[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire and Mises Blog]

An interesting economic demographic from Charles Johnson: contrary to much Democratic hand-wringing and Republican gloating, it appears that Kerry won the working-class vote, even in the red states; and the wealthier a voter was, the likelier she apparently was to vote for Bush. Degree of economic benefit from the existing system may thus be a better predictor of Bush support than fundamentalist religious convictions are (though I agree with Chris Sciabarra that the religious issues are relevant).

In other words: perhaps"it's the plutocracy, stupid!" After all, it's the economic élite who have traditionally been the chief boosters of the corporatist-imperialist state. (See, e.g., Roy Childs' Big Business and the Rise of American Statism; Walter Grinder and John Hagel's Toward a Theory of State Capitalism; Chris Sciabarra's Understanding the Global Crisis; Joseph Stromberg's Political Economy of Liberal Corporativism and The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire; and Kevin Carson's Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital.)