Class, Language, and Political “Issues”

More than once since I released The Political Disconnect, people have asked me something like “what are the issues that the low-income and working-class people you spoke with care the most about?” On the one hand, that’s a great question – we should of course all be interested in what low-income & working-class people care about, what they’d like to see improved or changed in their neighborhoods and communities and the broader society. But it’s also a terrible question, because the way we (scholars, political professionals, all kinds of highly educated people on the broad left of the political spectrum) think and talk about “issues” is very different from how … nearly everyone else does so.

First of all, most people don’t go around with a list of their “top issues” in their heads or hearts. They’ll respond to opinion polls (or at least some of them will; it is increasingly difficult to get a truly representative sample of US adults to respond to a survey or poll of any sort, possibly especially those to do with politics), and when they’re asked they’ll tell pollsters/researchers which issues are most important to them and their views on those issues. But they are likely thinking of different actual concerns, and they respond to questions about issues very differently depending on how they’re worded (see e.g. G. Elliott Morris on this; it’s also the thrust of the classic piece by my favorite dead French theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist”).

That doesn’t mean people don’t care about or understand all kinds of issues, they just tend to think and talk about them in really different ways. My favorite example of this comes from the book The Other Divide, by Yanna Krupnikov & John Barry Ryan. The “divide” they’re talking about is between people who are highly politically engaged (which for them means not only voting regularly but following politics closely and doing other kinds of political activity, such as donating to causes and volunteering for campaigns). People who are highly politically engaged are more likely to be older, white, men, have college degrees or more, and have higher incomes than those who are less engaged.

They have a chart I tell people about ALL THE TIME. It’s kind of hard to read, but once you see it, it’s really striking. I’ve reproduced it below & highlighted the key lines. Look first at “Gap Between Rich and Poor” – this is pretty important to highly-engaged Democrats (upward-facing white triangles), less important to less-engaged Democrats, and essentially unimportant to Republicans in either category.

Now look at “Wages Have Not Increased’ – that is one of the top three issues for less-engaged Democrats (downward-facing white triangles); the most important issue is “Health Care Costs” (highlighted at the top – and that’s also more important to less-engaged Dems than to highly-engaged ones). I would guess that a lot of highly-engaged Democrats believe that the cost of health care and the stagnation of wages are both part of what they mean when they talk about inequality or the gap between rich and poor – they’re essentially the same issues! But it looks like the people who are worried about their health care costs and their wages don’t see “Gap Between Rich and Poor” as particularly relevant their concerns.

There are other pretty striking disconnects between what less-engaged people and highly-politically-engaged people see as important issues, and the chart (and the whole book) is fascinating, even if it’s only one way to look at these things.

But it indicates something I see evidence for everywhere, and I think is really important to work on if we’re going to continue to have a democracy in the US: the class-cultural communication gulf (see also Joan C. Williams book Outclassed on this), which is one aspect of the disconnection between regular people on the one hand, and political professionals & other highly-engaged politics-followers on the other.