Democrats don’t have a working-class problem. America does.
Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to
FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.
By Dana Milbank
November 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a
Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have
lost the working class!
In 2004, we heard that
“working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting
Republican.”
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In 2016, we were told: “Democrats
once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks
have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:
“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets
off reckoning within party.”
“Why Democrats lost their
working-class coalition.”
“Is This the End of the White
Working-Class Democrat?”
This is getting tedious.
It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is
woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t
college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal
coalition dissolved — decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding
that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the
working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political
director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said
political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working
people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic
assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of
the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category — “working
class” — with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and
will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes
back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that
[Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when
corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer
notes. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote,
because Democrats emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party
structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations,
there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
They no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast
ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away
from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across
the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden
administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning
Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening
to them, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a
political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem —
but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past
two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and
income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax
enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules,
hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their
wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership,
which peaked at one-third of the workforce,
shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay
has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared,
earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed,
unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are
surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to
dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of
communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” writes
University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial
collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic
only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s,
reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the last 10 federal
elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate
or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent
party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years
later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring
wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th
century where there have been so many knife’s edge elections,” Podhorzer tells
me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine
tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to
message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it
ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that
voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of
labor unions and New-Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of
the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free-market
that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued
in his 2023 book, “Tyranny Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and
middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the
asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated
massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated
and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and
they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted
voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t
have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote,
Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points and Democrats may have actually
gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with
outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada,
Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake
— for the party and, more importantly, for the country. We are, in some ways,
back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over
workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New
Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared
economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to
relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Ahmari called for government to encourage “a labor market
in which most sectors are unionized, while workers in those few industries that
resist unionization enjoy higher minimum wages.” And this conservative thinker
waxed nostalgic for the New Dealers: “Those leaders left behind a political map
for building a better economy and a more authentically free society. They
guided us, above all, to workers’ countervailing power: the indispensable lever
for improving the lot of the asset-less and for stabilizing economies otherwise
prone to turbulence and speculative chaos. The supreme challenge today is to
forge a similar left-right consensus.”
Of course, that won’t be happening anytime soon. Trump
channels populist anger, but he directs it at migrants and foreigners instead
of corporations. The billionaire president-elect has chosen a billionaire commerce secretary,
a billionaire interior secretary and a billionaire education secretary and has
tapped the world’s wealthiest man to run his government-efficiency task force.
This oligarchy is planning to impose more of the same policies that caused
workers’ problems in the first place: extending tax breaks for the rich and
further rolling back business regulation, employment law and union rights.
As Bernie Sanders can attest, Democrats, too, have long
resisted a return to their populist roots, going back to when President Bill
Clinton signed NAFTA and his Democratic Leadership Council recruited corporate
donors to fund the party. But this moment could be different. Gallup’s latest polling shows that approval
of labor unions is at 70 percent, up from 48 percent 15 years ago, after the
financial crash. Sixty-one percent say unions mostly help the economy, up from
39 percent in 2009. The favorable impression of unions has grown at the same time
Americans’ confidence in most other institutions — business, church, the media,
the presidency, Congress — has been going the other way.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) issued a memo last
week with polling from his home state showing that 82 percent of people —
including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents — agree
that one of the biggest problems facing the country is that corporations and
economic elites hold too much power and government is doing too little about
it. “Democrats have the opportunity to call Republicans on their bluff and
prove to the American people that we are the ones on the side of the workers,”
he wrote. “But that’s only possible if we have the courage to pick fights with
powerful corporations and billionaires and fight against the status quo.”
That is a gigantic “if.”
The consumer advocate Ralph Nader, through his third-party
presidential campaigns and his hectoring, has tried for years to push the
Democrats toward a $15 minimum wage, a return to the progressive tax system of
the 1960s, a revival of private pensions and the National Labor Relations
Board, a hike in Social Security benefits paid for by higher payroll taxes on
the wealthy, and much more. But at this point, he tells me, he has no optimism
that the party can change itself: “They’ve drained it out of me.”
I understand the cynicism. For ages, Democratic leaders
have tried to have it both ways, calling for marginal improvements to the tax
code but shying away from anything that might repel the corporate interests
that are also in their coalition. But, at some point, the worsening suffering
of tens of millions of workers must convince them to take the risk.
And — who knows? — maybe if Democrats take that risk it
will free them, and all of us, from the dreary cycle of the past two decades in
which frustrated voters turn from one party to the other and then back again,
never finding the change they are seeking. And then, for the first time in
decades, maybe working people will again vote reliably Democratic, because
Democrats will have restored their working-class identity.
Or maybe such an effort will fail. But isn’t it better to
do the right thing for the country regardless of what it does to the party?
