Robert Tulip wrote:The ethos of success through work was previously associated with the politics of the Democrats, but over recent decades this ethos has been supported more effectively by the Republicans,
I don't think that is a very good characterization of the alignments. Both Democrats and Republicans have at times been identified with small business and farmers, for example. The Democrats put forward a version friendly to labor unions, and succeeded in blaming Big Business for the plight of ordinary farmers. Only when the Republicans also joined this bandwagon in the time of Taft and Teddy Roosevelt was anything done, and that was mainly about limiting the power of corporations rather than empowering workers.
The industrial power of workers was held off by brutal suppression and by higher pay, most notably as led by Ford. The stick and the carrot. When the Great Depression hit in full force, all bets were off and labor was at last given the power to bargain collectively. At that point the nation was something like 60 percent Democrat, but Republicans yielded the issue, as well as Social Security (the government old-age pension) and made a comeback on other grounds.
Astonishingly, the Republican establishment is still trying to oppose Social Security (and its upstart cousin, Medicare) by portraying any government assistance as "sponging". That is where Ted Cruz and the "Liberty Caucus" is coming from, though they know enough not to say it explicitly.
There is a strong belief in self-reliance in American working class culture. But outside the South this was not seen as in any way limiting labor unions or de-legitimizing them. My understanding is that in the South the elites were successful in portraying labor unions as pro-black, and this combined with the independent streak of the Scots-Irish culture among the less educated to make an ethos against unions take root.
My parents make an interesting case. My father, working class to the bone, was a bus driver with a strong union. As a result we were able to move to a suburb with good schools. But my strongly Republican mother (although not so much since Reagan) never stopped believing there was something not quite legitimate about striking for higher pay. She blames union overreach for the demise of the company's high pay, but corporate takeovers and union-busting clearly played at least as strong a role.
Robert Tulip wrote: who have sought to portray the Democrats as a party for spongers. Hence the hillbilly shift.
Research recently cited by Thomas Edsall in the NYTimes shows that people are much more likely to oppose government assistance when they perceive it as going to "other" groups. Thus the Fox News axis of evil works their dog whistles relentlessly to use anecdote as "evidence" that "those other people" are the ones that government assistance is about (and of course, that "those other people" are undeserving.) It's all about the wedge. The fact that welfare benefits have gone mainly to whites from the beginning, along with the fact that it has always had a high rate of "graduation" to getting along without welfare, get conveniently swept under the rug in their construction of reality.
That said, welfare reform in the 90s was not such a terrible idea. In execution is was too rushed and not supportive enough (Northern states who actually provided transition support achieved high rates of employment for former welfare indigents). The Southern states just wanted to punish "spongers" (which, in their ideology, means anyone getting assistance and most certainly any person of color getting assistance) and they have also reduced the welfare rolls, but with less happy results.
The politics have been shaking out differently since about the time of Ross Perot and Bill Clinton's first election. Unions opposed globalization, and globalization well and truly destroyed the power of industrial unions, as it was forecast to do. But automation has played a large role, probably at least as large (though I am suspicious of the economic studies behind these conclusions) as imports, in undermining that way of life. It is easy to point to anecdotes about the jobs moving, but the numbers say machines have taken at least as many jobs.
Self-reliance now has no rewarding path to turn to. If you are going to make it by learning coding, you are at minimum going to have to move to a big city, and probably you have to move to the coast. Neither traditional Republican nor traditional Democrat policies offer any underpinnings of a self-reliant life for the Middletowns of the old industrial landscape. Even a strong turn against free trade, which would cause lots of trouble with the international economy, would not bring very many jobs back to those small towns across what used to be the Industrial Heartland.
Trump tapped into the frustration over that case, aided by eight years of the longest and deepest slump since the 30s by a long shot, but those communities will not see any improvement. The young people will move out before they are trapped in houses with falling values, and the older folks will find opioids strangely consoling.
What does self-reliance look like now? Learn Chinese. Not because they are taking over, but because filling in all the niches of interesting lifestyle options is the future of the service sector. My kids are great fans of manga and anime, for example, not because Toyotas are great cars (although they are) but because it's fun.