The white-black ideological split has been a constant in American politics for decades. In the series of election year polls conducted by the American National Election Survey (ANES, a Stanford-University of Michigan polling collaboration), blacks have consistently sided with the view that “government in Washington should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living” by much higher margins than whites—sometimes by more than 2 to 1. Conversely, ANES reports that many more whites than blacks agree that “government should provide fewer services, even in areas such as health and education, in order to reduce spending.”

These general findings suggest the possibility that the political strength of voters whose convictions are perhaps best described as Social Democratic in the European sense is reaching a significant level in the United States. With effective organization and mobilization, such voters are positioned to set the agenda in the Democratic Party in the near future.

At the same time, the share of the electorate made up of the demographic group most strongly committed to a political agenda relatively favorable to the material interests of the “haves” is declining. The U.S. Census predicts that by 2050, non-Hispanic whites will no longer be in the majority. Teixeira, in a report for the liberal Center for American Progress, predicts that by 2016 “it is likely that the United States will no longer be a majority white Christian nation.”

The potential or even incipient shift in the balance of power from “haves” to “have-nots” is not purely demographic. The shift stems from a combination of economic developments, especially the army of long-term unemployed and stagnant incomes at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Just as the number of the unemployed with bleak prospects has been growing, so too has been the number of those without health insurance. From 1987 to 2008, the percentage of people without coverage grew from 12.9 to 15.4 percent; and, in hard figures, from 31.03 million to 46.34 million. This is a constituency desperately in need of help, and the only source of help for many, if not most, is the government.

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While the uninsured have been increasing absolutely and as a percentage of the total population, so too has been the percentage of the population receiving government-financed medical coverage from Medicare or Medicaid. These two programs covered 21 percent of the population in 1987, and 28.4 percent of the population in 2008.

According to the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the share of total personal income in the United States that comes from government transfer programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation, etc. – has grown rapidly over the past six decades, from 5.9 cents of every dollar in 1950, to 8.5 cents in 1970, to 11.8 cents in 1990, 12.5 cents in 2000, to 17.3 cents in 2009. In addition, according to BEA, another 9.8 cents of every dollar went, in 2009, to salaries for state, local and federal government employees, a figure that does not include costs of fringe benefits. In other words, more than a quarter of all personal income in the United States is paid for with tax dollars.