Bending Elite Opinion toward the Working Class
A fight is raging within the Democratic party between the old guard and the insurgents. It played out in a visible and ugly way during primary season. Many have forgotten that today’s old guard were once the insurgents themselves: they’re the descendants of the Democratic Leadership Council, the neoliberal Third Way/Koch Brothers wing of the party that was created during the Reagan Administration. The DLC crowd was so successful that they are now the establishment.
But voters are tired of the establishment and are demanding change, especially on the economic front. This is at the heart of the rise of economic populism. The establishment’s response is to attack it. Well, of course it is. The dictionary definition of populism is “a political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people especially against the Establishment.”
But what if it’s the insurgents, not the establishment, who have the ability to build the kind of coalition that delivers elections? That’s precisely what terrifies the establishment. New research supports the argument that economic populists have a shot at rebuilding the FDR coalition that dominated American politics for half a century. Third Way senses it - and, accordingly, has declared “war” on democratic socialism.
The Pendulum Swings
After decades of swinging to the right, the economic pendulum is swinging to the left. The swing is as inevitable as the laws of momentum. Just as the DLC abandoned New Deal principles and embraced a skeptical view of government competence, today’s Democratic upstarts are headed the other way. The closer Republicans get to their near-century-long dream of destroying the New Deal, the more Democrats are remembering why the New Deal happened in the first place.
Joe Biden and Bill Clinton were founding members of the DLC. But by the time Biden made it to the White House, FDR - not Bill Clinton - was his touchstone. Mayor Mamdani recently invoked FDR in urging Democrats to get back to their roots as champions of the working class. The difference between democratic socialism/socialism/social democracy is for the most part illusory: most people who identify with one of the three just want a government that provides them with a baseline of support so that they have a shot at maximizing their own potential.
In the midst of the debate about how to win back the working class, Professors Joan Williams and Jared Abbott are rolling out a new report called The Left’s Coalition Crisis: Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Beat It. It’s a treasure trove of analysis about what college educated people care about, what working class people care about, and how elites can align many of their goals with those of the working class. The genius of Williams & Abbott’s work is that their remedies emphasize what elites and the working class have in common, not what divides them. In many cases, it comes down to messaging around where the alignment is.
Williams and Abbott make a point that pollster G. Elliott Morris also makes: broadening the electoral base of support isn’t about moving to the center, even if a lot of pundits are well-paid to tell you so. Morris expressly makes the point that swing voters are not locked into the left and right frameworks that dominate the vocabulary of the political class. In many cases, they aren’t ideological: they’re fed up with a system that doesn’t work for them. He calls them “anti-system” voters.
If the system was designed by elites, and people are rejecting the system, then it follows that more elitism won’t do the trick.
Anti-System Voters
Williams & Abbott focus on “middle-status voters,” the cohort that has shifted rightward. They describe the group as
[the] middle 50% of Americans who … have lived through decades of deindustrialization, the offshoring of stable manufacturing jobs, and the hollowing out of once-thriving communities … leaving many in households that earn enough to get by but face real uncertainty about whether the next generation will do as well as the last.
What’s interesting is that trade is not an issue area that Williams & Abbott surveyed. But their description of “middle-status voters” makes it clear that trade policy over the past four decades - deindustrialization, offshoring, hollowing out of communities - has played a significant role in driving the shift of middle-status voters away from Democrats.
“Concerned that Democrats were souring on free trade, the Kochs sought to use [Third Way] to promote free trade to Democrats.”
Those of us who work on trade are not surprised; anger with the system over flawed trade deals has been bubbling for a long time. We aren’t the only ones who noticed: Salon reported on the Koch Brothers’ deployment of Third Way to persuade Democrats to stick with free trade anyway. The Koch brothers were “[c]oncerned that Democrats were souring on free trade, which threatened their oil importation business, [so] the Koch [Brothers] sought to use the group to promote free trade to Democrats.” When did the Koch Brothers get angsty? Way back in 2007.
Imagine if Democrats had faced up to the truth two decades ago instead of letting themselves be sucker-punched by libertarians into doing more of the same. We’d have skipped the fractious fights over the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2015 - and we’d have stripped Presidential candidate Donald Trump of one of his favorite targets in 2016.
Instead, Trump is President for a second time, and Third Way is still bragging about all the free trade stuff they’ve been getting done since 2008. Its sidekick the Progressive Policy Institute is cut from the same cloth.
