advantage in the larger, denser, more
knowledge-based metros, where the engineers, scientists, academics, designers,
researchers, lawyers, senior managers, and arts professionals that make up the
Creative Class are concentrated. Clinton votes were significantly correlated
with the Creative Class share of the workforce (0.49), while Trump votes were
even more negatively associated with Creative Class metros (-0.54). Again,
these correlations were similar, if slightly weaker, in 2012, 0.40 for Obama
and -0.41 for Romney.
The real contested terrain of
American politics is the Service Class and its locations. If members of the
blue-collar Working Class make up a fifth of the US workforce, and members of
the Creative Class make up another third, the Service Class is by far the
largest and fastest-growing class in America, accounting for more than 45
percent of the workforce (65 million strong and growing).
Here the data speaks for
itself. In 2012, the statistical associations between partisan vote shares and
Service Class shares were weak but slightly favoring the Democrats, 0.1 for
Obama and -0.1 for Romney. But in 2016, Service Class locations were
essentially up for grabs: there were no statistical associations between the
Service Class shares of metros and Trump or Clinton votes. In Florida, for
example, Clinton took larger, more densely-populated Service Class metros like
Miami and Orlando, while Trump took smaller ones, like Pensacola, Myrtle Beach
and Gulfport. The Democrats did not lose the election simply because the
Republicans swung the Working Class, whose members and locations have long been
trending in their direction, but because they were not able to inspire or
mobilize the Service Class, too many of whose members simply stayed home.
Places with large Service
Class populations hold the key to the Democrats’ future. With their
disproportionate shares of working women, members of minority groups, and
millennials, they are a natural Democratic coalition. Service Class workers
make roughly $25,000 dollars per year—a fraction of what Creative Class and
blue-collar workers earn. To galvanize them, the Democrats must craft a bold and
aggressive agenda for inclusive prosperity, including a higher minimum wage
indexed to geographic differences in living costs, stronger labor laws, as well
as far-reaching programs to upgrade their jobs and turn them into actual
careers, provide affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, and establish a
universal basic income, among many other things.
Although Trump’s policies will
not help the Working Class, the Democratic Party cannot depend upon winning
them back. To improve its standing in smaller, red-leaning metros, the
Democratic Party must aggressively court the Service Class strongholds within
them, adding them to the Creative Class metros that are already solidly blue.
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