The culture wars help the wealthy and hurt the poor
The federal government says that 38 million Americans live in poverty. In addition, tens of millions live above the poverty line but in more or less permanent financial insecurity. Who represents the interests of all these people?
For most of the 20th century the answer was straightforward. The party of poor Americans was the party of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, rural electrification and the minimum wage: the Democrats. That’s still mostly true. When a political party holds the nation’s credit hostage in an effort to cut food stamps, you can be certain it isn’t the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Biden.
But as the affluent wing of the Democratic Party continues to enlarge, and economically struggling whites grow ever more committed to the Republican party, party identities are bound to come under pressure.
According to a new analysis by political scientists Lee Drutman and Oscar Pocasangre, in 2020 Republicans won 137 of the 162 congressional districts where income is below average and whiteness is above average. Such districts account for more than 61% of the 222 districts that comprise the GOP House majority.
Democrats won about threequarters of districts that are more racially diverse than average, regardless of how affluent they were. Democrats also won a modest majority (57%) of districts that were above average in both affluence and whiteness.
All this has worked out well for wealthy Americans, who now have two parties relatively committed to their well-being instead of one. Many (though not all ) Democrats are reluctant to impose significant taxes on the rich, though such policies enjoy widespread support from voters.
Other efforts to increase the tax burden on the wealthy failed. When Obama tried to change the 529 education savings program to make it less skewed toward the wealthy, the votes weren’t there. Republicans opposed him, of course. But he abandoned the effort after House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other influential lawmakers persuaded him to pull the plug.
Democrats raised some corporate taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last year and retained the cap on the SALT deduction, which reduces benefits to wealthy taxpayers in high-tax states. But overall, the legislation was far more notable for its broad benefits — it made a host of tax credits available, for example — than for any tax increase.
Likewise, Joe Biden repeatedly reminds the public, most recently in his State of the Union address, of his vow not to tax any household making less than $ 400,000 a year. That threshold leaves only the top 2% of income earners outside the protective bubble.
Despite representing less affluent districts, the Republican Party has shown no interest in representing less affluent interests. It remains vehemently opposed to tax increases on the wealthy and to redistributing wealth or services down the economic scale.
But the predominance of lower-income GOP districts does seem to be easing Republican enthusiasm for killing Social Security and Medicare. Even Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is now saying that when he declared that he wanted to sunset all federal programs he by no means meant that he wanted to sunset all federal programs.
The GOP is a “post-policy” party. Their policy is politics. What they are for or against is a function of who is in a given office at a given moment. But one policy to which the GOP clings, no matter the politics, is opposition to taxes on the wealthy, especially as a means to provide benefits to the poor — even the Republican poor.
That leaves culture war as the main stuff of American politics. “Under these conditions,” Drutman and Pocasangre write, “the hyper-polarization that characterizes American politics becomes increasingly difficult to resolve. The different ways in which Democrats and Republicans carve out and sustain their respective coalitions leaves little room for agreement, particularly when identity and cultural issues replace economic issues as the focal conflict of politics.”
Culture war works for Democrats because diversity and youth, and thus the future, are largely on the Democrats’ side. The most economically vibrant parts of the nation are culturally liberal. Culture war works for Republicans because it’s all they’ve got.
Any effort to reorient the party’s economic policies toward its less affluent constituents would run afoul of rightwing donors and a vast conservative infrastructure established to insulate the wealthy from the policy preferences of the American majority. White grievance and a perpetually mutating rage against kids these days, by contrast, produces no intraparty conflict.
Both parties are cross-pressured by rich and poor constituents. For Democrats, that’s resulted in greater caution about taxing the wealthy while still seeking to provide benefits to the poor. For Republicans, it has necessitated a singular focus on the culture war to rally voters whose economic interests are actively undermined by the party.