Rox Populi

It's Not the Economy, Stupid

Check out Krugman today as he runs down the last four decades of the Republican playbook:

Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.

But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply, America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration. Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in 1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 — and that number will keep rising for the foreseeable future.

Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From their point of view, it’s us versus them — and everyone who looks different is one of them.

You might not agree 100% with Krugman's view because Republicans have been so adept as persecuting teh gay as a "moral values" issue to win elections. But that's really just another example of targeting "the other." Now that the "enemies within" strategy is shrinking, look for an ever-increasing list of enemies "over there" --which they've already cynically exploited to the tune of the death of more than 3700 US forces and countless Iraqis.   

Where the Brains Are

Amanda's review of Bill Scher's Wait! Don't Move to Canada! put me in mind of Richard Florida's Flight of the Creative Class:

The creative class, 38 million strong in the U.S., produces a disproportionate share of wealth., accounting for nearly half of all wages and salaries earned - as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined. Though the raw numbers are impressive, the U.S.'s current percentage of creative class employees already ranks only 11th worldwide on Florida's Global Creative Class Index.

To meet the economic challenges of the new century, America must continue to be open to foreign talent, while at the same time developing educational, cultural, scientific, and entrepreneurial opportunities that tap the creativity of a greater segment of its own population. Unless the U.S. can attract, retain, and grow top-notch creative talent, the increasingly intense competition will continue to weaken its economy.

What talent America currently has is undergoing a migratory shift. According to a new article [PDF] featured in the October edition of The Atlantic Monthly, Florida argues that America's great wealth and intellect  --more greatly distributed throughout the country before the 1970s-- is becoming increasingly concentrated in a few select cities:

Today, a demographic realignment that may prove just as significant [as previous migrations] is under way: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americas to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, as a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places. Such geographic sorting of people by economic potential, on this scale, is unprecedented. I call it the "means migration."

 

[click on map for larger view]

Like other maps we've all been obsessed with since the 2004 elections, the one above has interesting political, social and economic implications ...especially if the "means migration" is exacerbated by new flight of corporations dependent on innovators to these very same centers of influence. Chicken, meet egg.