Left Behind

So if it’s “elitist” or “insulting” to note that voters who are otherwise left behind in the global economy sometimes have misdirected frustrations – which can be exploited for political gain – then Barack Obama has plenty of company. ~The San Francisco Chronicle

Yes, he does have plenty of company–a majority of the Democratic Party, if polling is any indication.  Obama has plenty of company, and this is a serious problem not just for Obama, but for all those in the party who agree with what he said. 

The Chronicle reminds me here of something Obama was saying in his Philadelphia speech last month, which goes to the heart of the charge of his condescensing attitude: some people have correctly directed frustrations (i.e., they blame the right people or institutions for their plight) and some have misdirected frustrations.  Resentment about affirmative action is displaced economic anxiety; the answer isn’t to change or eliminate affirmative action, but to rally white voters against corporations and lobbyists.  Likewise, frustration with a broken immigration system and mass immigration isn’t actually about national sovereignty, border security, demographic change or anything actually connected to immigration–it is fear of the Other that fills the void that a job would otherwise fill.  Never mind that people who have work and economic security oppose mass immigration, often more fervently and actively than those who have some immediate economic interest at stake.  The entire issue is written off as “anti-immigrant sentiment,” xenophobia, an irrational fear.  This is the essence of the claim: liberals have values and convictions; conservatives have neuroses.  This is what we have come to expect from the left, but Obama fans were insistent that their candidate was different.  I have never been persuaded that this was true, and the claim is even less credible now.    

Naturally, in the Chronicle’s and Obama’s telling, it is whites and cultural conservatives who have misdirected frustrations, which fits with the critique of conservatism from the left, which holds that pretty much all of conservatism is one big exercise in misdirected frustration, usually boiled down (most simplistically by the Krugmans of the world) to that “antipathy to people who are not like them.”  Perhaps it is not terribly surprising that a liberal thinks cultural conservatives come up with the wrong answers, since he presumably believes that their cultural conservatism, at least in its political expression, is wrong, but it strikes me as significant that there is an assumption shared by Obama and the Chronicle that the attachments and attitudes Obama mentioned can apparently only be understood as a form of scapegoating and distraction.  Obviously, what the Chronicle refers to mockingly as the “horrors of globalization” or an immigrant “invasion” very well could impinge directly on the economic interests of small town Americans and might have an obvious, relevant connection to their economic predicament.  Since it is taken for granted among most coastal and urban elites that opposition to these things is the function of ignorance and prejudice, it simply can’t be that these issues might resonate with voters displaced by “creative destruction.” 

What seems more significant, however, is that voters in many of the communities most adversely affected by mass immigration might very well be less prone to vote on the basis of immigration policy than voters elsewhere.  There may also be cases where small towns that have been hollowed out by offshoring and deindustrialisation have been so battered that they now welcome any new factory or business, even if it employs large numbers of illegal immigrant workers.  Having destroyed their means of support through bad trade policy, Washington has made these towns dependent on the import of foreign labour to keep their towns from collapsing all together, and so perhaps perversely traps those worst affected by these wrongheaded policies into accepting them as inevitable.  Indeed, one hears quite often the argument from the left and from pro-immigration Republicans that voters in border states are supposedly less concerned about immigration than people in the center of the country who are just experiencing the first waves of immigration in the last decade or so, as if this made the current policy (or rather lack of a policy) more justifiable.  One also hears the critique that working class and black voters, who undeniably are negatively affected by mass immigration, don’t care about immigration as much as middle-class whites.  If these claims are true, Obama’s analysis is that much more in error and should then be seen as little more than the laziest of stereotyping.  Arguably, the people who are most likely to be most concerned with these areas of policy are those who fear or anticipate negative effects from these policies in the future; the communities that these policies have already gutted or transformed beyond recognition may have more immediate and pressing concerns than struggling against policies whose repeal or alteration will now do them little good.  It’s not at all obvious that the places that have been “left behind” are more attached to any of the things Obama mentioned than those that have not.

Update: Looking over the Rasmussen numbers on reactions to the remarks, what is striking is how few people outside of the 18-29 age group agree with Obama’s remarks.  Among 30-39, those who disagree outnumber those who agree by two to one (50-24); in the 40-49 group, the breakdown is 64-19; among 50-64 year olds it’s 58-26; in the 65+ group it’s 59-20.  (The remainder of each group is “not sure.”)  Not only is it not the case that “everybody” knows what he said to be true, but the public seems to disagree with him overwhelmingly.  Even young voters, one of Obama’s core demographic groups, are split evenly, 40-40.  Interestingly, it is the oldest voters who are least likely (39%) to say that the comments reflect an elitist view, while young voters are more likely than some of their elders (48%) to say this.   

Update: Fortunately, nobody except the elites care about this controversy.