Long-time neoconservative activist David Frum frets over Republican
Party becoming the party of the super-rich. This is like somebody
writing an article agonizing over the tendency of pigeons to crap on statues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07Inequality-t.html
NY Times Magazine, September 7, 2008
The Vanishing Republican Voter
By DAVID FRUM
I LIVE IN WASHINGTON, in a neighborhood that is home to lawyers,
political consultants, television personalities and the chief
executive of the TIAA-CREF pension fund. Not exactly an abode of the
superrich, but the kind of neighborhood where almost nobody does her
own yardwork or vacuums his own floor. Children's birthday parties
feature rented moon bounces or hired magicians. The local grocery
stores offer elegant precooked dinners of salmon, duck and artichoke ravioli.
Four miles to the southeast there stretches a different Washington.
More than one-third of the people live in poverty. Close to half the
young children are overweight. Fewer than half the adults work. The
rate of violent crime is more than 10 times that of the leafy streets
of my neighborhood.
Measured by money income, Washington qualifies as one the most
unequal cities in the United States. Yet these two very different
halves of a single city do share at least one thing. They vote the
same way: Democratic. And in this, we are not alone. As a general
rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more
equal, the more Republican. The gap between rich and poor in
Washington is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican
Charlotte, N.C.; and more than twice as great as in
Republican-leaning Phoenix, Fort Worth, Indianapolis and Anaheim.
My fellow conservatives and Republicans have tended not to worry very
much about the widening of income inequalities. As long as there
exists equality of opportunity as long as everybody's income is
rising who cares if some people get rich faster than others?
Societies that try too hard to enforce equality deny important
freedoms and inhibit wealth-creating enterprise. Individuals who
worry overmuch about inequality can succumb to life-distorting envy
and resentment.
All true! But something else is true, too: As America becomes more
unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have
dismissed are ending by devouring us.
THE TREND TO INEQUALITY is not new, and it is not confined to the
United States. It has manifested itself just about everywhere in the
developed world since the late 1970s, and for the same two reasons.
The first reason is the revolution in family life. Not so long ago,
most households were home to two adults, one who worked and one who
did not. Today fewer than half of America's households are headed by
married couples, and married women usually work. So America and other
advanced countries have become increasingly divided between families
earning two incomes and those getting by on one at most.
The family revolution coincided with another: a great shift from a
national to a planetary division of labor. Inequality within nations
is rising in large part because inequality is declining among
nations. A generation ago, even a poor American was still better off
than most people in China. Today the lifestyles of middle-class
Chinese increasingly approximate those of middle-class Americans,
while the lifestyles of upper and lower America increasingly diverge.
Less-skilled Americans now face hundreds of millions of new wage
competitors, while highly skilled Americans can sell their services
in a worldwide market.
As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that
some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000,
something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The
mood of the country has soured. Conservatives who disregard the mood
of unease may forfeit their power to defend the more open and
productive American economy they did so much to build.
STEP ACROSS THE COUNTY line between Washington and suburban Fairfax
County, Va., and you see the forfeiting process at work.
A third of a century ago, Fairfax had only recently evolved from farm
country to bedroom community. Some rich families clustered in the
village of McLean, where Robert Kennedy had his Hickory Hill estate.
Otherwise, Fairfax housed middle-class families looking for
inexpensive housing and excellent schools. These middle-class
families voted Republican, leading the Old Dominion's political
transition away from its reactionary segregationist past to a modern
business-oriented conservatism.
Under its Republican leadership, Fairfax boomed. Giant shopping malls
and futuristic office blocks beanstalked over tract homes. The
population surged past the one-million mark. Today Fairfax boasts an
economy bigger than Vietnam's. Fairfax households earn among the
highest average incomes of any American county, more than $100,000,
but that high average conceals wide variations between the highly
educated and new arrivals speaking in 40 different tongues. With
wealth comes diversity and what is inequality but diversity in monetary form?
The county's new wealth and diversity have created important new
social problems. The schools are stressed. The roads are choked. Land
use is more contentious. As Fairfax has evolved toward greater
inequality, it has steadily shifted into the Democratic column. The
Democrats Tim Kaine and Jim Webb won almost 60 percent of Fairfax's
votes in, respectively, the 2005 governor's race and the 2006 U.S.
Senate election. Democrats dominate Fairfax's local government. In
2004, Fairfax voted for John Kerry over George Bush, 53 percent to 45
the first Democratic presidential victory in the county since the
Johnson landslide of 1964. Don't imagine that this is a case of the
shanties voting against the mansions. Kerry won some of his
handsomest majorities in the fanciest of Fairfax's 99 precincts.
In fact, Fairfax's Democratic preference is typical of upper America.
In 2000, Al Gore beat George Bush, 56-39, among the 4 percent of
voters who identified themselves as "upper class." America's
wealthiest ZIP codes are a roll call of Democratic strongholds:
Sagaponack, N.Y.; Aspen, Colo.; Marin County, Calif.; the near North
Side of Chicago; Beacon Hill in Boston. (Palm Beach, at least,
remains securely Republican.) There is a long list of reasons for
this anti-Republican tilt among the affluent: social issues, the
environment, an ever more internationalist elite's distaste for the
Republican Party's assertive nationalism. Maybe the most important
reason, however, can be reduced to the two words: "Robert Rubin." By
returning to the center on economic matters in the 1990s, the
Democrats emancipated higher-income and socially moderate voters to
vote with their values rather than with their pocketbooks.
Republicans still claim the support of the upper-middle, but by
dwindling margins. Democrats increased their share of the vote among
those earning more than $100,000 by 9 percentage points between 1994
and 1998. Between 1998 and 2006, Democrats increased their share of
this upper-middle-class vote by 3 more points.
Till now, conservative strength in the vast American middle more than
compensated for any losses at the top and for the immigration-driven
expansion of the bottom. Indeed, the Democratic tilt of the very
richest Americans could be exploited as a powerful conservative
recruiting tool. Resentment of "elites" is a major theme of
conservative talk radio. "Who's looking out for you?" demands Bill
O'Reilly, as he excoriates "media elites" who vacation in the
Hamptons, Aspen and the Virginia horse country.
But O'Reilly's question has recoiled upon its onetime beneficiaries.
Who is looking out for the Fox-viewing public? For most of the Bush
administration, G.D.P. grew strongly, the stock market boomed, new
jobs were created. But the ordinary person experienced little
benefit. The median household income, which rose in the '90s, had
only just caught up to its 2000 level when the expansion ended in 2007.
(clip)
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