Does this chart to the right, conveniently stolen from Kevin Drum really show that "class is still far more important than religion in America, despite the culture wars of the past couple of decades?" What it clearly does show is that class -- if, at least, by class you mean "income" rather than educational attainment or some other signifier -- has a real, large, independent influence on voting behavior. Across the board, as people get richer they get more Republican. This is true even of white evangelicals and of Jews, two religious groups oft said to simply leave their pocketbooks behind in the polling booth.
That said, the chart also seems to me to show that religious differences largely dominate income differentials. There are three religious groups -- Jews, the non-religious, and African-American Protestants -- such that the highest-income cohort of all three groups is less likely to vote Republican than are the lowest-income cohorts of the three other groups -- white evangelicals, white mainline protestants, and white catholics. And, again, rich white mainline protestants are less Republican than are lower-middle class evangelicals.
This, I think, is fundamentally what makes American politics tricky. It's often said that class doesn't matter -- or doesn't matter any more -- and our current politics is defined by culture. But that isn't true, and the chart clearly shows it. Movement up and down the economic ladder has a big impact on voting behavior. But religious affiliation also has a very large impact -- an impact so large it's doubtful to me that any sort of political strategy is really going to transcend it. Politicians and operatives just need to deal with a very complicated political landscape that's not amenable to the sort of simplifications that make for a good 800 word column.
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Heads in the Sand
I don't think this is what makes hte US tricky, per se, but rather it's what makes the entire world and all of its history tricky.
Some theoryheads call it "intersectionality" - no person is ever reducible to just one of the cultural axes along which they gain their identity, but they are always forming themselves along every axis at once. No one is just poor or just heterosexual or just Asian - they are all at once and more, and their participation in one category is colored by all the others, though some more or less than most.
It's one of those super-obvious insights that shouldn't need such a stupid name, or shouldn't need repeating over and over on political blogs. But I think that our statistical culture causes us to always want to reduce identities and choices to the simplest variables, even when the data shows clearly that isn't going to reflect reality very well.
Posted by DivGuy | October 24, 2006 10:51 AM