Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
By Larry M. Bartels
Princeton University Press
Princeton, NJ: 2008
328 pages
$29.95
... American beliefs about inequality are profoundly political in their origins and implications. Well-informed conservatives and liberals differ markedly, not only in their normative assessments of increasing inequality, as one might expect, but also in their perceptions of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality. This is not simply a matter of people with different values drawing different conclusions from a set of agreed-upon facts. Analysts of public opinion in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that the facts themselves are very much subject to ideological dispute. For their part, political actors in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that careful logical arguments running from factual premises to policy conclusions are unlikely to persuade people who are ideologically motivated to distort or deny the facts. While it is certainly true, as Jennifer Hoschschild has argued, that "Where You Stand Depends on What You See," it is equally true that what you see depends in significant part on where you stand.
A challenge to conventional wisdom--including, specifically, many strains of liberal conventional wisdom--Unequal Democracy is a flat-out wonkfest of statistics, charts, tables and (thankfully) Larry Bartels' patient hand-holding and explanations of the mass of data that points to the undeniable realities of class in our society and how that affects our political system.
And as most readers at Daily Kos could probably guess, news is not good on the class front, in many cases in unanticipated ways. Just a few of the conventional wisdom-busters Bartels discusses in Unequal Democracy include:
- Americans hate the estate tax, and they did long before the right wing changed it to the "death tax."
- Politics matters. A lot. There is a huge difference between Republican and Democratic policies that affect the pocketbooks of middle-class and working-class Americans.
- Contrary to popular belief, working-class whites (outside of the South) have not deserted the Democratic Party--affluent whites have.
- Economic issues still vastly outweigh cultural/social issues when it comes time to cast a vote.
- To the extent that social issues have increased in importance, it is only so for the affluent white voter, not the working class.
- Gaps between the classes are at least equal to--and often exceeding--those found in Europe.
- The more informed the voter, the more pessimistic he or she is.
- Low-information conservatives and low-information liberals are virtually indistinguishable in their beliefs; high-information ideologues of both stripes differ greatly.
- Self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ more in perception about America's economic opportunity than the actual rich and actual poor do.
