How to Turn Blue Collars Into Blue Voters: The Psychology of the Working-Class Male

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted December 21, 2007.

I have been a clinical psychologist in private practice for more than two decades in southwestern Ohio, a Republican stronghold in the state that broke Democrats' hearts in 2004. Three years later, it appears that most of the "blue team" remembers Ohio only for voter fraud, but I remember how Democratic candidate John Kerry failed to emotionally connect with the blue-collar blues sufferers here -- especially the younger men.

My office is a mile from the Ohio River. Across the river to the south is Kentucky, closer than Brooklyn is from Manhattan, and a short drive west takes me to Indiana. In this Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana area, union jobs that pay livable wages are vanishing, but the blue-collar group that's not disappearing is the one that Howard Dean got himself in trouble for taking seriously: guys with a pickup truck and a Confederate flag.

I know one young man who drove a pickup truck with tires twice the normal size and had a Confederate flag hanging in his pole barn. He did a major favor for a friend of mine whom he came to like, and he was shocked when I told him what the impact of the flag would be on this person who is African-American. I told him that for many African-Americans the Confederate flag is as repugnant as a swastika is for myself and most Jews. He immediately got rid of his flag to avoid being offensive, apologized, and said, "For most of my friends, the flag is not about racism but about rebellion." The rebellion can be unspecified, but mostly it is against the U.S. government. There is no safer phrase in his world than, "I love America, but I hate our government."

For this young man and his friends, there is no shame in not voting. They don't take seriously what the Democrats and the Republicans say about the issues, assuming "they are all liars who will say anything to get elected." Some older blue-collar men in my part of the world know that historically the Democrats, more than the Republicans, have thrown them an occasional bone. But the younger generation knows that the farms their daddies once owned are now upscale subdivisions, and that the plants where their daddies once worked are now vacant because of, in part, Bill Clinton and the Democrats' North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) triumph.

Over the years, I have counseled many blue-collar men after they had been laid off from factory jobs and had begun to abuse alcohol, other drugs and/or their spouses. Today, I increasingly see younger men who have never held a job with a living wage. I recently talked to two such men in their mid-twenties, both unemployed and on parole for substance-abuse related offenses. Seeing no other options, they are intent on joining the military when their parole ends. Having nothing to do, they often drive around aimlessly, sometimes listening to right-wing radio. Both of these young men were Bush supporters in 2004, though neither actually voted.

One of these young men routinely repeats, "Michael Moore is a rich, liberal opportunist." But he just as routinely expresses a deep hatred for CEOs with multi-million dollar salaries. He likes U.S. history, and when we discussed anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman's plot to kill Carnegie Steel Chairman Henry Frick after Frick had reduced steel workers' wages and attempted to break the union with scabs, the young man smiled with admiration. He maintained his affection even after I told him that Goldman and Berkman were more politically left of Moore than Moore is left of Bush. Upon leaning that Berkman botched the job and only wounded Frick and served 14 years in prison, the young man chuckled and said, "Sounds like some stupid crap that I would have gotten into."

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Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).

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