I have difficulty believing that the people who are drawn to Bernie would
turn to Trump as an alternative. I was up later than I should have been on
Saturday night, watching a video of a community meeting that Bernie ran in
West Virginia. It involved community leaders talking about the issues that
poor people face there, and Bernie explaining to the large gathering of
residents, how socialist theory applied to the issues. The kind of people
who are drawn to this kind of presentation are not, I don't think, going to
turn to Trump.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2016 10:54 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan
Democrats
They say that figures don't lie. But Liars can twist the polls around to
say whatever they want. What is more disturbing are the reasons Trump
supporters are giving for placing their trust in "The Donald".
I listened to Democracy Now this morning and several Trump Worshipers
attending his rally in Lynden, Washington, gave garbled reasons for
believing that he will take care of Working Class America. Some of the
reasons were very scary.
If Hillary is counting on Bernie's supporters being forced to support her,
she may be in for a big shock. Trump is reaching out to the angry, and
disillusioned Working Class of both Parties. He could well capture more
Bernie supporters than will Clinton.
Remember, the confusion and misplaced trust among the 99% is the making of
the Corporate Media, bending to the orders of the Empire.
Sewing hatred, mistrust and self-serving among the Masses has come home to
roost. The Empire, in its desire to control and rape the Working Class, by
turning them inward upon one another, has the consequence of creating a
revolution. And the worst sort of a revolution. It will be a Headless
Explosion. Each faction, carefully cultivated by the Empire, will blame the
others for their troubles.
And then they will turn on the government. And then, most assuredly they
will turn on the Ruling Class. Remember the French Revolution?
Even the Russian Revolution crumbled into a dictatorship, despite the People
believing they had established a People's Government. Out of the confusion
that is swirling about our heads today, there can be little hope for a
positive outcome.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/9/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
angry workers blowing gaskets.
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Media Myth
of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
________________________________________
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats By Neal Gabler
[1] / Moyers & Company [2] May 8, 2016 Now that Donald Trump is the
presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get all
sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway to
Election Day victory runs through white working-class America, the way
Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary
Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the well-educated.
In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in
this - one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by Evan
Thomas [3] eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged "Bubba
Gap," and illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer. Democrats,
naturally, were the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous
repercussions for our politics. It used to be that Republicans were
the effete ones and Democrats the salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald
Reagan came along and pried working-class voters away from the
Democrats - the so-called "Reagan Democrats" - and suddenly the media
reversed party roles, deciding that America tilted right, and that
Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous
repercussions for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can
pretty much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot about
Trump Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon the
Democratic Party because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at
least not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers -
didn't last much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who didn't
realign American politics the way the media tell us they did. Trump
Democrats might be something of a myth, too - a collaboration of the
MSM and the candidate to portray him and his party as the agents of
blue-collar, middle America because it fits the media's stereotype of
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about RepublicanRonald Reagan.
hegemony and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes,
Republicans control both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are
dominant at the governor and state legislature levels. This, however,
is largely the product of certain peculiarities in the American
political system rather than any great Democratic defection or love of
Republicanism: things like low turnout in local and midterm elections
among minorities and the poor, who are likely to vote Democratic;
subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit Republicans; absurd
disproportions in which Wyoming, with its population of 584,000, gets
the same number of senators as California with its 39 million; and the
role of money in elections, as money generally flows more freely to
Republicans than to Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's
benefactors have more to gain from the system.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals, or
that Democrats outnumber Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the
latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties, but
they may heavily discount Democratic identification. According to a
survey by Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared Independents
who nevertheless lean toward one party or the other, Democrats
actually constitute 45 percent of Americans, while Republicans
constitute just 33 percent. So if you have been thinking that this is
a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in
his
2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and blue-collar
voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted from their
economic interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge issues from
abortion to gun rights to immigration. That was the great Republican
prestidigitation. Now you see economic distress, now you don't. And
the great political realignment that followed was laid at the foot of
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Politicalpercent.
Science, [6] the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then of
Princeton and now at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in a
searching analysis of Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines
over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of
George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a
decline in Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not
huge over five decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college degrees,
which was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you include non-white
voters without college degrees, Democrats actually enjoyed a two-point
increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though
the share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of
minorities is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the
three-fifths compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the
purpose of calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than
education, the results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats.
The percentage of low income voters going Democratic has actually
risen since the 1980s. In 2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent
of the votes of those with household incomes under $50,000, roughly
the American median, and only 44 percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the
Democratic decline among low-income white voters without college
degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages
actually increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase of 4.5
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: Allonly be fact-providing.
those blue collar workers who are supposed to have left the Democratic
Party for Reagan and then stayed in the GOP, or who might soon be
leaving for Trump, didn't in the first case, and aren't likely to do
so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label
Republicans for what they are: the party of white, rich,
disproportionately Southern folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who
are a diverse party racially and economically. When put that way, it
inevitably sounds like the media are taking sides, even though it would
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households,troglodytes.
Reagan didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in
1976. And he made some inroads into the working class as defined by
income as well. But the real story of the so-called post-Reagan
Republican tilt is that white Southerners, who had long been departing
the Democratic Party, until one of their own, Carter, stanched the
flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager to
tell because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on racist
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to beOK.
picking on Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM
won't risk doing that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists? That's
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, whiteangry workers blowing gaskets.
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will
draw many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large part
because there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic votes
left in the South to take away, and because most blue-collar workers
still identify with the Democratic Party. So get ready to hear about
all those angry, blue-collar white guys who love Trump and might hand
him the election. But when you do, remember this: Democrats drink beer
too, even though the MSM has you thinking they're all sipping chablis
as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA
TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA
Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior
fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society
and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8]
[9]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reagan-
democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification
-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how
-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth of ;
the Working-Class Reagan Democrats [9] http://www.alternet.org/ [10] ;
http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > The Media Myth
of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats
The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats By Neal Gabler
[1] / Moyers & Company [2] May 8, 2016 Now that Donald Trump is the
presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get all
sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway to
Election Day victory runs through white working-class America, the way
Ronald Reagan's did, while the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary
Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the well-educated.
