The Democrats have finally officially decided to dump the white working class.
For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
Bear in mind that the group that is being jettisoned was once the backbone of the Democratic Party, just as the big business/country club sets were once the backbone of the Republican Party.
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world.
Aside from the irony that anyone with a high school degree should have to go to college in order to learn to read and write, a perfect example of a valuable real-world skill is welding. Public school teachers (who reflect the view of the educrat class) tend to hold such “dirty” and “dangerous” work in disdain, and they steer kids away from it. Guidance counselors attempt to push them into universities where they go into a lifetime of debt for worthless degrees that impart zero job skills. But some of the kids are smarter than that. They realize that if you have a skill that is worth something in the real world, you can actually feed your family.
They also know something that the Occupy movement (often holders of useless degrees) has missed: that the educational system’s institutional bias against promoting real world skills has led to shortages — in some instances not of jobs, but of skilled workers to fill them. Such as welders.
Jay Leno explains:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PASEG5xLlRo
Such workers may not be welcome in the Democratic Party or at OWS protests, but they can feed their families with their own money.
They’re self-sufficient. Useful, even.
No wonder the Democrats don’t want them.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking and quoting from this post, and a warm welcome to all Instapundit readers!
Comments appreciated, agree or disagree.
UPDATE: Thank you, Glenn Reynolds for linking this post again!
New readers welcome, and please be sure to check out the comments, and feel free to leave one. I’m learning that there really does seem to be a determined and centralized effort to do away with hands-on skills, and denigrate blue collar work.
When I was a kid, the left championed the working class.
Comments
29 responses to “The war between useless and useful”
So after gleefully joining with the Democrats in my youth to combat racism the original racist party reverts to its racist and class conscience roots. The “old” aristocracy is back. I can’t tell you how much this sucks.
We now have a Master and Servant Party. And the Party of their Retainers. Will there ever be a Party for Free Men? Or do we need to go all Fremen on them?
BTW I have taken Jay’s advice even before I saw him give it. So I’ve decided to make things. And write about it.
Come on, the abandoned those folks long ago. (Except they kept asking them for money and promising them stuff they never delivered on.)
As for the “institutional bias” against jobs where you actually build things… the last time I looked, democratic-sympathetic unions controlled education.
This started back in the 1970s when the “New Left” replaced the “Old Left”. The New Left never really gave a d@** about the working class, and as they pursued their aristocratic decadence, the working class started voting elsewhere more and more.
Now the break is coming out into the open.
This might be the consideration that the Boy Scouts of America made as it prepares for the introduction of new Welding merit badge. Boys will learn the basics of welding and occupational career opportunities, guided by an adult counselor. Be prepared — for life.
[…] via Classical Values […]
I left teaching because it was a scam the (serious or not) students paid for; I loathed pointless faculty and staff meetings that seemed unable to be concluded without at least one slam against GWB; I found the indolence and arrogance frustrating. Now I take classes at a community college with the intent of pursuing a technical career where input and output matter and, I hope, competence is more important than political posturing.
What does strike me is the growing number of claims about how many great welding, plumbing, and electrician jobs are out there. Really? I am taking welding classes with an eye to AWS certification in MIG (GMAW), at least. Yet good luck finding somewhere that will hire you as a welder without experience; if you manage to land a job, in my geographical area you’re looking at $11-13/hour, possibly less. That beats Subway and Starbucks, I suspect. Welding is more interesting and colleagues (and customers) probably more enjoyable, and there is likely more upward potential; however, it’s a tight life for years until one’s experience accumulates to a more marketable sum.
I also note that my two welding classes each started with 12-13 students apiece. After 14 weeks, it is unusual if 5 still attend any given lesson. Some attended until the tuition payment deadline; others, who knows? I don’t think they’re AWOL because Big MIG or Big TIG hired them all.
