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Democrats 36,000, Part 3The Riddle of the Ideopolis.

By Timothy Noah
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2002, at 7:08 PM ET

Jeez, here it is Wednesday already, and the Democratic majority predicted by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira still hasn't emerged! Chatterbox must learn to be patient. In the meantime, having previously examined the failure of the Emerging Democratic Majority to show up on Nov. 5, and the shaky prospect that any future EDM will capture the white working class, Chatterbox will now attempt to solve the Riddle of the Ideopolis.

"Ideopolis" is what Judis and Teixeira call any metropolitan region with a nerdy postindustrial economy. Among the best-known ideopolises are California's Silicon Valley, Massachusetts' Route 128, and North Carolina's Research Triangle. But there are, Judis and Teixeira point out, scads of less well-known ideopolises, including the counties surrounding Madison, Wis., Nashville, Tenn., and Portland, Ore. (Most of the ideopolises Judis and Teixeira examine were culled from this report by Ross. C. DeVol, director of regional and demographic studies for the Milken Institute.) Ideopolises now account for 43.7 percent of the vote. They interest Judis and Teixeira because they're heavily Democratic.

It's no surprise that the NPR-listening, Passat-driving brainworkers in these ideopolises vote Democratic. Nor is it a surprise that members of ethnic minorities who live in ideopolises vote Democratic. But it is, Judis and Teixeira note, a surprise to learn that members of the white working class who live in ideopolises also vote pretty reliably Democratic. Thus the Riddle of the Ideopolis: Why does the white working class lean Democratic in the ideopolises but lean Republican everywhere else?

Judis and Teixeira offer the cultural explanation that ideopolises are not riven by class difference; in such places, "the white working class seems to embrace the same values as professionals." As a result, Republican appeals based on bigotry, resentment, love of guns, and hatred of abortion "have largely fallen on deaf ears." This absence of class warfare is probably real to some extent, though it can't possibly be as true as the technology industry's utopian PR would have us believe. There's got to be something else. What is it?

Chatterbox suspects the ultimate answer is economic. What is the engine that drives economic growth in an ideopolis? The university. Universities are basically socialist institutions. Chatterbox refers here not to the New Left-flavored politics of many academics, but rather to the fact that universities are heavily subsidized by the federal government, and often owned outright by a state government. Collectively, colleges and universities in the United States take in more money from the federal and state government than they do from tuition and fees. Even private colleges and universities get more than 16 percent of their total funding from the government. Some of this taxpayer money even gets funneled (in the form of scholarships) to low-income people! Universities are blatantly statist and redistributionist, and you'll find 'em in every state of the union. Does Rush Limbaugh know about this?

He does, of course, as does every other free-market-loving conservative in America. But except for a few quirky renegades (like Hillsdale College, which takes a principled stand against accepting federal dollars), nobody makes a big deal about this affront to Adam Smith. It's just an accepted fact.

Now, the mere fact that a place is heavily dependent on government spending doesn't tilt its politics to the left. (If it did, Alaska would have gone to Ralph Nader in 2000.) But when a community is not only dependent on government spending, but is also witness to how that government spending can create enormous wealth in industries such as biotechnology and computers, that likely makes members of that community less suspicious about government than they might otherwise be. They may even come to think government represents a positive good. An ideopolis's dependence on government spending, and its ability to spin research dollars into gold, is obvious to anyone who lives in such a place, from the CEO of a software company down to the janitor who dusts off his chair at night. And that, Chatterbox submits, is the real reason that the ideopolises' white working class votes Democratic.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Below is an edited version of a debate between Tim Noah (Chatterbox himself) and Tom Schaller, a University of Maryland Baltimore County political science professor. Things are complicated because there are two topics. The first is today's installment of "Democrats 36,000" and Schaller claims that different candidates have mobilized different portions of the white electorate and that the Democrats need to understand this. The second topic is an older Chatterbox item on what might have cost Kathleen Kennedy Townsend the Maryland gubernatorial election.

Remarks From The Fray:

Once again, Timothy Noah has managed to take a complex subject and offer a superficial, back-of-the-napkin analysis so he can make an early lunch. To best understand the disaffected white vote, you need to look at the four most important candidacies of the past decade: i.e., those of Ventura, Perot, McCain and Nader. Each candidate appealed to a different strata of white voter. And, at the risk of being a little cheeky (but fun!) about it, one can draw parallels between each maverick's campaign with four white pop stars who … serve as proxies for the four segments of the disaffected white vote. Those pop icons, in order, are: Eminem, Elvis, Madonna, and Justin Timberlake.