In case you haven't noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in
this - one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by Evan
Thomas [3] eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama's alleged "Bubba
Gap," and illustrated with a picture of arugula - and beer. Democrats,
naturally, were the arugula eaters.
This idea that Republicans are "real" Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous
repercussions for our politics. It used to be that Republicans were
the effete ones and Democrats the salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald
Reagan came along and pried working-class voters away from the
Democrats - the so-called "Reagan Democrats" - and suddenly the media
reversed party roles, deciding that America tilted right, and that
Democrats were elitists.
This idea that Republicans are 'real' Americans and Democrats aren't
is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous
repercussions for our politics.
I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can
pretty much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot about
Trump Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon the
Democratic Party because they allegedly find it too high-blown.
But this is what you probably won't hear: those Reagan Democrats, at
least not as we usually think of them - urban, Rust Belt laborers -
didn't last much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who didn't
realign American politics the way the media tell us they did. Trump
Democrats might be something of a myth, too - a collaboration of the
MSM and the candidate to portray him and his party as the agents of
blue-collar, middle America because it fits the media's stereotype of
Let's get a few things out of the way when we talk about RepublicanRonald Reagan.
hegemony and the party's appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes,
Republicans control both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are
dominant at the governor and state legislature levels. This, however,
is largely the product of certain peculiarities in the American
political system rather than any great Democratic defection or love of
Republicanism: things like low turnout in local and midterm elections
among minorities and the poor, who are likely to vote Democratic;
subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit Republicans; absurd
disproportions in which Wyoming, with its population of 584,000, gets
the same number of senators as California with its 39 million; and the
role of money in elections, as money generally flows more freely to
Republicans than to Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP's
benefactors have more to gain from the system.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals, or
that Democrats outnumber Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the
latest Gallup Poll [4].
These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties, but
they may heavily discount Democratic identification. According to a
survey by Republic 3.0 [5], if you add in self-declared Independents
who nevertheless lean toward one party or the other, Democrats
actually constitute 45 percent of Americans, while Republicans
constitute just 33 percent. So if you have been thinking that this is
a conservative GOP country, think again.
If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably
never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified
conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals.
Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in
his
2004
best-seller, What's the Matter With Kansas?,the "dominant political
coalition" in America is the union of business voters and blue-collar
voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted from their
economic interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge issues from
abortion to gun rights to immigration. That was the great Republican
prestidigitation. Now you see economic distress, now you don't. And
the great political realignment that followed was laid at the foot of
But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Politicalpercent.
Science, [6] the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then of
Princeton and now at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in a
searching analysis of Frank's thesis. Looking at voting trendlines
over a 50-year period, from the
1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of
George W.
Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a
decline in Democratic support - roughly six percentage points; not
huge over five decades, but still significant.
But wait! That decline was among white voters without college degrees,
which was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you include non-white
voters without college degrees, Democrats actually enjoyed a two-point
increase.
You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump
Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though
the share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of
minorities is rising. Basically, it's the media equivalent of the
three-fifths compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the
purpose of calculating representation, counted for less than whites.
Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than
education, the results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats.
The percentage of low income voters going Democratic has actually
risen since the 1980s. In 2012, Barack Obama received [7] 60 percent
of the votes of those with household incomes under $50,000, roughly
the American median, and only 44 percent of those over $100,000.
And here is something else Bartels discovered [6]. Nearly all the
Democratic decline among low-income white voters without college
degrees came in the
South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages
actually increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase of 4.5
Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: Allonly be fact-providing.
those blue collar workers who are supposed to have left the Democratic
Party for Reagan and then stayed in the GOP, or who might soon be
leaving for Trump, didn't in the first case, and aren't likely to do
so in the second.
I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn't feel comfortable
broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label
Republicans for what they are: the party of white, rich,
disproportionately Southern folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who
are a diverse party racially and economically. When put that way, it
inevitably sounds like the media are taking sides, even though it would
This isn't to say that in 1980, when it came to union households,troglodytes.
Reagan didn't cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in
1976. And he made some inroads into the working class as defined by
income as well. But the real story of the so-called post-Reagan
Republican tilt is that white Southerners, who had long been departing
the Democratic Party, until one of their own, Carter, stanched the
flow in 1976, were the primary defectors.
And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.
That's another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager to
tell because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on racist
For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to beOK.
picking on Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM
won't risk doing that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists? That's
None of this is to say that Trump won't attract lots of angry, white
working-class voters. It isto say that it's highly unlikely he will
draw many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large part
because there probably aren't a whole lot of white Democratic votes
left in the South to take away, and because most blue-collar workers
still identify with the Democratic Party. So get ready to hear about
all those angry, blue-collar white guys who love Trump and might hand
him the election. But when you do, remember this: Democrats drink beer
too, even though the MSM has you thinking they're all sipping chablis
as they munch their arugula.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA
TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA
Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior
fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society
and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [8] Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid.[9]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reagan-
democr
ats
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3] http://www.newsweek.com/cover-story-obamas-bubba-gap-86197
[4]
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification
-near-
historical-lows.aspx
[5] http://republic3-0.com/myth-independent-voter-stefan-hankin/
[6] https://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebartels/kansasqjps06.pdf
[7]
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how
-group
s-voted-2012/
[8] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Media Myth of ;
the Working-Class Reagan Democrats [9] http://www.alternet.org/ [10] ;
http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
