On lunch pails (1)

Hang in there today and tomorrow for a two-parter. And be sure to follow through to the end. Your jaw will be dragging on the floor at some of the things I have to share.

First, the setup: two neoconservatives, Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin, have published a ridiculous piece of right-wing boilerplate in the Los Angeles Times entitled, yes, "Gentry Liberalism."

Regular Big Con readers have met Joel Kotkin before. He was one of "ownership society" propagandists, back in 2005, exhorting as many Americans as possible to own their own homes. Indeed, Kotkin singled out the cities with the most rapidly expanding homeownership rates—those same cities who now enjoy the most rapidly expanding foreclosure rates—as "Our New Cities of Aspiration," the de facto headquarters of the American dream." So listen closely to Joel Kotkin. He always knows where it's at.

Comes now Joel, and his partner Fred, with the argument that the Democratic Party, once the home of a liberalism that "defended the interests and values of the middle and working classes," has now been overrun by this "gentry liberalism," answerable only to the "tony neighborhoods and luxurious suburbs in and around New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and West Los Angeles."

Let me share with you a bit of a secret. I occasionally find studying conservatives a very, very boring task. From decade to decade to decade they keep on hauling out the same old warhorse arguments, propping them up as if they were fresh as the morning dew.

Barry Goldwater was also very big on the rhetoric of, "I used to respect the Democrats back in the days of liberal lions like Roosevelt and Truman, but now they've been overrun by a bunch of candy-assed toffs." So was Ronald Reagan; that former New Dealer made "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me" his hardiest slogan. And dig this: the Harvard Crimson has its archives online back to the nineteenth century, and there you can read that right-wing plutocrat-who-pretends-to-be-a populist Michael Barone trying out his right-wing-pundit training wheels in that particular working-class rag in a 1966 column he called—wait for it!—"The New Snobbery."

How...new. It's a conservative rite of passage, and it's always the same argument—and even the subtext of Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech in 1952: Democrats used to be a party of for guys who carried lunch pails. Now they're a party for swells who wear monocles. So why not, Mr. Lunch Pail, try voting Republican?

The "gentry liberalism" rap is a marvelous distraction from the fact that Siegel and Kotkin's ideology, conservatism, is to America's actual gentry as white is to rice and green is to hundred dollar bills. And indeed, the "argument" is sillier this year than it ever has been before. So silly that even Joe Klein—a Democrat inordinately fond of the narrative that Democrats have sold out their lunch-pail base—can punch through this wet tissue of nonsense:

...all of the Democrats are far more populist than they've been in the past. They've turned against free trade (a bad move, I think) and turned toward bolstering the social safety net (a good move). Kotkin and Siegel note that 77% of hedge fund managers favor the Democratic Party, but 100% of the leading Democratic candidates this year favor taxing the profits of hedge fund managers as regular income (not at the 15% capital gains rate). The authors make no mention of universal health insurance, which is hardly a gentry issue--but is the number one priority for each of the candidates running.

Well said. And Klein says more: that Kotkin and Segal claim Democrats are ignoring "traditional middle-class concerns such as the unavailability of affordable housing, escalating college tuitions and the shrinking number of manufacturing jobs" in favor of a "gentry liberal crusade to tighten U.S. environmental regulations to slow global warming could end up hurting middle- and working-class interests." But Joe Klein spots the silly in this as well:

the environment...was a gentry issue in the past.... But this time, the candidates are framing it, appropriately, as a potential source of new jobs and as a national security matter. Kotkin and Siegel say the technology isn't ready for the array of "green collar" jobs promised by Democrats, which just isn't true: the bulk of those jobs, at first, will come in the area of conservation--retrofitting insulation etc etc.

Indeed. And props to Campaign for America's Future-launched Apollo Alliance for this particular game-changing move.

But there's one more data point Kotkin and Segal marshal to "prove" that the Democrats have abandoned their identity as the Party of the People: "They're more concerned with...gay rights than with lunch-pail joes."

It's fascinating to see it said so explicitly that supporting basic human rights proves that the Democrats are unworthy of working-class support—and damned insulting to the "lunch-pail joes" they affect to champion. In fact, it's another bit of déja vu all over again. Only, back when Michael Barone took the story out of mothballs in 1966, the crusade that disqualified the Democrats was their embrace of civil rights for blacks.

Next time: join me for a journey back to the golden months of the summer of 1966, when the argument that "lunch-pail joes" should abandon the Democrats because of their concern for human rights became the official, on-the-record Republican policy just in time for the home stretch of the congressional campaign. An "open occupancy" bill, making it illegal to refuse to sell your house to a black person, was winding its way through Congress. Martin Luther King was marching for open occupancy in Chicago. I'll publish some documents I've rescued from the archives that display the response of "lunch pail joes" to this evil Republican opportunism. It had naught to do with Democrats' embrace of "gentry liberalism." Instead, they wrote to a once-beloved liberal senator, Paul Douglas, running that year for reelection:

"A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunity to vote you in to the highest office in the land—The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who ar changing in their support of you."

Tune in tomorrow. Really, these letters will blow your mind.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future