In that context, it becomes much clearer how President Trump has managed to eat Democrats’ lunch on trade. He has argued relentlessly that the system is rigged against working people and that both Democrats and Republicans are to blame. (So has Bernie!) Trump has been the insurgent wing of the Republican Party on that issue. It is Trump who has invoked FDR’s “forgotten man” to appeal to the same people FDR appealed to.
What was Democrats’ response to Trump’s pledge to use tariffs to Make America Great Again? To whip out a calculator and do math. That as much as anything embodies the degree to which the party lost the FDR touch by embracing technocratic elitism as a messaging strategy. FDR didn’t win four elections by persuading people that he was a better bean counter than the other guy.
We’ve seen Republicans run the tariff play before. During the Gilded Age, they campaigned on it. Robber barons were making money hand over fist thanks to the tariffs; when workers organized to demand their fair share, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers - Republicans - responded with violence. Working class voters supported the Republican Party anyway. Why?
Because tariffs were not a number: they were a message. The message was: “I care about your job, and I’ll protect it.”
“Tariffs were not a number: they were a message.”
Democrats need to get out of their technocratic bubble and confront reality. In 2024, voters both wanted prices to come down and supported tariffs. That seems like a contradiction until you stop thinking of tariffs as a math assignment and instead recognize that people are trying to tell you something.
They’re telling you the system sucks. The rules of the rules-based trade order were designed to reward capital at the expense of labor. Workers know it, elites don’t want to know it, and so the latter gaslight the former, who then vote for the tariff guy - if they vote at all.
On that point, exasperation with a system that has failed them might also be why turnout among lower income voters is so low. Daniel Laurison, a sociologist at Swarthmore University, provides us with data on just how many stay home from the polls – and why. He points out that it isn’t apathy: it’s a lack of faith that government will solve the problems plaguing their communities.
Affordability
Notwithstanding the 2024 election results, establishment Democrats have once again fallen into the trap of conflating affordability and prices. Larry Summers, avatar of neoliberal economics, paved the way days before his most recent fall from grace. Summers’ worldview continues to lead the establishment astray, as it has for decades.
“While economic issues are a high priority for college-educated liberals, they focus chiefly on costs. Working-class people do, too, but they also focus on the other side of the ‘affordability’ equation: jobs, wages, and working conditions.”
This tack also aligns with a new Koch initiative: they’re back at it, launching a multi-million dollar effort to “promote the benefits of free trade and opposing tariffs.” Meanwhile, their buddies over at Third Way are preparing for what they call the “next war” - not a hot war with Iran or Greenland, nor a policy war with the current Administration, mind you, but a war … on democratic socialism. Priorities!
Meanwhile, elite Democrats continue to insist that getting rid of tariffs will net them a bunch of working class votes. Yet in the midst of the 2024 election where inflation was a key issue, Trump’s pro-tariff message delivered him not just the electoral college, but the popular vote, too.
Williams & Abbott point out something the Mamdanis of the world already understand: for the working class, affordability is about prices and wages. They write that “[w]hile economic issues are a high priority for college-educated liberals, they focus chiefly on costs. Working-class people do, too, but they also focus on the other side of the ‘affordability’ equation: jobs, wages, and working conditions.
That should be a winner for the Democrats. Which party focuses on jobs, wages, and working conditions? Not the union-busting party of neo-robber barons, that’s for sure. The party of the New Deal? Yup.
As obvious as it should be, when it comes to trade, the establishment is repeating the mistake of focusing only costs, and not the other side of the affordability equation – wages.
Elites don’t want to accept that the free trade of the 1990s correlates to the erosion of organized labor, labor’s declining share of income, and the failure of wages to keep up with productivity. Even the Financial Times is writing about labor’s declining share of income. As far back as 2007, the Koch Brothers saw what was happening and paid to get Democrats to double down anyway. Succesfully.
Wake up!
Condescension
A cross-cutting concern in the Williams & Abbott report is that elites treat working class people with condescension. They highlight one of my own pet peeves: the claim that people are “voting against their interest.” It’s a smug, “we know what’s best for you” attitude that of course alienates the very people you’re supposedly trying to recruit to your cause.
According to Williams & Abbott’s research, there’s a gulf between working class values and those of elites. Working class priorities center on family and community, hard work, and following the rules. Elite priorities, like defending democracy, don’t land the same way:
working class Americans feel (with good reason) that democracy has failed them: inequality predicts low trust, including low trust institutions. The appropriate response is to secure a better future for all Americans, not belittle the victims of economic globalization.
