What does the working class really want?
That is the headline of George Packer’s review of seven recent books on politics and the economy for the Atlantic. And while the article gives a surprisingly fair hearing to the role mass migration has played in the decline of America’s working class, it still suffers from a glaring upper-class bias: an infatuation with climate change.
Responding to John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s call for “gradualism” in addressing climate change in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes, Packer simply asserts that the stakes are too high for such indifferent messaging; in Packer’s words, “the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather.”
Whether or not the current upper-class hysteria over climate change is justified — past predictions of doom have fallen comically short — is a subject for a longer post. For now, new polling from American Compass sheds needed light on Packer’s original question.
Headlined as a poll about globalization and China, the American Compass’s poll that asks respondents which policy goal they prioritize higher, reversing the decline of manufacturing or addressing the risks of climate change, is more responsive to Packer’s question.
Here is the exact question respondents were asked:
“Policymakers often consider laws that would change how goods are produced, in ways that might have large benefits in the long run but would also lead to higher prices in the short run. Two topics that have received a lot of attention in recent years are the risks of climate change and the decline of manufacturing. If you had to support at least one policy that would raise prices for you, which would be a higher priority for you?”
Overall, 62% of adults said they would rather pay higher prices to strengthen American manufacturing than pay higher prices to combat climate change. But the breakdown by class was even more revealing.
According to the poll, 67% of working-class respondents (defined as those without a college degree and household income between $30,000 and $80,000) chose manufacturing over climate change, while just 33% chose climate change.
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Meanwhile, people in Packer’s demographic (the upper class was defined as those with household incomes higher than $150,000) preferred manufacturing over climate change by just a 51% to 49% margin. Only those self-identifying as Democrats chose climate change over manufacturing, and even then only by a 54% to 46% margin.
One doesn’t have to buy into the entire American Compass industrial policy agenda to realize that there is plenty of room for conservatives to connect with working-class voters on issues like regulatory reform that would go a long way toward revitalizing manufacturing in the United States.