13 ms·

" “the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.” Elites’ distance fro

by geodel 7y ago

" “the Democratic Party in the United States transitioned over half a century from the workers’ party to the party of the highly educated.” Elites’ distance from working-class interest, he contends, led the Democratic party and its ideological counterparts abroad to accede to a policy program betraying the values of social democracy: regressive taxation, elite domination of higher education systems, and forms of globalization that enabled the wealthy to hide their assets from tax authorities and trade agreements that facilitated outsourcing. " This is great point. I see this on social media commentary all the time and wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns.

lainga 7y ago
Is it right for Piketty to assert that the Democratic Party was a homogeneous whole in the 60's? What exactly was Daley doing at Chicago in 1968 in the interests of social democracy? You may as well claim that the Democrats transitioned from the party of the South due to unforeseen Goldwater-shaped factors.
- 0x262d 7y ago
  The Democratic party has always been an unhappy coalition between capitalists and workers with diametrically opposed material interests. But in the 60s and 70s there was an extremely militant labor movement and the balance of power between those two groups was shifted a lot (although political control was never given up).
save_ferris 7y ago
I always assume most are just oblivious, given the fact that the Democratic Party still tries to identify as a worker-first party. That’s rapidly changing with the rise of the modern progressive movement, DSA and the like. Part of the problem is the two-party system, which essentially ensures that control remains between the Dems and GOP. This is why so many presidential elections wind up being contests of the least-worst option.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  It’s also why some positions that should be fairly common are effectively impossible to express. For single payer healthcare, against the death penalty, and anti-abortion? You have no good candidates. Pro union, but also for stronger anti-illegal-immigration measures? Ditto. And so on.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    I'm not sure we need a label for every single combination of positions. your first example could just be a religious liberal/progressive. the second probably describes a lot of blue collar trump supporters, although the man himself would probably not make an explicitly pro-union statement.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      We need finer-grained party platforms—so, more of them—so issues that might otherwise advance easily don’t become hostages to wedge issues. But for that we have to make structural changes so more than two parties can stably exist at once—or else so that no parties can stably exist long, I guess.
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    I'd argue that's more of a symptom of the rise of identity politics in particular than the two-party system. Policy and political discourse is driven so heavily by identity today that political parties find it easier to coalesce around groups of unrelated issues in order to find their voting base. But I do agree with you in that it's an issue.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      The two party system is a big factor because it allows the two parties to stay closely within their positions and voters have nowhere else to go. When I compare this to Germany there the traditional two big parties received a rude wake up call because suddenly the greens and the AFD started rising. So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
codingslave 7y ago
I've always viewed it as paradoxical that the left is both: 1.) For the welfare of the worker, social programs, universal healthcare, "standard of living" 2.) Open borders immigration, free trade, outsourcing, and other ultra capitalist policies.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  Open borders is anti-capitalist because it allows labor to move with the same liberty as capital, so it can help reduce the ability of capitalists to find deals. Without other policies it is atomizing and ineffective, but there is a good moral argument for it in that invisible lines shouldn't hamper freedom of movement for people. Nations are fake. The socialist left is against free trade and outsourcing. Period. We are internationalist and support trade with countries that will raise their labor conditions to parity. We also support anti-capitalist struggles abroad.
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    > Open borders is anti-capitalist because it allows labor to move with the same liberty as capital, so it can help reduce the ability of capitalists to find deals. Except like so much with socialism, the reality and the hypothetical are in stark contrast. You are arguing that in theory, open borders allow for laborers to take their value to wherever it will benefit them the most. But in reality, it not particularly easy for an individual to pick up and move their entire lives, especially when we are talking about distances on the scale of international travel. So the workers who are willing to move end up being those with the least to lose, meaning those who do end up moving are those willing to settle for less. Say Mexico and the US opened their borders tomorrow. Do you see American laborers taking their skills to Mexico en masse? Or do you see Mexican laborers taking their skills en masse to America? How do you think the value of an American laborer is affected when the labor market gets flooded with supply, many of whom will likely be willing to work for less than their American counterparts?
    - worik 7y ago
      Given the structural inequalities between USA and Mexico "opening the boarders" is impractical. Given the structural inequalities between USA and Mexico allowing free movement of capital between USA and Mexico enriches USA and impoverishes Mexico.
hkmurakami 7y ago
One thing to remember is that everyone thinks they're "middle class". Even the corporate VP making half a million dollars thinks she's middle class.
- clairity 7y ago
  this is why i define the middle class as the middle 3 quintiles of wealth rather than some nebulous standard of living, the latter of which can be manipulated more easily for political ends. it's more obvious then to see that the 20-80% middle class standard of living has unambigously become more stressed, debt-laden, fearful, and immobile over the last 50 years, while the 1% has become much freer in all dimensions. we need to bring that back into balance (which is not perfectly equal distributions by the way).
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    class, wealth, and income are all distinct concepts. imo you're better off being more specific if you really mean wealth or income buckets. taken alone, wealth throws away some important information. a retired couple worth $500k (roughly 80th percentile household net worth) is living a very different life than a twenty something who already has that in the bank.
    - clairity 7y ago
      yes, i almost added a tangent about income, but really, that's at best second-order effect--class mobility has been dempened over those 50 years and doesn't make much difference except at the margins.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  Or the programmer making half a million dollars :-)
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  An anecdote, but, most of my closest friends definitely believe they are poor; most of their friends that I've met also believe they're poor. I honestly haven't met too many people that believe they're "lower" middle class. Conversely, except in SV, everyone I know that pulls over $300k thinks they're rich.
