In today’s news that shouldn’t be surprising but is, check out this story that was on the front page of the NY Times today.
Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
I have finally dug through the giant pile of books on my nightstand to start reading Andrew Gelman’s extremely important examination of the realities behind the stereotypes Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. And the book was inspired by the media stereotype that conservatives are less wealthy and educated than liberals. Conservatives have very successfully pushed forward this narrative about the “liberal elite”—-in their worldview, liberalism was invented by over-privileged white people and then foisted on the rest of the Democratic coalition, characterized as illiterate sheep. Gelman dives deep into the reasons why this narrative had any traction at all in the mainstream media. It wasn’t just malice, but it’s sort of complicated, so you should read the book. (It’s a quick, breezy read with LOTS of graphs. Seriously, there’s like two a page.) But the book definitively answers the perplexing question of our time, which is, “Why do poor people in red states vote against their economic interests?” The answer is, quite simply, they don’t. There is no paradox. To quote Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.”
Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. But I do think there’s a supposition that they’re lower or middle middle class, and not well-educated. That’s based on the illiterate signage, the bad clothes, the obnoxious pride in having bad taste, and of course the mind-bendingly stupid shit they believe. And that’s not just regarding the paranoid fantasies about Obama, but more straightforwardly asinine stuff, like that Medicare isn’t government health care. It’s easy to assume that these folks are just uneducated, and that they’d wise up if they got educated. And of course, the assumption that lack of education correlates with lower income is something that comes from demonstrable facts, so it’s easy to leap to thinking the tea baggers are less wealthy than the liberal elite they carp about.
But wait!, you may say, look, I hate that “liberal elite” shit as much as you do, but they have a point. I mean, are you going to tell me the East Coast isn’t thick with white liberals who dress nicely, have strong opinions on coffee drinks and wine, and all have fancy college degrees and most likely graduate degrees?
Well, of course. Gelman actually talks about that in the book, and how that impacts the image of the “liberal elite”. The data does show that a lot of the professional class leans towards the Democrats. Lawyers, educators, journalists, high level bureaucrats, those sort of people. But those people are far from the majority of college-educated people, and a lot of the time, their salaries are actually lower than the average for people of their education levels, because they swapped out money-making for meaningfulness in their careers. And they cluster where the jobs are. And they socialize with each other. And they begin to think their circle is bigger and more meaningful than it is. Since journalists come from this group of people, they have a megaphone to perpetuate their own stereotypes. And since conservative journalists and pundits live in this world, they develop an outrageously stupid narrative about how they’re so oppressed because everyone in their small slice of the world thinks of them as the dweebs.