Poor People Are Most Likely To Be Infected And Most Likely To Die In The Pandemic. Who's To Blame?

Even if you're not as well-off as David Geffin and sailing your yacht around the Grenadines, wealthy Americans-- particularly wealthy white Americans-- seem less likely to be infected by COVID-19 and less likely to die of it if they are. Before we get to Eric Levitz' New York Magazine on why Americans don't vote their class, below, let's look at how that has impacted Americans during the pandemic. Multimillionaire Virginia Congressman Don Beyer (New Dem) is not letting the pandemic get in the way of his quest for party leadership. He's been using his position as the previously unheard of vice-chair of the Joint Economic Committee, to gain national name recognition. Last week, he announced the release of a compelling new report reporting why lower income workers and racial minorities are disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus.

With conservatives in both parties, standing firmly against Medicare-for-All, the report shows that Black, Latino and low-income Americans are more likely to have pre-existing conditions such as hypertension, chronic lung disease, diabetes and heart disease, conditions found in nine of 10 Americans hospitalized for coronavirus. In addition, they are more likely to do person-to-person work in the service industry-- often without benefits like paid sick leave, health insurance and the flexibility to work from home. Black, Latino and low-income Americans are also more likely to suffer economic impacts from the recession caused by coronavirus because they historically experience higher unemployment rates, lower income and much less wealth.

Beyer: "As a result of a corrosive cocktail of systemic inequalities, tens of thousands of people across the country are more likely to die from the coronavirus because of who they are, what they do and where they live. Not everyone has a job that will allow them to work from home and those that do not are disproportionately low-income and people of color. Public-sector jobs that have been pathways to the middle class for so many black families-- essential jobs to keep society running-- are now risky. I keep thinking about the black bus driver in Detroit who, like so many of those in the service industry, was torn between a paycheck and protecting his health-- a few weeks after complaining about the lack of health protections on his bus he died of coronavirus. As Congress thinks through how to help the nation respond and recover from the coronavirus, it is important that we remember that race neutral programs and policies do not always have race neutral impacts. We saw this play out with some of the small business programs that were included in previous legislative responses to the coronavirus-- even though they are eligible, small-business owners of color are having a harder time accessing federal loans through their local banks. I am pleased that in the bill passed yesterday we improved access by ensuring more funds are available to minority-owned businesses."

And best of luck to him. The report-- which makes it clear that "COVID-19 has focused attention on the high human cost of structural inequalities in American society" is very much worth reading. "Economic inequality in the United States strongly determines who will be most likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 and who will be most harmed by its economic impact. As a result, the virus likely will increase inequality, disproportionately hurting the poor, working poor and communities of color. If these underlying conditions are not addressed, the next pandemic could have even more painful results."

Now, to Levitz' essay. "In the mid-20th century," he wrote, "a voter’s socioeconomic position strongly predicted his or her partisan allegiance: In Britain, France, and the United States, voters with low incomes and only a high-school education tended to support left-of-center parties, while high-income, highly educated voters aligned with those of the right. In all three nations, this is no longer the case. All else equal, lower-income voters are still more likely to “vote blue” in the U.S. But that tendency is much weaker than in the past. Meanwhile, the relationship between educational attainment and partisan preference has flipped: Now, college-educated voters are more likely to support putative workers’ parties, while non-college-educated ones tend to favor conservatives."

The decline of class-based voting has long troubled the American left. And for good reason. Voters without four-year degrees are more numerous than those who have them, and America’s political institutions give the former disproportionate influence over election outcomes. For this reason, among others, the Republican Party has fared much better in the era of class depolarization than it did in the preceding one.

What’s more, the declining salience of class identity has exacerbated the challenge of enacting progressive reform, even when Democrats do manage to secure power. Corporate America and the typical worker do not meet each other on an even political playing field. Effective civic engagement requires resources. It takes money to finance campaigns, time to monitor legislative and regulatory developments, and organization to bend those developments in one’s favor. The Chamber of Commerce can shoulder these costs much more easily than isolated working people. Traditionally, the left’s formula for overcoming this fundamental disadvantage has been to (1) help workers collectivize the costs of political engagement by organizing into trade unions, and (2) exploit the working class’s numerical supremacy to overwhelm capitalist opposition. Or, as socialist sloganeers have summarized it: They’ve got money, but we’ve got people; we are many, they are few.