gumby 7y ago
> wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns. I lean to "oblivious" argument. People inherently see things through their own experience. Back in the 80s I took some classes that tried to break through the bubble (especially funny that it was MIT where I like to joke "if you don't arrive arrogant they'll beat it into you").* This was just before the CMC machine tools arrived so we were working on WWII surplus Bridgeport mills and the like. And we were sent down (literally in the basement of building 35 IIRC) to work on them under the supervision of the folks in blue who were all polite but also unstinting in their criticism (in my case -- I deserved it!). After a few sessions of this, in lecture we were reminded that "you'll be up in the air conditioned design shop sending prints down for these guys to build. They may only have a high education but they are at lest as smart as you guys, often smarter. If you send something stupid to them you'll hear about it". It was a good lesson. * This is actually an exaggeration: in my experience nice people continued to be nice. But MIT does have quite a few jerks, not all of them intentionally so.
- skrtskrt 7y ago
  I attended a top-20 US University and many of my classmates and friends had multimillionaire parents & fell into the "oblivious" camp, (like telling me $50k income for an entire family was upper middle class)... BUT their upbringing, the media they consume, and the reinforcement of beliefs through their social echo chamber makes it insanely hard to change their "obliviousness", to the point where it's not so innocent anymore - more like willful ignorance.
  - refurb 7y ago
    I knew a guy in graduate school who had never held a "crap" job like working the register at a retail store or working as a janitor. His parents made sure he never had to take summer jobs to pay for schooling. His first job out of school was at an investment bank. The world of blue collar work was entirely foreign to him.
  - ngngngng 7y ago
    I had a rich roommate that once remarked that "most people make more than $400k a year." He had made it to college and believed that most people lived in a literal 1% salary.
wycy 7y ago
This is painfully true. This is pretty well captured by the completely out of touch sentiments in [0], written by the folks at Crooked Media (generally Democratic establishment people). The wealthy upper middle class sees the coronavirus quarantine as just a chill time to work from home on a laptop and drink wine. These people are not ignoring the plights of the poorer working class; they are altogether completely blind of it. They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. The human cost is entirely lost on them. [0] https://crooked.com/articles/we-are-doing-fine-coronavirus/ https://crooked.com/articles/we-are-doing-fine-coronavirus/
- reggieband 7y ago
  > They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. In a thread on HN someone commented that the 3m unemployment figure was only 1% of the population. I had to take a moment to let that sink in. It makes me worried about a future dominated by technocrats.
  - jmole 7y ago
    a better percentage to use would be the delta in unemployment rate, e.g. 3M / (# of people who want to work). This would be approximately 3M / 158M [0], or a 1.8% rise in the unemployment rate. In the 2008 recession, we saw a total unemployment rate of almost 10%, so we'd have to lose an additional 7-8M jobs to get to that level. [0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm
    - wycy 7y ago
      Considering the fed is warning about the possibility of 30% unemployment [0], an additional 7M could come next week. [0] https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-23/fed-official-unemployment-could-hit-30-as-coronavirus-slams-economy https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-23/fed-...
      - 7y ago
Kalium 7y ago
I've witnessed two modes at work here. One is elites deciding that since their sympathies are in the right places, they must know what the concerns of the working class are. Since they're better educated, they're also clearly best equipped to address those concerns! The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class and what's in their interests is what's in the interests of the working class. Both are misguided. The former leads to patronizing policy, the latter selfish. The best example I can think of for the latter is student loan forgiveness - lots of educational elites have student loans, comparatively little of the working class does.
- lukifer 7y ago
  > The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class Well said. I cringe a little whenever I hear a complaint like "we're the first generation who won't be as well off as our parents", usually from educated young adults who've never known what it's like to have your utilities shut off, or not know where your next week of meals is coming from. I don't mean to trivialize issues like health care costs, student debt, or general economic anxiety; those problems are real, and go far beyond finger-wagging admonitions to "stop wasting money on lattes and experiences". But there's absolutely a conflation by many young college graduates that because they face uphill economic challenges (relative to their middle-class norms), that they must be in the same category as the hand-to-mouth working class. To the extent that creates political solidarity, great; but quite often, it belies selfishness and entitlement, with no awareness of, or gratitude for, much better they have it than the majority of the planet. (Full disclosure: I have a bit of a grudge against twenty-somethings at the moment, for talking a big game, and then failing to show up to the primaries this year.)
lone_post 7y ago
Not just that, but both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in the abuse of the working class through massive - both expanded legal and willfully ignored illegal - immigration. The vast majority of new immigrants are low skill low wage workers and these workers drive down working class wages. Now immigrants are on the whole very hard working and persistent people. They are a self selected population of such people. That said, the economic reality is clear: for every small business owning immigrant, there are many more competing with existing citizens for low wage jobs and absorbing government benefits. Both the Democrats (ideological and political interests) and the Republicans (business interests) have ignored this and opened the floodgates of immigration precisely at the same time that the lower and middle classes are deteriorating. We are all human beings, but the leaders of a nation must prioritize the needs of the citizens of that nation above others, regardless of grand humanitarian interests or self serving business interests.
- based64 7y ago
  Bernie used to campaign, even in 2017, against immigration on behalf of the US Working class, calling it a Koch Brothers scheme to drive down wages. Now he's pandering and calling for "A welcome America for all"
coliveira 7y ago
This happened because, while the Republican Party represents the same old interests, the increase in inequality forced a change in the Democratic Party. The bills were being paid by progressive elites, with high salaries and linked to big corporations. Low-wage earners, increasingly losing their jobs to other countries, felt as having lost their influence in the party.
- ericd 7y ago
  Seems directly tied to the unions’ loss of power.
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    Unions still have a lot power in the Democratic Party -- in blue states they practically control the state legislatures. However, depending on the union, rank and file members have lost power and representation.

