There are certain concepts that help you get a better grasp on the complex reality of the social and political world. When combined they can help shed light on the ever-changing present. The devastating impact that neoliberal policies had on thousands of working class towns over the past few decades is one such point of stress for understanding the 2020s. A second is the class realignment currently underway in American (and global) politics.
In brief, poor and working class voters used to to vote for the Democratic Party in the US. Globally, the poor and working classes voted for left-leaning parties. As one scaled the income and education ladder they were more likely to vote for the parties of the right. This was the case in the US as well, where voters became more Republican as they became wealthier and more educated.
This is no longer the case. In the past few elections the top ten percent of income earners have voted Democrat. In 2024 the bottom 50% of income earners voted Republican for the first time in generations, maybe ever. This is part of the rise of what Thomas Piketty has termed the Brahmin Left, i.e. the left-leaning parties, from the US to Europe, and much of the rest of the world, are now the parties of the professional classes and the right are becoming more and more the parties of the less-educated and lower-income.
This is new. Go into any Republican district today and you will hear that their grandparents and great-grandparents voted for FDR in the 1930s and 1940s.
Furthermore, this has obvious electoral reverberations: If you are the party of the professional classes, say the top third or so of income earners, how do you win the majority vote in a Presidential election? But it has other, more far-reaching cultural implications.
Democrats now dominate the professions. Universities, laboratories, hospitals, national media, publishing houses, HR departments and upper management at blue chip corporations, law offices, government bureaucracies, much of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And their perspectives, ideas, and language increasingly dominate the Democratic Party. They are the party of the successful, high-income, dual earning family.
This is the important point that mainstream Democrats and liberals have failed to grasp. It explains conservative distrust toward elites, experts, and mainstream institutions. As the Democratic Party and liberalism have become more connected to the professional class, to the point now where professional class suburbanites are arguably the base of the Democratic Party and the main site of liberalism in America, they have come to play a larger role in institutions like the media, corporate HR offices, academia, medicine, entertainment, publishing, government bureaucracy, and so on.
As these sources of information, reality claims, knowledge production, etc., have become more liberal, they have come to seem more suspect to conservatives. All the more so in an age of intense polarization. Even though the conservative view of many of these institutions as full of liberal activists primarily engaged in partisan activities is wrong, the conservative view that they are full of liberals is not wrong.
And it makes it harder and harder to convince conservatives, as well as apolitical down-and-out rural and small town working class people, that the well-off denizens of liberal institution world can be trusted. After all, these people are well-off while much of rural and small town America truly is struggling, often massively so. As these poor areas have become more Republican, they have become less trusting of mainstream institutions that they see as populated by hostile partisans. And in a more and more partisan era, we are less and less likely to grant good will to partisans of the opposite side.
I’m not endorsing the conservative critique that all important institutions are controlled by liberal activists, let alone more conspiratorial views. I align with the general leftist view that the economy, and other key institutions, are more or less run by capitalists. But as the Democratic Party has moved further and further from a working class base, and become more aligned with a professional class that has good jobs, they are having a harder time winning over working class votes. They speak a different language, they see the world differently, they have a more meritocratic and positive view of the status quo, and the world makes more sense to them (until Trump came along/save for Trumpworld). Conservatives in turn are less trusting of these mainstream institutions the more they see them dominated by liberals.
The default liberal response to these developments too often is just to lecture, scold, and condescend about expertise and reality, impotently pounding their fists that Trumpworld, especially its more down and out and conspiratorial denizens, won’t just accept the truth claims of liberal professionalism world. But this will never work.
Only a working-class centered perspective, critical of the status quo and much of the complacency (and arrogance) of the professional class, not to mention the more powerful oligarchs, will speak to and recapture working class voters.
Consider the following: mainstream liberals say “trust the science, trust the facts.” Take big Pharma, for instance. Yes, it gives us life-saving vaccines, albeit often with government involvement and cajoling. But it also gives us the absolutely devastating and ongoing opioid epidemic. Is it really a wonder that medical conspiracy theories are flourishing, especially when the epidemic hits poor, rural areas the hardest, the exact places that feel most distant from the professional world and its glittering successes?
Vaccine opposition is stupid. But professional class liberals, however well-intentioned, are the least qualified people to deliver this message. “Trust the science”, coming from well-off experts and comfortable elites, tends to sound indistinguishable from “trust the status quo.” No surprise this message doesn’t work. And you see this more broadly in much of the liberal world’s reaction to Trump, where professional class liberals are constantly flirting with turning the Democratic Party into an updated version of the mid-20th century Republican Party--well-heeled, complacent, defending the status quo, and lecturing the less well off to trust their betters. $200,000 income, whole-foods shopping people with good jobs lecturing struggling "deplorables" is a recipe for electoral loss. And I’m saying this as someone on the left.
Let this fact sink in: the poorest Congressional districts across America are all heavily Republican. The wealthiest are all heavily Democratic.
A key takeaway? To win back working class voters of all races, and turn out working class people who are apolitical or dejected, you need people from their communities to speak to them and deliver a populist economic message. Clueless outsiders can’t do it, especially not when they are focused, as the professional class so often is, on identity symbolism and policing language norms. There is a growing body of research backing up this point.