A report from the Pew Research Center out this morning isn’t getting huge play in the press, but it offers a much bigger clue to the shape of our future than anything you will read on the front page of today’s New York Times.
The report is on public attitudes toward unions, and it finds that despite the recession and the electoral swing to the left in 2008, unions have significantly less trust and support than ever before. The Pew data reinforces similar poll results from Gallup; support for unions this year was at its lowest level since Gallup first asked the question in 1936.
Overall, Pew reports that 42 percent of those questioned had an unfavorable view of labor while only 41 percent viewed labor positively. Among whites, just 37 percent view unions favorably; 46 percent have an unfavorable view.
The public’s view of unions has shifted noticeably since 2007, with independents tracking close to Republicans than to Democrats on this question. Support for labor has noticeably weakened among blacks, Democrats and senior citizens; members of union households remain strongly favorable.
Although Pew doesn’t provide us with much data about why these changes are taking place, I think several factors are at work. First, there are more unionized workers in the public sector now than in private enterprise, and dislike of the arrogant, incompetent DMV worker who cannot be fired and gets a better pension than you do runs pretty strong. Second, more people think unions won’t work in the jobs that they have. If costs go up, business shifts to non-unionized firms either inside or outside the US. Third, the perception that bailouts have gone to sustain wages for unionized workers has not resonated well with people who think they will pay taxes in order to support higher wages and benefits for other people. Fourth, scandals and overreaching (ACORN, card check) have sharpened public distrust of the labor movement.
The news for unions isn’t all bad. More than 60% think they are needed to protect worker rights. But ‘necessary evil’ isn’t an inspiring slogan when you are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in one election cycle after the next for political support. And it’s likely that support will drop farther when and if the financial crisis in the states pits the interests of unionized public employees against the rest of the population.
This is bad news for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” and suggests that the country is continuing to move away from the assumptions and values of the New Deal era. The great progressive myth is that bad economic times will remind voters of the good old days of the 1930s when Democrats and labor unions sheltered the workers from the consequences of capitalist meltdown; this belief is what deluded the Obama White House into the belief that it had a free hand for major legislation like the one FDR had in 1933.
But the myth isn’t true any more. Not just in the United States, but across the western world, public feeling has been moving to the right in the wake of the financial crisis and recession. In Germany, France and Italy the center-right has done very well out of the crisis; the Conservatives are strongly favored in the UK, and the socialist government in Spain is increasingly unpopular.
Democrats had hoped that Obama’s election was ‘transformational’. Many of my friends talked about Obama as “our Reagan” in the early days, the charismatic leader who would turn back the Reaganite tide and get the country back on the right (liberal) track once again. So far, nothing like that has happened, and it sounds as if even the White House is giving up on that goal now.
There is one important exception that needs to be noted. Unions draw more support from young people than from older ones. Although support for labor has fallen sharply among 18-29 year olds, a slim majority still has a favorable view of labor. This tracks with other polling that shows ‘millennials’ are more liberal than older people. Yet another Pew survey indicates that millennials have been moving away from President Obama and the Democrats since the last election. My guess is that this represents a combination of the Bush backlash and the increasing tolerance of young people on social issues rather than a full shift back to New Deal nostalgia; and that over time the ‘liberalism’ of the millennials will look more libertarian. We shall see.
On the whole, though, Americans don’t want to restore the old blue social model; they don’t think that can be done, and they want to build something new. The leader they are looking for isn’t someone who will take them back to the glory days; they want leaders who will help them go boldly to a place where none have gone before. They want the warp drive, not the brakes.
This more than anything is why, despite all our troubles and shortcomings, I remain optimistic about the American future.