Republican “populists” are on the wrong side of this fight. Photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP/Shutterstock For many left-wing pundits, America’s partisan divide in 2021 is defined by its lack of a strong material basis . After all, a voter’s income level tells you less about her political allegiances today than it has for most of our nation’s modern history . In 2020, some of the wealthiest Zip Codes in the United States backed the party of organized labor by a landslide margin, while some of the poorest broke overwhelmingly for the party of libertarian billionaires. The ties that bind blue America’s tech entrepreneurs to its nonwhite gig workers — or red America’s oil barons to its white rural poor — are those of culture , not economics. Democrats stand for a multiethnic conception of American identity, secularism, cosmopolitanism, racial justice, and gender equality; Republicans, for a normatively white and Christian America, the patriarchal family, and zero-sum nationalism. … [Read more...] about The $15 Minimum-Wage Debate Clarifies the Partisan Economic Divide