But once workers stop organizing into unions, and stop voting on the basis of class identity, they cease to be “many” in the operative sense. Both major parties become intra-class coalitions in which working people’s interests as workers are either balanced against those of corporate coalition partners (as in the Democratic Party) or ignored (as in the GOP). Meanwhile, absent the concentration of working people into one dominant partisan coalition, America’s veto-point-laden legislative institutions-- and the tendency of staggered presidential and midterm elections to produce divided government-- render large-scale reform of any kind a Herculean task.

Put all these considerations together, and it seems less than coincidental that the decline of class-based voting in the U.S. (and Britain and France) has corresponded with an upsurge in income and wealth inequality.

...The fact that Sanders boasts more support among suburban college graduates than whites with low levels of education shouldn’t be surprising. His agenda may have more to offer the latter in material terms. But in the contemporary U.S., college-educated whites tend to evince more progressive policy preferences than non-college-educated ones even on matters of redistribution. In a national survey fielded earlier this month, the progressive think tank Data for Progress asked voters, “Do you think it is the responsibility of the federal government to see to it that everyone has health-care coverage?” College-educated white voters said “yes” by a margin of 50 to 39 percent; among non-college-educated white voters, that margin was 43 to 39 percent.

The results of Maine’s 2017 referendum on Medicaid expansion lend credence to this finding. Given the opportunity to expand the availability of socialized health insurance, the most highly educated parts of the Pine Tree State voted in favor, while the least well-educated regions voted against. Material interests weren’t entirely irrelevant to voting patterns: Researchers found that, if one held education constant, then areas with higher incomes were more likely to oppose Medicaid expansion. But an area’s median income was still a less reliable predictor of its support for the policy than its average level of educational attainment; college trumped class.

This same dynamic is reflected in the ideological tendencies of the Democratic Party’s congressional caucus. Democratic House members who represent districts with above-median levels of college-educated white voters are more likely to belong to the Progressive Caucus-- and to co-sponsor Medicare for All-- than those who represent districts with above-median levels of non-college-educated white voters.

Democratic senator Joe Manchin represents a state whose median income is $45,000 a year. He is among the most conservative Democrats on Capitol Hill, and said in 2019 that he would not vote for Bernie Sanders in a race against Donald Trump. Manchin’s House colleague, Ro Khana, represents a constituency whose median income is $141,000. Khana is among the most left-wing members of Nancy Pelosi’s caucus and co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s campaign. This is difficult to explain if one posits a tight correspondence between an area’s class composition and its appetite for social democracy. But it’s much less mysterious if one presumes a correlation between high levels of education and support for progressive politics: 60 percent of the adults in Khana’s House district are college graduates, while just 20 percent of those in Manchin’s West Virginia boast bachelor’s degrees.

...The left has good reason to lament the decline of class politics. Class-based political organizations were the muscle behind virtually every major progressive reform in U.S. history. And a radicalized working class is a much more plausible agent for democratizing capital ownership than are affluent liberals (however comfortable the latter may be with western European–style social democracy). More mundanely, unless the Democratic Party staunches its bleeding with non-college-educated voters, it will struggle to assemble Senate majorities.

But in the absence of a strong trade-union movement or laborite media, class position exerts a much weaker influence on voting behavior and policy preferences than some socialists have assumed-- while higher education exerts a much stronger one. Some of America’s most ardent dialectical materialists are themselves affluent college graduates whose politics grew more radical during their time at university. If academic socialization could teach such children of the upper-middle class to prioritize Marxist convictions above their 401(k)s, why couldn’t it also teach millions of “normie” college-educated Democrats to prize progressive principles above their marginal tax rates?

None of this is to say that leftists shouldn’t be fighting for the hearts and minds of white high-school graduates. Class position does not mechanically determine ideology. But neither does race or education. Tens of millions of white, non-college-educated voters cast their ballots for Democrats every election year, and the party could not survive without their support. There is no inherent reason why a larger percentage of this demographic group can’t be won over to progressive politics. But there’s little evidence that mere advocacy for social democratic reform will overwhelm the contingent reasons for the prevalence of white working-class conservatism and/or nonvoting. Only left-wing institutions with a footprint in non-college-educated voters’ workplaces and communities can plausibly overwhelm the hegemony that right-wing media exercises over the median white American’s political imagination. Whatever flaws the left’s account of class depolarization may have, its critique of the Democratic Party’s malign indifference to organized labor’s fate is unimpeachable. The failure of every unified Democratic government since the Second World War to prioritize labor-law reform doubtlessly exacerbated the rightward drift of the white working class.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of near-term electoral strategy, the left must presume that the class composition of the Democratic coalition cannot be drastically changed in the course of a single campaign-- and that college-educated Democrats are as “natural” a constituency for the party’s progressive wing as any other.

Today's Democrats can only win when "luck" defeats Republicans