穷人在美国两党斗争中被牺牲
2023-03-13 12:56阅读：
美国政府称，有3800万美国人生活在贫困之中，此外还有数以千万计的人虽然生活在贫困线以上，但或多或少处于永久性的财务不安全状态。谁能代表这些人的利益？
文化战争兴起
在20世纪大部分时间里，答案很简单。代表美国穷人的政党即民主党往往关注社会保障、医疗补助、医疗保险、农村电气化和最低工资等问题。现在的情况大体上还是如此。
但随着民主党富裕势力不断扩大，经济困难的白人越来越热衷于与共和党进行文化战争（指社会群体之间的文化冲突，对价值观、信仰和实践主导权的争夺。它通常指在社会价值观上普遍存在分歧和两极分化的话题——编者注）。在这种情况下，党派身份必然会面临压力。
根据政治学家李·德鲁特曼和奥斯卡·波卡桑格雷的最新分析，2023年，共和党的核心位于收入低于平均水平、白人占比高于平均水平的选区。民主党则赢得了大多数种族多样性高于平均水平的选区，以及富裕程度和白人占比都高于平均水平的多数选区。
这种政治演变已经进行了几十年。在1992年的选举中，自由派共和党人代表曼哈顿上东区的国会选区已经14年，而该区竟然选出了民主党人。如今，自由派共和党人已不复存在，民主党人则连续30年代表这片上流选区。
都不愿给富人增税
富有的美国人很喜欢这种局面，因为现在两个政党都以他们的福祉为重心。尽管很少有政策能得到选民如此广泛的支持，但许多民主党人不愿意对富人征收高额税款。虽然美国前总统奥巴马与其民主党盟友曾推动了一项真正旨在推动重新分配的医疗保健计划，并使数千万美国穷人和工薪阶层受益，但民主党当时为此承担了巨大的政治风险，并在该计划通过后的10年里为之奋斗。
然而，其他增加富人税收负担的尝试都失败了。当奥巴马试图改变529大学教育储蓄计划，以减少对富人的倾斜时，其并未得到太多
支持。共和党人当然反对他。后来，经时任众议院议长、民主党人佩洛西和其他有影响力的议员劝说，奥巴马放弃了努力。
民主党在去年通过的《通胀削减法案》中提高了一些企业税，同时也为美国国税局提供了足够的资金来实际履行其职责。民主党人不顾加州和东北部议员的反对，保留了州和地方税收减免的上限，而这将减少高税收州富裕纳税人的福利。
但总体来说，这项法案给美国本土带来了广泛好处，比如提供了大量的税收抵免，没有任何增税。现任总统拜登此前在发表国情咨文时反复提醒公众，并发誓不对年收入低于40万美元的家庭征税。这降低了高收入家庭享受保护的门槛——只有收入前2%的人群被排除在外。
尽管共和党代表着较不富裕的地区，但该党没有表现出代表这部分地区利益的兴趣，而是依然强烈反对对富人增税以及根据经济规模重新分配财富或服务。
政治基础已经腐烂
彭博社记者乔纳森一直认为，共和党是一个“后政策”政党（指不再关心政策制定的实质内容，只看重推进观点的党派——编者注），共和党人甚至懒得在2020年发布一个纲领。他们的政策就是政治，他们赞成或反对什么取决于在某一特定时刻，谁在某个特定的办公室。共和党的外交政策越来越取决于国内机会主义者的要求。然而无论政治如何，共和党坚持的一项政策是反对向富人征税，尤其是以此作为向穷人提供福利的一种手段，哪怕是共和党的穷人。
以上种种使得文化战争成为美国政治的主要内容。政治学家德鲁特曼和奥斯卡认为：“在这种情况下，美国政治特征的超极化变得愈发难以解决。民主党人和共和党人建立和维持各自联盟的方式不同，几乎没有达成一致的余地，特别是当身份和文化问题取代经济问题成为政治的焦点冲突时。”
因为多样性和青年选民，文化战争在一定程度上对民主党有利。因此在未来，这些人大多会站在民主党一边。而美国经济最活跃的地区往往是文化自由的地区。同时，文化战争对共和党也有一定好处，因为这正是他们赖以发展的根本。两党都受到富人和穷人选民的交叉压力。对于民主党人来说，他们向富人征税的同时，仍寻求为穷人提供福利，需要更加谨慎。而共和党有必要特别关注文化战争，以团结那些经济利益被民主党破坏的人。
美国不太平等的社会政策基础显而易见，一方政党在意识形态上支持再分配，而另一政党的选民却反对如此。不幸的是，美国的政治基础已经腐烂。
Poor Americans are losing out in the culture
war
With the debate moved to divisive social issues, low-income white
voters are siding against their own interests.
By Francis Wilkinson
The federal government says that 38 million Americans live in
poverty. In addition, tens of millions live above the poverty line
but in more or less permanent financial insecurity. Who represents
the interests of all these people?