This summer I spoke with a plumber’s union rep (family friend) for areas near Chicago. “I hear there’s a shortage of plumbers, jobs going wanting, good pay” I told him. He said there were so few plumbing jobs that *the union itself* had begun discouraging people taking plumbing courses; many of his union’s members had been without work for months and the union was feeling the squeeze. I am ambivalent about unions, but when they say no work exists, I am inclined to believe them. Granted, there might be jobs galore for non-union plumbers, but I am quite skeptical.
The same goes for electricians. For decent jobs (and, in some cases, legal jobs), one must be union-certified. But to enter a union involves who you know and blow to a greater extent than landing a normal job. Yet I know of some union electricians who have likewise been out of work for very long stretches.
Every employer naturally wants to hire experienced people to replace their retiring experienced people. Yet few firms are willing to offer that bottom rung from which experience starts to accumulate. No amount of gov’t-funded job training provides *real* job experience.
Constant gov’t meddling in labor markets and travesties like ObamaCare do hurt employers and cause them to forgo hiring as long as possible. Instead, they just ramp up overtime with the employees they have. If you’re capped at $24/hour on the line and getting mandatory overtime up to 60 hours per week, your pay is healthy. The problem is getting to the line.
Pardon the meandering, but I am skeptical of the “blue-collar bloom.” Apparently there are good jobs for HVAC, AS in EET/MET, and other things. However, the ubiquitous computer-sieved application hell probably means few people’s materials are ever seen, hence few are ever given a chance.
Is every employer paraphrasing Lou Reed: “I’m waiting for the (experienced) man?”
And if I may: Go Ron Paul!
Roger, the reason there aren’t any jobs where your friend is are contained in the words “union” and “near Chicago”. There’s a reason why TX is creating jobs: we have a governor smart enough to get government and its’ union subsidiaries out of the picture.
The key words are “self sufficient”. That’s the backbone of the MYOB set and therefore anathema to the control freaks.
My brother (in his 40’s) works as an engineer for a welding company. He has over 25+ patents awarded with another 15 in the wings. He’s told his sons to go into welding–and all 3 of them have listened. The last one graduates from high school this spring. I think they’ll do fine; no one can outsource their jobs.
Roger, I think what you are missing is that courses at community college do not make you a welder. It does two things…first, it represents to employers that you have the very basics covered, and second that you have enough work ethic to make it through (that you are among the roughly one third willing to work enough to make it through a CC class). It is not that you are ‘trained’ it is that you are demonstrating that you are trainable.
The challenge for employers looking at you is that you will be a net drain on them, likely for several years, while you learn and gain experience. While you may ‘only’ be making $12/hour, you are getting training/experience worth much more than that at your employers expense. How many hours of experienced productive welders time will you take showing and helping you? How many jobs will you take so long at that you make the job uneconomic for your boss? How many expensive mistakes will you make as a newbie?
And what is exacerbating things is the economy. When things are growing, employers are willing to take on that burden because enough experienced people are not available (at a resonable price). In hard times, with skilled experienced tradesman available, there is little incentive to invest in training a new guy. It is almost always cheaper to hire experienced tradesman than to train new ones when they are available.
Think about it this way, if for every hour you work, you increase your long term (20 year) wage potential by one tenth of one penny, that is worth ~$40/hour. So you are making $52/hour…it is just that you are getting the vast majority in valuable expereince rather than cash. And if you think one tenth of a penny in experience value per hour is rediculous…it is only increasing your wage by $2/year. For the experience in your first year…it is probably double if not quadruple that.
I know a man who is a ‘very experienced’ welder, nearing retirement. He doesn’t work for anyone, he just welds in his garage and off his trucks for on site jobs. He has no employees. Makes a very good living (put two daughters through the ivy league, one to masters level, the other PhD, all paid for by him). He is unwilling to invest his (very valuable) time in someone else. He sees the loss of current income (time spent training) as bigger loss than the benefit of having someone else to assist him. He was even unwilling to train one of his daughter’s husband…too much work, too much time, too much slowing down to train costing him money. He is good, and people know he is good, so he almost always has more jobs than time.
