“Failure to Blossom” is the title of Ronald Brownstein’s excellent “re-review” of a series of books published after the 2004 election. I’ve added “turd” to the title for two reasons: (1) I wanted to use the word “turd” in a blog post title and (2) the subhead of Brownstein’s piece:
bq. Why did so many smart writers believe that Karl Rove’s vision would succeed—and that Democrats had to mimic it?
I really like the idea of re-reviewing books after the fact. The books Brownstein reviews got a lot of things wrong. And there are various lessons in that fact, such as the prosaic “pundits are often wrong” and “commentators overestimate the extent to which political tactics can affect outcomes.” This probably explains why I read very few of these sorts of books. So I won’t get into the merits of Brownstein’s treatment of them. (But see Ed Kilgore’s post.)
Instead, I’m interested in this line from Brownstein:
bq. After a generation-long ideological resorting of the electorate, we now leave in a political world where party coalitions are held together more by culture than class, by values more than interests.
He is right on ideological re-sorting. Here’s one scholarly account by Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders. And he’s right that values matter. In fact, there’s some interesting new evidence in this paper by Timothy Fedderson, Sean Gailmard, and Alvaro Sandroni that in large elections, where any individual voter has a small probability of affecting the outcome, voters will tend to exhibit “moral bias”: they are more likely to vote “on the basis of ethical considerations than on the basis of narrow self-interest.”
The problem with Brownstein’s remark is his claim that values matter more than interests. This is a difficult claim to sustain for several reasons.
First, there’s the difficulty in separating values and interests. In one interpretation, values themselves have functional benefits: helping to solve problems of social order, as well as facilitating coordination and trust. Thus, people have a sort of rational interest in defending certain values. (Here I am paraphrasing the work of Russell Hardin and Dennis Chong.) I’m not fully persuaded by these accounts, in part because they seem to stretch the definition of “interest” pretty far, and because I don’t think they grapple as fully as they could with when values should change — i.e., Hardin writes “our sunk costs are us,” but should they be? Nevertheless, this perspective is worth engaging.
A second problem is simply empirical: interests appear to matter more, not less, than they used to. If we operationalize interests using personal income, the appropriate conclusion is that of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal in Polarized America:
bq. Moreover, there has been a rather substantial transformation in the economic basis of the American party system. Today, income is far more important than it was in the 1950s. American politics is certainly far from purely class-based, but the divergence in partisan identification and voting between high- and low-income Americans has been striking. This trend helps to explain conflicts over taxation of estates and dividends in an era generally presumed to be dominated by ‘hot-button’ social issues like abortion and guns.
A final point: economic interests and economic issues engage values too. I think this gets lost sometimes, particularly when a phrase like “values voters” gets thrown around. Values are assumed to refer to a limited set of issues — abortion, gay rights, gun ownership — and to be the province of Republicans. Democrats are then advised to shed their focus on things like the economy and learn to talk about God. Here is Jonathan Haidt:
bq. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?[1]
But this loses sight of key facts, namely that voters tend to care more about the economy than social issues, and that talking about the economy is rarely, if ever, a simple matter of saying “vote for me and I’ll fatten your wallet.” The political discourse about the economy reflects a lot of competing claims about how we as a society should allocate resources. Take, for instance, the debate about whether taxing the rich is an appropriate way to pay for health care.
The take-away is that separating values and interests is not easy at all. Nor is it easy to prove that one dominates the other. “Culture,” for all the headlines it generates, may not be as paramount as Brownstein thinks.
fn1. In light of the 2008 election, Haidt’s perspective, as well as those of George Lakoff and Drew Westen, are definitely due for a “re-review.”