[quote FifteenToes]@ChestnutStuffing
You know, what you wrote there is a commonly accepted trope - that politics is nothing more complicated than everybody voting for their own self interest. But in this case I honestly think you're wrong.
I can survive a Tory government, and I can survive Brexit. I'm not wealthy by a long way, but I'm nearing retirement, own my house and have enough in pensions etc. to make it work. As a property owning pensioner, I'll be among the LAST demographic that the Tories screw over. It'll be OK.
I vote Labour, and I voted Remain, because I don't WANT to live in a society where life is a question of closing myself up inside my own little world with the people I know and satisfying myself that I personally will be OK, while homeless people are freezing to death on the streets and poor people are dying avoidable deaths due to an underfended NHS. I want to be able to face any group of people that I come across in various aspects of my life and know that the society I work in, pay taxes and contribute to, gives them all a fair chance to make a decent life for themselves. Sure, some will be luckier than others, some more talented. Some will become millionaires and some not. I'm OK with that, I just don't want them to starve, freeze, have to work horrendous jobs with awful pay and conditions, or now be able to get a decent education for their kids.
These are my values, and with some variation of degree and detail they're the values of most Labour supporters I know. People take the piss out of middle class socialists like Corbyn because they've never been poor so don't really know what it's like to be working class, but what do you want them to do? They can do their best to contribute to a program intended to implement values of equality and universal respect that transcend class, or they can fuck off and join the capitalists, put their energy into looking after their own situation and leave the working poor to their own devices. Which would you prefer?
I've always looked at the USA and thought "Christ, thank God I don't live there". Not because I'd be poor, but because I don't want to live in a society where poor people get no healthcare and simply die instead. I don't want to live somewhere that unskilled workers get two weeks holiday a year, crap conditions and noone to argue their corner.
Is this what you mean by "middle class values"? Is it specifically middle class to care about other people and not want to see them freeze and starve and die? Is it specifically middle class to want to see everyone get the education they need to make the most of their talents and then contribute to society with them? OK then. But what's the alternative? What would you like the middle class to do instead?
Everyone understands that some of the working class vote Tory because they think the Tories will represent their interests. The problem is not that, it's that in most respects they're really just doing that based on feelz, and they're almost certainly wrong. That's not based on bigotry or superiority or anything else, it's based on analysis, history and the facts not adding up.
Honestly I'm not sure how useful class-based analysis is at this point. People tend to think, and vote, in terms of maximising individual liberty to make and keep wealth, or in terms of giving the government power to control some aspects of the economy, redistribute wealth and minimise some of the effects of inequality. With a lot of obvious exception and side players, the former tend to vote Tory and the latter Labour. Both types of people exist in all classes.
The thing is: Everyone knows that the second program is going to be detrimental to the economic self interest of the rich. They should, equally, know that the first is going to be detrimental to the economic self interest of the poor, but a whole industry of lies and obfuscation conceals that fact.[/quote]
Actually I said their interests and their values.
And yes, a state with good social welfare costs nice middle class people money, and they are supporting those with less with their taxes, etc, the fact is that the kinds of policies that social democratic parties favour tend to be very good for the middle classes. Both economically and in terms of the things they see as important.
If large numbers of people who are in a different sector, or a different part of the country, or a different age group, see things differently, there is almost certainly a reason for that. They are not less likely to care for others than the urban, university educated middle classes. They are also more aware of how their own livelihoods and communities have been affected by different kinds of policies, they have views on what makes a good life and how they want to live.
There is a reason that the modern left has so overwhelmingly embraced identity politics, and it is because it allows them to continue to talk about equality and justice without ever doing one thing that is a threat to global capitalism. Global capitalism is quite happy to be blind to all kinds of social and racial and sexual categories, so long as it continues to push wealth to the top.
Traditional leftist politics focused on viable local economies doing dignified work for fair pay, as well as state funded things like schools and health care. Which is why they were not typically for free trade or movement of labour. Right now, conservatives thinkers are talking about these things - within the right there is some real division on these questions, but it is on the table increasingly on the conservative side, and even political parties are giving at least lip service to those ideas.
The left isn't, unless you go so far left you are an old-school communist, which doesn't appeal to many. In fact they are repudiating such discussions with a fair bit of bile. And they continue to push ID politics and critical race theory which are both seen increasingly as vectors to avoid the real issues.