by geodel 7y ago

lainga 7y ago

Is it right for Piketty to assert that the Democratic Party was a homogeneous whole in the 60's? What exactly was Daley doing at Chicago in 1968 in the interests of social democracy? You may as well claim that the Democrats transitioned from the party of the South due to unforeseen Goldwater-shaped factors.

0x262d 7y ago
The Democratic party has always been an unhappy coalition between capitalists and workers with diametrically opposed material interests. But in the 60s and 70s there was an extremely militant labor movement and the balance of power between those two groups was shifted a lot (although political control was never given up).

save_ferris 7y ago

I always assume most are just oblivious, given the fact that the Democratic Party still tries to identify as a worker-first party. That’s rapidly changing with the rise of the modern progressive movement, DSA and the like. Part of the problem is the two-party system, which essentially ensures that control remains between the Dems and GOP. This is why so many presidential elections wind up being contests of the least-worst option.

karatestomp 7y ago
It’s also why some positions that should be fairly common are effectively impossible to express. For single payer healthcare, against the death penalty, and anti-abortion? You have no good candidates. Pro union, but also for stronger anti-illegal-immigration measures? Ditto. And so on.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  I'm not sure we need a label for every single combination of positions. your first example could just be a religious liberal/progressive. the second probably describes a lot of blue collar trump supporters, although the man himself would probably not make an explicitly pro-union statement.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    We need finer-grained party platforms—so, more of them—so issues that might otherwise advance easily don’t become hostages to wedge issues. But for that we have to make structural changes so more than two parties can stably exist at once—or else so that no parties can stably exist long, I guess.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  I'd argue that's more of a symptom of the rise of identity politics in particular than the two-party system. Policy and political discourse is driven so heavily by identity today that political parties find it easier to coalesce around groups of unrelated issues in order to find their voting base. But I do agree with you in that it's an issue.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    The two party system is a big factor because it allows the two parties to stay closely within their positions and voters have nowhere else to go. When I compare this to Germany there the traditional two big parties received a rude wake up call because suddenly the greens and the AFD started rising. So these parties have to refresh themselves unless they want to become irrelevant. In the US there is no such pressure.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

codingslave 7y ago

I've always viewed it as paradoxical that the left is both: 1.) For the welfare of the worker, social programs, universal healthcare, "standard of living" 2.) Open borders immigration, free trade, outsourcing, and other ultra capitalist policies.