One anecdote he told me (a few years ago now) was that a several decades ago he got ‘nuclear certified’ to do work while a nearby nuke plant was being built. He is still getting job offers from that…apparently the vast majority of even experienced welders cannot meet the test…something about a practical exam that required a series of welds that then got x-rayed and stress tested to make sure they were essentially perfect. Apparently there are people looking for that cert now, and willing to pay six figures and not starting with a 1. I am not surprised that very very few have bothered to get that cert in the decades when no nukes were built.
See if you can get nuclear certified as part of your courses. If you succeed, it would distinguish you from virtually all the other students. If you fail, it might readjust your perspective on how trained you are from your course work.
My over-achieving nephews are in middle school in tony Palo Alto, CA. Both say their favorite class (above math, science, and computers) is “industrial tech”. What an old fart like me would call shop class — wood shop and metal shop together, apparently. Milling, welding, lathe work — and some CAD, because no one draws blueprints any more. “We actually get to make stuff,” says the older one. “It’s fun.”
This is an elective course, and they say it’s the most popular of all the electives, and the hardest to get into. This, in ultra-liberal Palo Alto. Blows my mind. Maybe the proximity of Silicon Valley has something to do with it.
A friend of mine does elevator work; installation and repair. He’s in the union. He tells me that the union people are having a hard time finding jobs because there are so many non-union elevator workers out there. He doesn’t think they do as good of a job (I’ve known this guy a while through a couple of job changes, I don’t think it’s sour grapes), but people will hire someone if they can get them for 1/2 or 2/3 what the union guys charge.
Most of the self sufficient people live in what the liburals/elitists call fly-over country.
When things get testy, guess where the liburals/elitists will not be welcome?
I love Oklahoma!!
Well, I’m an experienced design engineer (over 3.5 decades) in the aerospace sector and I have to say that one of the most useful “optional” courses I took in high school was general metals shop; it gave me a decent grounding in the various shop practices (I had the highest grade in the class) and this makes quite a difference in working with the shop and in doing practical (i.e. capable of being affordably made) designs. It still makes a difference now.
Ron F. writes:
“A friend of mine does elevator work; installation and repair. He’s in the union. He tells me that the union people are having a hard time finding jobs because there are so many non-union elevator workers out there. He doesn’t think they do as good of a job (I’ve known this guy a while through a couple of job changes, I don’t think it’s sour grapes), but people will hire someone if they can get them for 1/2 or 2/3 what the union guys charge.”
I work for a small “Mom-and-Pop” operation as a low-voltage electrician: burglar alarms, door-access control, custom audio-video systems, just about anything low-voltage except fire alarms. We’re non-union, and I don’t know of any union outfits in our area, but I really don’t pay any attention to that particular point anyway.
I does seem to me that how good a job a man does depends not on whether he’s a union member or not, but how much of a damn he gives about his job– not so much in terms of doing good enough work to keep his job, but in actually taking pride in what he does. One of our competitors is a much larger outfit, and they do really shoddy work– and they do it so often and have done it so often that I have to wonder how it is they stay in business.
We’ll never get rich doing what we do– the “big bucks” don’t come from doing the smaller jobs that our small outfit is capable of doing, and the boss doesn’t want the company to get much bigger than it already is– but we don’t lack for work. People come to us to either get what they can’t anywhere else, or call us to fix the disasters left behind by our competitors.
I have to admit that I don’t have much admiration for unions– I worked as management for a large Eastern railroad for about a year in ’89 and ’90, and learned to despise the union mind-set. (My bosses in management weren’t prizes either.) But if the union boys want to work, they’d better learn to put out good-quality work that will justify the pay they’re asking for. If it turns out that what they’re asking for is too high, then maybe they should adjust their price downward to match the competition, and figure out how to do a better job than the competition does. In other words, they should live in the real world, just like the rest of us.
Yes, I know, that last bit sounds cranky. But labor is like anything else– it will sell, if the price is right. (Unless it’s 1933 all over again, but that disaster was made in Washington. And that’s a rant for another time.)
