In today's Opinion Journal, James Taranto comments unfavorably (of course) on Timothy Noah's ruminations on the possibility that conservatives might be insane. But Taranto misses a whole lot more that can be criticised. Noah begins his article thusly:
The working class's refusal to synchronize its politics with its economic interests is one of the enduring puzzles of the present age.
Note the breezy assumption that voting Democratic is unarguably in working classmen's economic interests. Their failure to vote this way is only an "enduring puzzle" to those who would present such an assumption as fact.
Between 1989 and 1997, middle-income families (defined in this instance as the middle 20 percent) saw their share of the nation's wealth fall from 4.8 percent to 4.4 percent.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States was 245,705,000 on January 1, 1989 and 266,574,000 on January 1, 1997. 20% of those numbers are 49,141,000 and 53,314,800, respectively.
And according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Gross Domestic Product (which I feel is a good proxy for "the nation's wealth") in constant 2000 dollars was $6.9814 trillion in 1989 and $8.7035 trillion in 1997.
So, in 1989, the 49,141,000 citizens in the middle of the income pile had, according to Noah, 4.8% of the wealth. That would be $335.1 billion. Or $6819 each.
And (you can see where this is going, can't you?) in 1997, the 53,314,800 citizens in the middle had 4.4% of the wealth. That would be $383.0 billion. Or $7184 each.
In other words, people in the middle 20% did, in real terms, get richer. Not a whole lot richer, and granted, my calculations are a bit back-of-the-envelope, but it certainly contradicts the point that Noah wants to get across when he compares 4.8% and 4.4%.
And I won't even delve into the question of how many people in the middle 20% in 1989 were still in the middle 20% in 1997. Time to go on to Noah's next sentence:
Yet Al Gore lost the white working class by a margin of 17 percentage points, and John Kerry lost it by a margin of 23 percentage points.
I don't agree with Taranto's position that "working class" is an insult (to me, it's as neutral as "blue collar"), but still, Noah seems to be pulling a fast one on us by using the term here. After presenting us with a statistic about middle-income Americans, Noah goes on in the very next sentence to tell us about the voting habits of the "white working class" as if the two sets of people are interchangeable. Are they? The link in the above sentence defines "white working class" as "whites with less than a four year college degree". No mention of how many in the white working class are in the middle 20% of income. For that matter, neither is there any mention of how many middle-income folks are non-white.
In addition to the switch from middle-income to white working class, note the switch in timelines. Noah uses data (incorrectly, as I pointed out) from 1989 and 1997. Then extrapolates to elections in 2000 and 2004. What happened from 1998 through 2004? Noah doesn't say. He just finds it self-evidently inexplicable that white working-class folk would vote against Al Gore (the same Al Gore, it should be said, who was vice-president for half of the time Noah claims the middle-income group was losing ground economically).
Noah's paragraph concludes:
As the GOP drifts further to the right, and becomes more starkly the party of the wealthy, it is gaining support among the working class.
Some possible explanations: The working class is indeed already on the right, towards where the GOP is drifting to. Or the working class doesn't have any animosity towards the wealthy and would like to join their ranks someday. Or the GOP isn't as starkly a party of the wealthy as a party who managed to field a candidate even more wealthy than Bush is. Or maybe even the working class knows condescension when it hears it, and doesn't much like it. That, in the end, is Taranto's analysis:
Every time the Democrats lose an election, they make a big show of asking questions like these. Then, the next time they lose an election, they once again wonder why the "working class" has forsaken them. Maybe it's as simple as: because they were listening.