The Party of Aspiration

The New Republic was nosing through the election results earlier this week, and discussing the long-term trend in party affiliation.

Over the last several decades, the country has seen two swing groups move in opposite directions: Working-class whites exiting the Democratic Party, and more affluent, educated voters leaving the GOP.

But in this election the working-class white trend bifurcated.

Among all whites without college degrees (40 percent of the electorate), Obama lost by a whopping 18 points. But among whites making $50,000 per year or less (a quarter of the electorate), he lost by a mere 4 points.

Which makes sense, if you ask me. Because the Republican Party is the party of aspiration. It is the party of people who are aiming to improve their lot in life. That is why aspirational working-class whites are exiting the Democratic Party and non-aspirational working-class whites are not.

The Democratic Party is the party of credentials. Get the right credentials, and get a government job (as a union worker, a teacher, health worker, or professor) and you get set up for life.

You often learn more about yourself when you fail than when you succeed. In the greatest failure in modern Republican Party history, the election of 1964, the party faithful found out that they had a rising star in Ronald Reagan. For the next twenty years, Democrats sneered at him as a lightweight and a B-movie actor. But he still became president of the United States.

The standouts of the recent election were, obviously, Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Both of them are aspirational Americans, in the process of improving their lot, or at least dreaming of improving their lot. So we may look back at the election of 2008 and say: that was they year that the Republican Party as a Middle America party of aspiration was truly born.

Maybe not. You can never tell. The sky is always full of portents. But most of the portents signify nothing.

The telling part about it all was the viciousness of the liberal attack on Palin and Joe. There was obviously something profoundly offensive in Sarah and Joe to the liberal mind.

It’s not hard to understand why. Liberals don’t like aspirational people. They don’t like them because they don’t fit in the liberal plantation. In fact you could say that aspirational people look like troublemakers to the overseers of the liberal plantation.

But it is still astonishing to realize that, for our liberal friends, people like Sarah Palin and Joe Wurzelbacher are an offense to all good-thinking people, and must be destroyed.

I’m still finding it a bit hard to get my mind around that.