As a Certified Machinist, Toolmaker, and QC Tech with CAD and design experience, I’ll welcome the national return to reality and sanity. The problem I’m having is HR people who don’t have the foggiest idea what I know how to do: ask one of them what a machinist does and you’ll either get “Someone who runs a machine” or a blank stare.
I wonder if just one of them knows what the thermal expansion coefficient of non-ferrous metal is, what an interference fit is, or what it takes to sharpen a twist drill by hand. Oooh, I think I’ll ask Ron Bloom if he knows…
I’m an electrical engineer, with 10 years of experience. Of course the democratic party is abandoning the white middle class worker. The white middle class worker used to be a healthy percentage of the country. Now that the “minority” groups are gaining in percentage and in voting habits they’re becoming more important to winning elections.
There’s one other explanation. The middle class worker has been getting squeezed by the economic practices of the GOP, starting with Reagan in 1980, so much so that much of what was considered the “middle class” has now sunk into poverty. In order to win what used to be the middle class all the democrats have to do is appeal to the lower class, those $10/hour welders. Look at history, and you’ll see that the last time our economy looked like it does today is in the 1920s, right before the Great Depression. FDR got us out with SSI and a top marginal tax rate of 90%. Not the 28% of 1920 or the 35% of 2010. 90%.
I know what’s happening to the middle class. I’m leaving. I will become a professor, and my wife will become a doctor. We’ll be making over $250k a year. The reason I’m pushing for this is that the middle class in this country is dying a slow, drawn out, painful death and I don’t want to be a part of it. If you don’t want to die, either get out or vote democrat.
I’m an independent. I can’t stand the democrats. However, I look at republican policies and it looks like they’re deliberately sabotaging this country and the constitution. As a veteran I pledged myself to defend the constitution of the USA against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’m having a really hard time convincing myself not to take lethal action against the elected members of the GOP. Death is the punishment for treason. Their actions are either proof of incompetence or treason. Either way they’ll be gone.
I’m an independent. I can’t stand the democrats. However, I look at republican policies and it looks like they’re deliberately sabotaging this country and the constitution. As a veteran I pledged myself to defend the constitution of the USA against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I’m with you on that part.
It’s too bad Jay couldn’t make his entirely valid point about the value of skilled workers without slamming other skilled workers. That video (and this blog, for that matter) exist because of people sitting at a desk pushing computers around.
When school budgets are cut, shop classes are the first to go.
I have a son in high school. When I was in High School in the 70s we had “Regional Occupation” where you went out and actually worked at real live jobs, as a sort of intern. You got paid, you learned a skill, employers got help, you got a job and an education. My ROP option was computer science, or as we called it then “Data Processing” but I had friends who learned car repair and another who became a lineman for Pacific Bell because of their time in “ROP”. All three of us went to college, but we had skills for jobs when we left high school.
I asked my sons guidance Councillor if they still offered that her response:
“We only offer that for at risk kids who have no chance of going to college”.
Excuse me? To get an actual paying skill these days, you have to be a criminal first?
When I told her that plumbers make more than 150k per year and welders were in demand, she didn’t have an answer. She continued to talk about college opportunities.
It was as if she was getting a percentage of the tuition we paid to the colleges as a bonus for sending kids to them.
[…] comments to my earlier post, Eli Cabelly and M. Simon both remarked on the following oath: As a veteran I pledged myself to […]
[…] Classical Values: I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world. […]
Two problems with the WWC. First, they’re likely to be conservative, especially socially. This conflicts with the rest of the dems’ constituencies, what Grover Norquist called the “give me” coalition. The WWC, as self-sufficient, doesn’t need the dems to give them stuff and, instead, has a propensity to be in what Norquist called the “leave me alone” coalition.
IOW, bitter clingers.
Some years back, my central air conditioning quit one hot summer afternoon. The HVAC guy came out after supper. As I sat on the back deck watching him extract a dead box elder bug from some kind of a circuit, and build a box elder bug shield, he told me he and his daughter ride both western and dressage. Not a cheap hobby. Since the family runs to Infantry, I am not sure whether you need different horses, in addition to different gear, to ride both styles. But horses are expensive. I expect he does not have a college education.
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