tehjoker 7y ago
Open borders is anti-capitalist because it allows labor to move with the same liberty as capital, so it can help reduce the ability of capitalists to find deals. Without other policies it is atomizing and ineffective, but there is a good moral argument for it in that invisible lines shouldn't hamper freedom of movement for people. Nations are fake. The socialist left is against free trade and outsourcing. Period. We are internationalist and support trade with countries that will raise their labor conditions to parity. We also support anti-capitalist struggles abroad.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  > Open borders is anti-capitalist because it allows labor to move with the same liberty as capital, so it can help reduce the ability of capitalists to find deals. Except like so much with socialism, the reality and the hypothetical are in stark contrast. You are arguing that in theory, open borders allow for laborers to take their value to wherever it will benefit them the most. But in reality, it not particularly easy for an individual to pick up and move their entire lives, especially when we are talking about distances on the scale of international travel. So the workers who are willing to move end up being those with the least to lose, meaning those who do end up moving are those willing to settle for less. Say Mexico and the US opened their borders tomorrow. Do you see American laborers taking their skills to Mexico en masse? Or do you see Mexican laborers taking their skills en masse to America? How do you think the value of an American laborer is affected when the labor market gets flooded with supply, many of whom will likely be willing to work for less than their American counterparts?
  - worik 7y ago
    Given the structural inequalities between USA and Mexico "opening the boarders" is impractical. Given the structural inequalities between USA and Mexico allowing free movement of capital between USA and Mexico enriches USA and impoverishes Mexico.

hkmurakami 7y ago

One thing to remember is that everyone thinks they're "middle class". Even the corporate VP making half a million dollars thinks she's middle class.

clairity 7y ago
this is why i define the middle class as the middle 3 quintiles of wealth rather than some nebulous standard of living, the latter of which can be manipulated more easily for political ends. it's more obvious then to see that the 20-80% middle class standard of living has unambigously become more stressed, debt-laden, fearful, and immobile over the last 50 years, while the 1% has become much freer in all dimensions. we need to bring that back into balance (which is not perfectly equal distributions by the way).
- leetcrew 7y ago
  class, wealth, and income are all distinct concepts. imo you're better off being more specific if you really mean wealth or income buckets. taken alone, wealth throws away some important information. a retired couple worth $500k (roughly 80th percentile household net worth) is living a very different life than a twenty something who already has that in the bank.
  - clairity 7y ago
    yes, i almost added a tangent about income, but really, that's at best second-order effect--class mobility has been dempened over those 50 years and doesn't make much difference except at the margins.
skrebbel 7y ago
Or the programmer making half a million dollars :-)
rxhernandez 7y ago
An anecdote, but, most of my closest friends definitely believe they are poor; most of their friends that I've met also believe they're poor. I honestly haven't met too many people that believe they're "lower" middle class. Conversely, except in SV, everyone I know that pulls over $300k thinks they're rich.

gumby 7y ago

> wonder if educated elites being merely oblivious or totally asshole about working class concerns. I lean to "oblivious" argument. People inherently see things through their own experience. Back in the 80s I took some classes that tried to break through the bubble (especially funny that it was MIT where I like to joke "if you don't arrive arrogant they'll beat it into you").* This was just before the CMC machine tools arrived so we were working on WWII surplus Bridgeport mills and the like. And we were sent down (literally in the basement of building 35 IIRC) to work on them under the supervision of the folks in blue who were all polite but also unstinting in their criticism (in my case -- I deserved it!). After a few sessions of this, in lecture we were reminded that "you'll be up in the air conditioned design shop sending prints down for these guys to build. They may only have a high education but they are at lest as smart as you guys, often smarter. If you send something stupid to them you'll hear about it". It was a good lesson. * This is actually an exaggeration: in my experience nice people continued to be nice. But MIT does have quite a few jerks, not all of them intentionally so.

skrtskrt 7y ago
I attended a top-20 US University and many of my classmates and friends had multimillionaire parents & fell into the "oblivious" camp, (like telling me $50k income for an entire family was upper middle class)... BUT their upbringing, the media they consume, and the reinforcement of beliefs through their social echo chamber makes it insanely hard to change their "obliviousness", to the point where it's not so innocent anymore - more like willful ignorance.
- refurb 7y ago
  I knew a guy in graduate school who had never held a "crap" job like working the register at a retail store or working as a janitor. His parents made sure he never had to take summer jobs to pay for schooling. His first job out of school was at an investment bank. The world of blue collar work was entirely foreign to him.
- ngngngng 7y ago
  I had a rich roommate that once remarked that "most people make more than $400k a year." He had made it to college and believed that most people lived in a literal 1% salary.

