There's a long piece by David Brooks in an Atlantic magazine several years ago. Brooks spent some time in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. "Pennsylvania is Philadelpia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other side, and Alabama in the middle. Franklin County is in the Alabama part." He noted that while the people in Franklin County would agree with him readily that the rich were getting richer, etc., the conversation would always derail into a weird mutual incomprehension. He finally figured out that people in Franklin County didn't think of themselves as have-nots. And in many ways they were not. In absolute money terms, it was poor, but the cost of living was low, and a middle-class life was fairly easy to get. More interestingly, there were various customs and economic realities that prevented people from getting very wealthy there, and especially, from showing it.
One Franklin County resident was amazed at a neighbor's car, "It cost 25 thousand dollars. He got it fully loaded." Brooks notes that he didn't tell the guy that in Brooks' neighborhood, nobody but a kid just out of college would buy a car that cost that little.
Franklin County voted for Bush, but Brooks' county, one of the wealthiest in the country, voted for Gore. But as Brooks notes, in his county, unless you are very, very rich, you are constantly surrounded by things you can't afford.
And I think it's this pervasive sense of status anxiety that causes well-off people to vote for Democrats. So we're getting a strange inverstion of the old economic populism of the Democrats -- rich people still tend to vote for Republicans, but if your neighbors are rich, it tends to make you vote Democratic. In this election, on a county-by-county basis, there's been a correlation between income and voting for Kerry.
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Date: 2004-11-20 03:44 am (UTC)One Franklin County resident was amazed at a neighbor's car, "It cost 25 thousand dollars. He got it fully loaded." Brooks notes that he didn't tell the guy that in Brooks' neighborhood, nobody but a kid just out of college would buy a car that cost that little.
Franklin County voted for Bush, but Brooks' county, one of the wealthiest in the country, voted for Gore. But as Brooks notes, in his county, unless you are very, very rich, you are constantly surrounded by things you can't afford.
And I think it's this pervasive sense of status anxiety that causes well-off people to vote for Democrats. So we're getting a strange inverstion of the old economic populism of the Democrats -- rich people still tend to vote for Republicans, but if your neighbors are rich, it tends to make you vote Democratic. In this election, on a county-by-county basis, there's been a correlation between income and voting for Kerry.