Plumbing the thinking of ‘Joe The Plumber’

So from everything I have read, Joe The Plumber would not, in fact, be fiscally penalized by an Obama administration. He does not actually, as he has conceded, make $250,000 a year. The plumbing business he supposedly wants to buy almost certainly does not net $250,000 a year. And in any case, his purchase of that business appears to be a pure hypothetical. If anything, it is likely that voting for Obama would be in Joe’s economic self interest: Joe himself admits that unless Obama is lying about his plans, “I would be receiving his tax cuts.”

This raises some questions. For starters, what is Joe’s problem? Is he stupid? Is he a Republican plant? Is he motivated by some other issue that has nothing to do with this?

Well, anything is possible. But I think Joe may be acting in the interest not of himself, but of a theoretical future self. When Joe told Obama “I’m being taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” he was, objectively speaking, wrong. He is not being taxed more and more, because he is not fulfilling the American dream.

He is dreaming the American dream. And as it happens, there’s no charge for that. But while  Joe would not be penalized by Obama’s proposed tax hikes, his theoretical future self — Dream Joe, let’s call him — would.

Or might be, if Dream Joe comes true. Of course Actual Joe is a true American, and believes that Dream Joe will inevitably merge with Actual Joe; it’s only a matter of time. So that was Dream Joe talking to Obama.

Anyway, the absurd Joe spectacle has me thinking about a bit from a recent George Packer New Yorker camapaign article. The article had Packer traveling around economically beaten-down areas talking politics, and the relevant passage deals with Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas, and that book’s thesis: Working-class people vote against their economic self-interest for cultural reasons that have been seized on and amplified by conservative politicians.

I’ll put the whole passage after the jump, but basically Packer summarizes research by some sociologists which suggested that working-class voters who used to see the Democratic party as a protector of their economic security started drifting away in the 1970s, not because of cultural issues, but precisely because in their judgment the Democratic party had lost the ability to protect that economic security — or their “material well-being,” as the study’s authors put it. After all, unions were dying out, jobs were going overseas, and these workers were increasingly on their own.

“Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement,” Packer writes. (The cultural factors Frank cites kicked in later, according to this argument. See the whole passage for more.)

To this I’d just add one more layer, which will bring us back to the likes of Joe. The anti-government, low-tax rhetoric that Packer refers to — and that was perfected by Ronald Reagan, who managed to win the role of governing the citizenry in large part by arguing that government is the biggest problem citizens have — worked because it spoke to aspiration.

It was populist rhetoric, but it did turn not turn on class warfare. Indeed it did away with the idea that the Joe the Plumbers of the world resent the rich, and was rather premised on the insight that Joe the Plumber and his ilk want to be the rich. And in point of fact believes he ought to be rich, deserves to be rich. Taken to its extreme, this form of populist rhetoric is premised on class envy: Joe is as good as any of those fat-cat swells! What’s keeping him from being rich? The government! Outta the way, government!

Joe the Plumber identifies with that, even though, in real life, his “wealth” will not be “spread around” by an Obama government, or any government. Yet he is not interested in the best interest of Actual Joe; he is interested in the best interests of Dream Joe.

And he’s not alone. Which is why the McCain campaign has been attempting the neat rhetorical trick of suggesting that a tax increase for the top-earning 2% of Americans is actually a blow to the Joes of the world. Maybe I’ll say more about that tomorrow.

Extract from New Yorker article after the jump if you’re interested.

Last year, four sociologists at the University of Arizona, led by Lane Kenworthy, released a paper that complicates Frank’s thesis. Their study followed the voting behavior of the forty-five per cent of white Americans who identify themselves as working class. Mining electoral data from the General Social Survey, they found that the decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period—from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties—and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift.

Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that — during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated — the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them. “Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, there was increasing reason for working-class whites to question whether the Democrats were still better than the Republicans at promoting their material well-being,” the study’s authors write.

Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton’s Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s argument.

But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security.