This was true in … 1932, which is why FDR felt his job was to fend off fascism from the right and communism from the left. That was the original third way! Not communism, and not authoritarianism. Totalitarian forms of governments, communism and fascism were appealing to middle-status voters victimized by the excesses of Darwinian capitalism. So FDR pursued a version of capitalism that wasn’t Darwinian.
It’s now well-known that the China Shock had cascading adverse effects for communities, especially in the Midwest; the opioid crisis and Purdue Pharma’s government capture just reinforce hostility to the system.
Elites for years dismissed offshoring as the problem of lazy American workers who can’t compete (Keynes attacked a similar canard during the British debate over whether to rejoin the gold standard). But a lot of workers know what the rules are here at home, they know what the rules are overseas, and they don’t think the system is fair. They’re happy to work hard and compete - if we’re all playing by the same rules.
Climate, Energy, and Jobs
The gap between elite and working class support for climate initiatives is one of the largest that Williams & Abbot uncovered. But more than three-fourths of both groups support expanding solar and wind. According to the report, the answer is to change “away from attacks on fossil fuels to focus instead on lower energy costs, good blue-collar jobs, and rebuilding American industry.”
This remedy will only grow more salient as the price shocks of the Iran War continue to make their way through the system. It is true that the clean economy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act were an immediate target of the Right, and that at first blush would seem to contradict Williams & Abbott’s conclusion. But upon closer examination, the IRA experience bolsters what Williams & Abbott are saying. Center-right friends have told me that the IRA wasn’t as durable as CHIPS because a lot of the marketing focused on climate. These same friends see an opportunity to do something on energy diversification and industrial policy. Unlike the Biden Administration, which had an industrial policy that was designed to expand renewables, the current Administration is paying investors to not invest in renewables.
As energy prices mount, a renewed emphasis on clean economy industrial policy has the potential to deliver on both sides of the affordability equation: prices and wages.
Our Experience in Office
In office, we made a conscious effort to travel to communities and to meet with people who don’t have access to the corridors of DC power. We know trade can be an intimidating and wonky subject – and certainly there are ivory-tower economists out there who would like to keep it that way – so our approach was simply to ask people what they wanted to talk about.
These conversations were profound, funny, and sometimes emotional. One manufacturer explained that for some of his workers, their job was the only source of stability in their life. They lamented the destruction of their communities. Elites like to say the decline of manufacturing is due to automation more than trade, but not only is that at odds with supply chain shortages resulting from China’s lengthy pandemic shutdowns, it’s at odds with what you see when you take the time to visit some of these devastated places. A lot of these jobs haven’t been replaced by robots. They’ve been offshored.
Walking into these spaces, we could feel the lack of trust. Some of the people we met with had not voted for our boss. Some of them were suspicious of anyone visiting from the Beltway. None of it fazed us: we were not there to sell anything. We were there to listen.
Even today, I hear think tank types talk about touring the country to explain to people why trade is good for them. No doubt they’ll whip out their calculators and spreadsheets and whiteboards and prove it, dammit! This is, of course, exactly the wrong thing to do. It reinforces what Williams & Abbott are telling us: we think people don’t know what’s good for them, and a little more information from elites will do the trick. Good luck with that.
What Williams, Abbott, Morris, and Laurison are explaining – with data – is consistent with our own anecdata from visits around the country. As a government, we have made choices for the last four decades that have hurt working people. We have decided that we don’t need to respect the opinions of those who don’t go to college. We believe we know what’s best for people who are living in circumstances fundamentally different from our own. All of this, as those us of us who are college-educated have been at significantly lower risk of having our jobs offshored.
What of AI?
Now comes artificial intelligence, which threatens to do to white-collar jobs what flawed trade policy did to blue-collar jobs. The Williams & Abbott report doesn’t cover AI, but the gulf is there too. The tech titans are promising working class people that they’ll benefit from AI at the expense of college-educated workers. Whether that’s true or not, white collar workers are increasingly sharing the economic anxiety of their blue collar counterparts.
Which is why today’s insurgency is going in the opposite direction of Third Way. Third Was is the establishment, now. Today’s insurgency is coming from a growing number of people who think the system is rigged and want to unrig it. Of course reactionary centrists are desperate to persuade people that economic populism won’t win back the working class. Now they’re arguing that the people driving the leftward push in Democratic primaries are college-educated, not working class. But that’s exactly the point. Many of the working class voters who share the sentiment bailed on the party a long time ago. A lot of them don’t bother voting in Democratic primaries. So if those who remain are voting for economic reform, then there’s a chance to form a coalition of white-collar and blue collar workers.
In other words, the alignment Williams & Abbott are talking about is there for the taking.
Are Democrats going to take it?