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The party of the rich

The party of the rich

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 5:45 am by Gene Veith

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The party of the rich 2016-07-28T10:36:56-04:00 Gene Veith

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Democrats are now the party of the rich, and Republicans are the party of the blue collar worker. So concludes Reihan Salam, writing in the liberal Slate, drawing on research by think tanker Lee Drutman, who shows that the wealthiest Americans now tend to vote for Democrats.

Why? Because the wealthy tend to be “socially liberal”; that is, they support abortion, gay rights, gun control, etc., etc. Contrary to how they usually describe themselves, they are not necessarily “fiscally conservative.” They are so affluent they don’t mind paying slightly higher taxes, and they want the government to provide health care and other benefits for the lower class that serves them. But they are far from Bernie Sanders-style socialists, being supportive of big banks and Wall Street.

Conversely, as we see in the ascension of Donald Trump, lower income workers–concerned about free trade, exporting jobs, and low wages, as well as what they see as America’s cultural decline–are voting Republican. This is all an exact reversal of just a few years ago.

From Reihan Salam, Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton shows the Democrats are the party of the rich, in Slate:

Republicans have built a coalition that is a far better fit for culturally conservative working-class whites than it is for the Bloombourgeoisie. If Donald Trump is any indication of where the GOP is heading, that trend will continue in the years to come.

Recently, Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the think tank New America, argued that the Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the preferred party of America’s wealthiest voters. In 2012, Barack Obama won a larger share of the vote of households earning $220,000 or more than Mitt Romney, the first time since 1964 that voters in the top 4 percent of household income backed a Democrat over a Republican. It’s a safe bet that many of these well-off voters chose Obama over Romney for the same reasons Bloomberg did—RINO Romney was just too right-wing for their tastes. And if these voters couldn’t warm up to Romney, you can only imagine how they’d feel about Trump.

For most of the past half-century, the Republican edge among the rich has been quite substantial. But since 2000, it’s been drifting downwards, a development that Drutman attributes to the Democrats’ rising strength among educated voters coupled with the fact that today’s rich voters are more highly educated than rich voters of decades past. It’s also the case that for many upper-middle- and upper-upper-income voters, tax cuts are not nearly as big a draw as social liberalism. What’s a slightly smaller federal tax burden worth to a voter who’s already pretty comfortable? Besides, on issues like free trade and balanced budgets, Hillary Clinton is far more “conservative” than Trump, a populist who favors tariffs, border walls, and policies that would cause deficits to balloon. Indeed, as far as Clinton is concerned, Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson is probably a bigger threat to peel off votes from the socially liberal rich than Trump is.

Which brings us back to Michael Bloomberg, the consummate “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” political figure. This is not to say that Bloomberg’s a libertarian, as evidenced by his jihad against cigarette smoking and sugary soft drinks and his defense of stop-and-frisk. Instead, he is best understood as a business-friendly moderate, a politician who’s never seen eye-to-eye with liberals who are exercised by rising economic inequality. To Bloomberg, it’s perfectly natural that a city like New York would be extremely unequal—what else do you expect when you have an economy in which low-wage immigrants make a living by catering to the needs of high-wage professionals? Having made his fortune by putting high-tech terminals in the hands of Wall Street traders, Bloomberg isn’t one to badmouth the big banks either. After all, it’s bankers’ bonuses that keep cab drivers, doormen, and servers of all kinds employed.

Where Bloomberg parts company with let-them-eat-cake types is in believing that low-wage workers should be provided with Medicaid, SNAP, and high-quality charter schools for their kids, both because it’s the right thing to do and because, to be blunt, it’s an insurance policy against a reprise of the French revolution. It’s not an entirely crazy political philosophy, and it’s shared by a decent number of upscale urban liberals and suburban moderates. Bloombergism is not far off from the progressive Republicanism once represented by Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits. What it’s emphatically not is Sanders-style socialism, which holds that the chief threat to democracy is the outsized power of “millionaires and billionaires” like, well, Michael Bloomberg.

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