Values & voters: can the Democrats talk straight?

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently paid tribute to philosopher Sidney Hook by giving "Hookie" awards to the best essays written in 2005. I'd like to propose the "Moynihans," in honor of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. This award--which comes with no money, no ceremony, and no statuette or plaque--recognizes the best essay dealing with the interplay between economic change and family change.

My first Moynihan of 2006 goes to Garance Franke-Ruta for "Remapping the Culture Debate," published in the February American Prospect. Much has been written about the Democrats' values problem. But the discussion among some Democrats usually ends, not by attributing the problem to the party itself, but by blaming the false consciousness of the voters or the machinations of Karl Rove and his allies on the religious right. What has been missing altogether is a thoughtful analysis of why the party has lost the loyalty of voters who should, on the basis of their apparent economic interests, be solidly aligned with the Democrats. This is Franke-Ruta's contribution. Drawing on the work of labor economists, opinion researchers, and marketing gurus, she painstakingly and persuasively explains why noncollege voters are more worried about the state of families than about the size of their own wallets.

First, she notes, the profile of today's workers is dramatically different from those of the lunch-pail and union-card workers of the past. Today's men and women work in the service and information economy where 43 percent are in office jobs and only 8 percent of the private sector are in unions. They are better educated: in 1960, one-half of the labor force hadn't completed high school; in 2003, close to 60 percent of workers had some college. Given this, Franke Ruta asks: "How does the Democratic Party, whose most essential economic ideas were forged in the crucibles of the worst of times, develop an agenda for a postscarcity society?"

Part of the answer, she says, is to grapple with the hard truth that a majority of Americans today no longer have the economic interests that impel them to vote Democratic. According to Franke Ruta, relatively few middle-income earners have a bleak economic outlook. The overwhelming majority of them earn more than $50,000 a year, and 77 percent of those earning just $30,000-$40,000 a year describe themselves as doing well economically.

This is not to say that there are not economic hardship and pain in the turbulent and globalizing economy. Clearly, there are. It's just to say that there is far less shared pain; people no longer feel a sense of economic solidarity. They experience their economic lives and fortunes in an atomized and isolated way. They try to manage on their own. Moreover, in an odd way, the very turbulence of the economy breeds false but fervent hope in the big win. They no longer look to the federal government or labor unions to throw them a lifeline. They put their trust in the state lottery system.

This has led to some ugly consequences. Americans who feel economically vulnerable aren't clasping hands in brotherhood and sisterhood; instead, they resent those who do get outside aid and also the party that seems to speak only for those who can't help themselves.

The more important part of Franke-Ruta's answer for Democrats is to confront the still harder truth that it's not just economic solidarity that's vanished. It's also social solidarity--most notably, the stability of marriage and family life. In the lives of traditional Democrats, and especially working-class Catholics, both labor unions and marital unions once provided a source of mutual aid and economic stability. Both have faded from the lives of working people today. In this harsher world, noncollege voters understand that adherence to traditional values is what it takes to get ahead in America. It's hard to fulfill your dreams for yourself and your children if you become an unwed teenage parent, live with a string of cohabiting partners, or scrape by on meager child-support payments after a divorce. At the same time, they are far more vulnerable to family breakdown and far less insulated from its devastating economic effects than their more economically privileged peers. Parents at the lower end of the economic spectrum are also the most deeply worried about the exposure of their children to the violent messages and sexual comeons in the popular culture.

The Democratic Party fails to connect with white noncollege voters, Franke-Ruta argues, because it fails to speak to their aspirations for traditional family lives. Yet what her analysis also suggests--though these are my words, not hers--is that the Democrats' values problem also involves a double standard. Members of an increasingly upscale Democratic Party are themselves likely to lead also traditional family lives. For their own children, they encourage hard work, high levels of educational attainment, and delayed marriage and childbearing--a success path that requires enormous discipline, tenacity, and deferred gratification. Yet all too often, in the name of misplaced tolerance or in pandering to activists in the base, these same neo-Puritans endorse permissive, even libertine, values that are deeply threatening to those who used to make up the heart and soul of the party. What the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party fails to understand is that while the superrich can be libertines, others pay too high a price.