Democratic vs. Republican occupations

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Plazma Inferno!, Jul 11, 2016.

  1. Plazma Inferno! Ding Ding Ding Ding Administrator

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    Most librarians are Democrats. Most farmers are Republicans.
    As a group, doctors are in the middle, though pediatricians lean left and urologists right.
    This interesting graph giving ratios of Democrats (blue) vs. Republicans (red) among certain professions.

    http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    These patterns go back far enough to be partly self-sustaining, but: in my State the Democratic Party is actually an allied organization called the Democratic Farmer/Labor Party, usually abbreviated DFL. That is, farmers in my State were at the time of its formation leftwing, allied with Labor, despite most of them being in standard Marxist theory business owning, land owning, capitalists.

    This is anachronistic now, but at the time of formation was meaningful: private landowners - men who owned substantial, income producing property - in Continental Eurasia, were either part of or descended from the aristocracy, or members of the capitalist class that had made enough money in business to buy land from the aristocrats.

    In other words, not too long ago in most places on this planet farm owners - as opposed to farmers - were natural allies of bankers, not natural allies of factory hands. But this was not so in my State, and a few others, as the Great Depression highlighted. Some parts of America were for a long time quite unusual (in world history) in having bankers and farm owners at political odds. This is Jefferson's notion of the roots of democracy embodied in a real landscape, and it was so embodied via government policies such as the Homestead Acts and similar interferences with the otherwise inevitable economic relationship of capital and land ownership (rich people own all the land and vice versa, in free market capitalism).

    And now it's going away. America is being pulled into the mainstream of history, economically, as farms consolidate and the dispossessed move to the cities and become Labor. On top of that, the brand identification of Republicans as abolishers of slavery and the lessons of the Great Depression in the nature of moneylending have worn off (the recent Crash was prevented from affecting the new larger farmers, by farsighted capitalist influenced policy). So farmers in the old Confederacy (for one reason) and in my neighborhood as well (for another reason) have recently (last fifty years or so) gravitated toward the Republican Party, the Party of the bankers and industrialists, their natural home as landowning aristocrats.

    And a similar pattern - capital vs labor, with the Democratic Party although no longer leftwing still kind of on the side of Labor (which includes women, the largest faction of the dispossessed), and the Republican Party still running on the fumes of its former ideology and not yet eaten by its monster - is visible in those occupational breakdowns. As is the monster (oil field workers are fools to be Republican, but misogyny and racial bigotry will make fools of the best of us).
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2016
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