Another post I wanted to share with you is this one at Full Stack Economics by Alan Cole. In it he lays out the case that the Democratic Party is now the “party of the rich”:
The growth of the high-income Democratic faction can’t be perfectly measuredâ —there is no database that exactly matches voters and their incomesâ —but there are plenty of ways to see the trend indirectly.
For example, a Wall Street Journal analysis observed the changing patterns of presidential voting in the 100 richest U.S. counties. The Democratic share rises over time. Walter Mondale carried just 7 of them in his 1984 landslide loss. In his 1992 victory, Bill Clinton carried just 36 of the 100. Joe Biden carried 57 of them in 2020.
One of those 57 counties was Bergen County, New Jersey, just west of New York City. The northern parts of Bergen County are in New Jersey’s 5th Congressional Districtâ —Josh Gottheimer’s district.
Political scientists sometimes look at a second demographic dimension, education, to get a more nuanced picture of the electorate. A 2019 study of realignment from Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm divides voters into four permutations of education and income levels:
I don’t think that’s completely accurate or, at least, it’s accurate but incomplete. I think that both parties are the “party of the rich”. You only need look at donor rolls to see the truth of that.
However, I think that the Democratic Party is the party of “intellectuals” to use the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase. To get some idea of what is meant by this you might want to take a look at this old post of mine in which I quote a lengthy passage from Dr. Schumpeter’s most famous work, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy”. The TL;DR of this is that there’s a distinct social class of highly educated and, generally, well-compensated individuals who will inevitably undermine both capitalism and democracy.
The problems I have with all of this is that most of these “intellectuals” are complete strangers to primary and secondary production and see their own area, tertiary production which is mostly consumption, as actually being production. They’re actually a pretty small minority in the society but they’re pushing the society in a way that benefits them and actually hurts most of the people in the society.
They’re very well-intentioned.
“The problems I have with all of this is that most of these “intellectuals†are complete strangers to primary and secondary production and see their own area, tertiary production which is mostly consumption, as actually being production. “
As I read the previous paragraph in your post the lifted statement immediately popped into my head. I find this to be most acutely true of the college academics, the technically oriented (but not blood and guts shop floor engineers) and the punditry, which I think needs no further explanation.
I don’t fault them for being “very well-intentioned,†which I assume was sarcastic, other than for the fact that their views never seem to work but continue to be strongly held. Dogmatic, or evil? I do fault people for being suckered into pie in the sky notions while in fact voting against their own, and the general, interests. Kinda dumb.
Nomenklatura.
There are other alternatives. Hopeful, for example. I think the most prevalent error is the belief that their wishful thinking hasn’t worked because it hasn’t gone far enough.
That defect isn’t limited to progressives, by the way. I think it applies to those who think that tax cuts pay for themselves as well.
“their wishful thinking hasn’t worked because it hasn’t gone far enough.”
Common as weeds among Marxists.
I heard recently, half-jokingly, that the Democrats are trying to recreate the Eisenhower coalition while the Republicans were trying to recreate the New Deal coalition.
Average household income in Bergen ia about $101,000. Seems like definition of rich keeps moving.
Steve
steve, do you understand the distinction between “rich” and “richest”? It is possible to be among the richest counties without the people who live there being rich.
So the title should be “party of the people who live in the richest county”? Yes, it would be possible for the richest county to not have any rich people.
Steve