Sound ridiculous?

Check this out: Ventura tapped into trailer-park, dropout whites from the postindustrial Northeast and Midwest who are generally unregistered and on the margins of society (Eminem); Perot tapped into Southern and Border state evangelicals … (Elvis); McCain was the darling of the non-partisan, 4-year college-educated crowd, including those from the Catholic suburbs and growing Southwest … (Madonna); finally, Nader lured away postgraduate enviros and limousine liberals from the affluent suburbs … (Timberlake). The Dems have been losing all four segments, and why?

Because these strata of disaffected white voters didn't simply break away and head in a straight line directly for the Republican Party … Democratic politics has to move orthogonally, boldly and in new directions …

Of course, who can expect deep analysis from Noah? This is a "reporter" who took (part of) a quote by me reported in the Baltimore Sun the day after the Ehrlich-KKT Maryland governor's race -- a quote about gender bias against KKT in the media, not among voters, because they rarely mentioned that Ehrlich has never led any government, at any level, at any time -- and created a straw man argument ("Schaller says Maryland voters sexist!") so he could bully me around in Chatterbox. (Of course, in his diligence he called neither me or the original Sun reporter to confirm the meaning of my quote, from which he made a huge inferential leap.) With these psychic powers, perhaps Mr. Noah should be dispatched to help President Bush peer into the souls of foreign heads of state. Oh, and Noah is a former KKT campaign staffer. Hmmm...maybe she lost because she is bad at choosing hired help.

… Slate's readers deserve better, and I deserve an apology from Noah. The emails from angry men saying I'm unfit to be teaching in the public university system are a nuisance …
Regards,

-- Tom Schaller
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

(To reply, click here.)

Schaller says I misquoted him--or rather, he says the Sun misquoted him and I passed along the misquote--about gender bias and Kathleen Townsend. He says he was characterizing what the media did, not what the voters thought. But it wouldn't have come up as an issue right after Townsend lost the election unless Schaller thought that the voters had bought into the media stereotype.

Schaller's disquisition about the disaffected white vote is interesting, but has no bearing I can fathom on what I wrote about the disaffected white working class vote.

-- Tim Noah

(To reply, click here.)

Nope, Tim, wrong yet again. I never said you misquoted me. I said you made an inferential leap by doing what you appear to do regularly: glean part of some quote, interpret in some way favorable to half-formed argument you have, and then bully it as a straw man. My point, as you well know, is that I never mentioned voters, but you inferred that I blamed their supposed sexism for KKT's loss … Reprint the exact paragraph from the Sun and then try to explain how you reached your inference, and I'll be happy to leave it to Slate's reasonable readers to determine whether harm was done …

-- Tom Schaller
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

(To reply, click here.)

The graf that started it all:

Based on this section of the Sun story (find the complete version here—it's free, but you must register), Schaller's statement seems to this reasonable reader to be part of a story about how the Maryland Democratic state leadership set Townsend up for a fall. The bias looks like it rests (initially) with neither the voters (Noah's point) nor the media (Schaller's point), but with the poo-bahs; how it gained traction is another story (the one they are debating, I guess):

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley was talking about a "vacuum of leadership" in the state Democratic Party as recently as March. When he gave his speech announcing that he would not enter the primary, he never mentioned Townsend's name, declining at the time to endorse her.

"That's the sort of albatross that she could not shake, that she's not capable of leadership, which defies logic," said Thomas F. Schaller, a UMBC political science professor. "Had it been a man, the whole issue of fitness to lead would have never come up. There's some serious gender bias."

The old boy network never fully embraced Townsend.

And the passage from the original Chatterbox:

Before proceeding, let's dismiss two hackneyed interest-group arguments floated in today's newspapers: …2. Townsend lost because Maryland is sexist. The Baltimore Sun quotes Thomas F. Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, arguing that Townsend's fitness to govern was questioned because she was a woman. "There's some serious gender bias," he said. Then how to explain the durability of Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski? If anyone were being sexist, it would have to be women: The Post poll shows that 61 percent of white women voted for Ehrlich while only 38 percent voted for Townsend. Ehrlich's support among white women was only seven percentage points lower than his support among white men.

(11/14)

Washington Post