wycy 7y ago

This is painfully true. This is pretty well captured by the completely out of touch sentiments in [0], written by the folks at Crooked Media (generally Democratic establishment people). The wealthy upper middle class sees the coronavirus quarantine as just a chill time to work from home on a laptop and drink wine. These people are not ignoring the plights of the poorer working class; they are altogether completely blind of it. They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. The human cost is entirely lost on them. [0] https://crooked.com/articles/we-are-doing-fine-coronavirus/ https://crooked.com/articles/we-are-doing-fine-coronavirus/

reggieband 7y ago
> They know that 3 million people just filed for unemployment, but they only know about it as an abstract statistic. In a thread on HN someone commented that the 3m unemployment figure was only 1% of the population. I had to take a moment to let that sink in. It makes me worried about a future dominated by technocrats.
- jmole 7y ago
  a better percentage to use would be the delta in unemployment rate, e.g. 3M / (# of people who want to work). This would be approximately 3M / 158M [0], or a 1.8% rise in the unemployment rate. In the 2008 recession, we saw a total unemployment rate of almost 10%, so we'd have to lose an additional 7-8M jobs to get to that level. [0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm
  - wycy 7y ago
    Considering the fed is warning about the possibility of 30% unemployment [0], an additional 7M could come next week. [0] https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-23/fed-official-unemployment-could-hit-30-as-coronavirus-slams-economy https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2020-03-23/fed-...
    - 7y ago

Kalium 7y ago

I've witnessed two modes at work here. One is elites deciding that since their sympathies are in the right places, they must know what the concerns of the working class are. Since they're better educated, they're also clearly best equipped to address those concerns! The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class and what's in their interests is what's in the interests of the working class. Both are misguided. The former leads to patronizing policy, the latter selfish. The best example I can think of for the latter is student loan forgiveness - lots of educational elites have student loans, comparatively little of the working class does.

lukifer 7y ago
> The other is highly educated people feeling economically unprivileged and concluding that this now means they are the working class Well said. I cringe a little whenever I hear a complaint like "we're the first generation who won't be as well off as our parents", usually from educated young adults who've never known what it's like to have your utilities shut off, or not know where your next week of meals is coming from. I don't mean to trivialize issues like health care costs, student debt, or general economic anxiety; those problems are real, and go far beyond finger-wagging admonitions to "stop wasting money on lattes and experiences". But there's absolutely a conflation by many young college graduates that because they face uphill economic challenges (relative to their middle-class norms), that they must be in the same category as the hand-to-mouth working class. To the extent that creates political solidarity, great; but quite often, it belies selfishness and entitlement, with no awareness of, or gratitude for, much better they have it than the majority of the planet. (Full disclosure: I have a bit of a grudge against twenty-somethings at the moment, for talking a big game, and then failing to show up to the primaries this year.)

lone_post 7y ago

Not just that, but both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in the abuse of the working class through massive - both expanded legal and willfully ignored illegal - immigration. The vast majority of new immigrants are low skill low wage workers and these workers drive down working class wages. Now immigrants are on the whole very hard working and persistent people. They are a self selected population of such people. That said, the economic reality is clear: for every small business owning immigrant, there are many more competing with existing citizens for low wage jobs and absorbing government benefits. Both the Democrats (ideological and political interests) and the Republicans (business interests) have ignored this and opened the floodgates of immigration precisely at the same time that the lower and middle classes are deteriorating. We are all human beings, but the leaders of a nation must prioritize the needs of the citizens of that nation above others, regardless of grand humanitarian interests or self serving business interests.

based64 7y ago
Bernie used to campaign, even in 2017, against immigration on behalf of the US Working class, calling it a Koch Brothers scheme to drive down wages. Now he's pandering and calling for "A welcome America for all"

coliveira 7y ago

This happened because, while the Republican Party represents the same old interests, the increase in inequality forced a change in the Democratic Party. The bills were being paid by progressive elites, with high salaries and linked to big corporations. Low-wage earners, increasingly losing their jobs to other countries, felt as having lost their influence in the party.

ericd 7y ago
Seems directly tied to the unions’ loss of power.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  Unions still have a lot power in the Democratic Party -- in blue states they practically control the state legislatures. However, depending on the union, rank and file members have lost power and representation.