For most of the 20th century the answer was straightforward. The
party of poor Americans was the party of Social Security, Medicaid,
Medicare, rural electrification and the minimum wage: the
Democrats. That’s still mostly true. When a political party holds
the nation’s credit hostage in an effort to cut food stamps, you
can be certain it isn’t the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Joe
Biden.
But as the affluent wing of the Democratic Party continues to
enlarge, and economically struggling whites grow ever more
committed to the Republican culture war, party identities are bound
to come under pressure.
The core of the Republican Party in 2023, according to a new
analysis by political scientists Lee Drutman and Oscar Pocasangre,
is found in districts where income is below average and whiteness
is above average. Republicans dominate the 162 congressional
districts that fit that description, winning 137 of them in 2022.
Such districts account for more than 61 percent of the 222
districts that comprise the GOP House majority.
Democrats won a majority of districts that are more racially
diverse than average, winning about three-quarters of such
districts, regardless of how affluent they were. Democrats also won
a modest majority (57 percent) of districts that were above average
in both affluence and whiteness.
This political evolution has been under way for several decades. In
the 1992 election, after being represented for 14 years by a
liberal Republican, Manhattan’s “silk-stocking” congressional
district on the Upper East Side elected a Democrat. Liberal
Republicans no longer exist, and Democrats have represented Park
Avenue for three decades running.
All this has worked out well for wealthy Americans, who now have
two parties relatively committed to their well-being instead of
one. Many (though surely not all ) Democrats are reluctant to
impose significant taxes on the rich, though few policies enjoy
such widespread support from voters. President Barack Obama and his
Democratic allies pushed through a genuinely redistributive health
care plan that has helped tens of millions of poor and
working-class Americans. But the party assumed great political risk
in enacting it and fought hard to defend it for a decade after its
passage.
Other efforts to increase the tax burden on the wealthy failed.
When Obama tried to change the 529 education savings program to
make it less skewed toward the wealthy, the votes weren’t there.
Republicans opposed him, of course. But he abandoned the effort
after House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other influential
lawmakers persuaded him to pull the plug.
Democrats raised some corporate taxes in the Inflation Reduction
Act signed into law last year while also funding the Internal
Revenue Service sufficiently to actually perform its duties.
Democrats retained the cap on the SALT deduction , which reduces
benefits to wealthy taxpayers in high-tax states, over the
objections of legislators from California and the Northeast.
But overall, the legislation was far more notable for its broad
benefits — it made a host of tax credits available, for example —
than for any tax increase. Likewise, Joe Biden repeatedly reminds
the public, most recently in his State of the Union address, of his
vow not to tax any household making less than $400,000 a year. That
threshold leaves only the top 2 percent of income earners outside
the protective bubble (although even that rhetoric is sufficient to
inspire Republican wails of “socialism!”).
Despite representing less affluent districts, the Republican Party
has shown no interest in representing less affluent interests. It
remains vehemently opposed to tax increases on the wealthy and to
redistributing wealth or services down the economic scale. But the
predominance of lower-income GOP districts does seem to be easing
Republican enthusiasm for killing Social Security and Medicare.
Even Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is now saying that when
he declared that he wanted to sunset all federal programs he by no
means meant that he wanted to sunset ALL federal programs.
Confirming, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Jonathan Bernstein
has long maintained, that the GOP is a “post-policy” party,
Republicans didn’t even bother to produce a platform in 2020. Their
policy is politics; what they are for or against is a function of
who is in a given office at a given moment. (Likewise elections
that Republicans lose are rigged and elections that they win — even
on the same day in the same precincts — are fair and square.)
Republican foreign policy is increasingly contingent on the
dictates of domestic opportunism. But one policy to which the GOP
clings, no matter the politics, is opposition to taxes on the
wealthy, especially as a means to provide benefits to the poor;
even the Republican poor.
That leaves culture war as the main stuff of American politics.
“Under these conditions,” Drutman and Pocasangre write, “the
hyper-polarization that characterizes American politics becomes
increasingly difficult to resolve. The different ways in which
Democrats and Republicans carve out and sustain their respective
coalitions leaves little room for agreement, particularly when
identity and cultural issues replace economic issues as the focal
conflict of politics.”
Culture war works, to a limited extent, for Democrats because
diversity and youth, and thus the future, are largely on the
Democrats’ side. The most economically vibrant parts of the nation
are culturally liberal. Culture war works for Republicans because
it’s all they’ve got. Any effort to reorient the party’s economic
policies toward its less affluent constituents would run afoul of
right-wing donors and a vast conservative infrastructure
established to insulate the wealthy from the policy preferences of
the American majority. White grievance and a perpetually mutating
rage against kids these days, by contrast, produces no intra-party
conflict.
Both parties are cross-pressured by rich and poor constituents. For
Democrats, that’s resulted in greater caution about taxing the
wealthy while still seeking to provide benefits to the poor. For
Republicans, it has necessitated a singular focus on culture war to
rally voters whose economic interests are actively undermined by
the party.
The policy foundation for a less unequal society — one party that
ideologically supports redistribution and another party whose
constituents increasingly need it — is visible. Unfortunately, the
political foundation is rotted.
