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02 Nov 08

"Class Politics" Richard Florida, Creative Class Blog

Fascinating (possibly scary?) piece by Florida on how Obama's win could still fan the flames of an ugly backlash from the right that may be more convulsive and destructive than the current economic / financial meltdown. Florida factors in some data around demographic changes due to the creative economy (linked to democratic/ Obama politics), to paint a picture of a potentially very divided country.

www.creativeclass.com/...class-politics-3 - Preview

politics obama class_theory usa republican democrat class_war richard_florida creative_class

When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.
I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.
Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class have grown to 40 million - nearly a third of the work force. That group has become powerful in American politics, and it is squarely behind Mr. Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high technology.
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- Republican strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever-prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968.
  The rise of the creative economy generated a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized. Diversity and self-expression became necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function.
  As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. - what we now know as blue America - the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions - were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.
- This class divide is overlaid on America’s economic and political geography, with the U.S. economy being driven by centers of innovation such as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.; finance, entertainment, and media cities such as New York and Los Angeles; and university-anchored tech centers such as Austin, Tex., Boulder, Colo., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
- These class divides will only deepen. Fear and anxiety will probably get worse. And a strange kind of reactive populism, much worse than anything we have seen before, could be on the rise. Unless Mr. Obama can fashion a broad, inclusive appeal that extends the benefits of the creative economy to working and service economies, the bitterness he himself acknowledged, in a moment of candor, will grow deeper.

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"Class Politics" Richard Florida, Creative Class Blog

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