The exit polls from the 2010 mid-term elections demonstrate the domination of the "culture war" narrative over class consciousness throughout the statistics and in both liberal and conservative politics.

One of the most alarming statistics of recent electoral history is the degree to which working class white people have voted for conservative politicians. The white majority has identified more with the ideas of white capitalists and less with the reality of those they work with everyday.

In this year's election, white voters making less than $50,000 a year voted 55 percent to 42 percent for Republicans over Democrats.

Further, an AP poll conducted before the election found white voters without a four-year college degree favored Republicans by 18 points, 58 percent to 36 percent. In 2008, exit polls indicated these same voters favored Republican congressional candidates by 11 percent. In 2006, the Republicans won these votes by 9 percent points.

Where working-class whites most likely vote with a progressive tendency is where they are members of labor unions. Since 1976, labor union households have backed Democratic congressional candidates by an average margin of 62 percent to 35 percent. However, only 17 percent of voters were members of unions this election.

People of color, and others who continue to experience oppression in our society, have primarily voted for politicians that represent more progressive ideas. This year, African American voters voted 90 percent to nine percent for Democrats, Latinos voted 64 percent to 34 percent for Democrats, and Asians voted 56 percent to 40 percent for Democrats. Women's votes were evenly split, but this may seems to be because so many progressive voters did not vote this election.  LGBTQ voters favored Democrats 68 percent to 31 percent for the Republicans.

This can be understood as a result of people, on both the left and the right, being encouraged to link their politics more and more with their specific social or cultural identity. There was only a six percent Democratic advantage coming from white voters making below $50,000 a year compared to white voters making over $50,000 a year, and a slightly larger difference between working class people of color and their wealthier counterparts (they primarily represent huge Democratic voting blocs racially).

Class consciousness plays a secondary role to other social differences in modern United States' politics, and this lack of class consciousness is now, more than ever, a major problem for the progressive movement.

Why is the culture war narrative such a factor in U.S. elections?

In part, it is because it represents the backlash against the peoples' movements of the 1960s. It was Bill O'Reilly who most explicitly revealed this in a 2006 book titled Culture Warrior. In it, he frames U.S. politics as a battle between the values of a religious U.S. majority and a small but powerful group of secular progressives. It takes little sociological and historical study to understand what he was really doing in his work was pushing religious individuals to link their religion with the pre-1960s values of both a dominant white culture and unapologetic capitalism.

This perverted narrative was seen in the polls this year, where white Protestants were convinced to vote for Republicans over Democrats 69 percent to 29 percent. This is a six percent increase in the Republicans' share of the 2008 white Protestant vote, and an 8percent increase for Republicans compared with 2006 results.

This conservative culture war frame is the primary ideological build of the modern conservative movement in the U.S. O'Reilly's book is a small part of this. The idea that "religious" values are under attack by the government is repeated both on Fox News and radio programs hosted by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others. For a deeper analysis of this, and how conservatives have purposefully smashed the Christian religion into a doctrine that coincides with their own white, capitalist values, see my previous PA article "Defeating the Ultra-Right: Know your Enemy."

Another reason the culture war narrative has become so strong is rooted in the way white voters perceive class. This perception has been molded by both the capitalists themselves as well as efforts by conservative pundits and the Republican Party.

The capitalist class began working long ago on minimizing their appearance as a distinct class. In John K. Galbraith's 1958 book The Affluent Society he noted that capitalists, especially since the presidency of FDR, shunned overt displays of wealth. After the Great Depression, news reports on the wealth of the nation's most powerful industrialists plummeted. They continue to enjoy the wealth and power they have always had, to even greater and greater degrees as disparity has increased over the past 40 years, but take care not to appear as if this is so.

The epitome of this phenomena can be seen in how Bill Gates or Steve Jobs represent themselves in public, wearing casual clothes or answering specific customer inquiries into company business directly, via email or their smart phones. This mythology runs so deep that Bill Gates is often the person used to reinforce the idea that anyone can become a multi-billion dollar capitalist tycoon if they simply have the will to do so.

And this idea is widespread. A 2000 Time/CNN poll found that 39 percent people living in the U.S. believe they are in the wealthiest one percent or soon would be. Obviously, this is an impossibility.

Where class is observed by most white people, it is observed through the conservatives' culture war frame. It is astonishing to notice the rise of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has always been focused on making people view reality through the culture war frame, during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Before the Heritage Foundation conservatives relied on groups more focused on economic policy for ideas. The National Association of Manufacturers is one such group, which now works more behind the scenes and is delegated to focusing on specific tasks, such as combating legislation focused on protecting the environment.

Conservatives have used the culture war narrative to make people believe the wealthy are all secular progressive types who, according to them, seek to destroy the culturally conservative values of the average U.S. citizen.  Key to doing this is the idea of the "latte liberal," the focus on wealthy progressive celebrities in "sinful" Hollywood, and other ideas that can be heard on talk radio or read about in Thomas Frank's excellent book What's the Matter with Kansas?

The Republican Party is in on this scheme, and plays with it to manipulate working class people. George Bush's mansion is referred to as "Crawford Ranch," he took care to appear folksy in his public appearances despite being a Yale graduate and being the member of a millionaire family his whole life. He may have worn a tie, but he was sure to put on the cowboy hat just as much.

This charade was briefly revealed only a month ago, when a PR group working for the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a casting call for an ad to attack West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. The casting call, first reported on the Politico website, stated "we are going for a 'Hicky' Blue Collar look," and asked that potential actors wear clothes that looked "beat up."

The greater progressive movement has to refuse the culture war frame, but it has thus far done so poorly.

Part of this is due to some progressives actually reacting to the culture war frame rather than refusing it as false.  It has been tempting to do so, as the frame comes from the backlash which reacted to those sections of the progressive movement that fought racism, sexism, and heteronormativity in the 1960s.  As such, the conservative culture war frame provides a perfect enemy for the progressive movement to battle.

Accepting the conservatives culture war frame, however, means that the progressive movement may agitate people who would be on their side if it were not for the frame in the first place. White, Christian people are currently under the idealistic frame's spell, thinking in terms of it to varying degrees.

The left has to shatter this frame if they want to move this country in a more progressive direction, and it can do this by emphasizing all people's right to self-determination.

The majority of the progressive movement often discusses class as it relates to other oppressive forces. This has been very important in making sure progressive groups do not reinforce gender, race, LGBTQ, and other oppressions in their own activity. This has also led people to realize how all oppressions are interrelated.

This has provided progressives with a new frame that relates class consciousness and race cognizance, that links gender discrimination and men's economic dominance, and so on.

BUT, the left also has to talk about class relations being represented as power relations as a phenomena in and of itself if it is to bring working class white people back into the progressive movement. It is not enough to talk about wealth disparity among people of different classes. It is better to talk about power differences, as this can be related to all forms of oppression.

Some of the ideas that can be most helpful in responding to the culture war frame I have already detailed in my previous article "Communists Advance the Progressive Idea."

I believe the Communist Party and the labor movement do a good job of this already.

We must keep in mind what the current relations are and move forward. The 2010 elections were a battle lost, but they by no means represent the end of the war.

Photo: Devoid of a meaningful agenda, Tea Partiers typically directed both anti-immigrant and anti-Black racially coded messages at President Obama, as this fellow aptly demonstrates. (Photo by FibonacciBlue, cc by 2.0)