The “Emerging Democratic Majority”: New Class Divisions and the Meritocratic Left Free

Abstract

Since 2016, there has been a renewed debate among scholars over the definition of postindustrial class divisions (especially with respect to education and occupation) and their relationship to the growth of populism. Similar disputes have emerged among elites within and between major parties in multiple Western democracies. On the left and right, party factions increasingly divide over the preferred social bases of their coalitions and how to adapt the party’s rhetoric or policies to capture them. In the United States, the Republican Party is divided between candidates eager to expand on growing support from traditionally Democratic, non-college-educated workers attracted by Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and those who wish to restore the party’s earlier focus on so-called fiscal conservatism—probusiness, free market–oriented policies. Similarly, since 2020, figures with ties to the Democratic Party have been debating what role progressive, college-educated voters should have on the party’s identity and political future, or whether the party needs to reorient itself to recapture non-college-educated workers moving toward the Republicans. The ideological tendencies, identified by Democratic strategists with college-educated voters, have shaped the party’s response to worsening social and economic conditions among their former, working-class base. Specifically, meritocracy became more central to Democrats’ framing of economic decline as the party embraced more neoliberal policies on trade and the “New Economy.” These trends on the Democratic side help clarify the terms on which right-wing populists are garnering increased support from a multiracial cohort of non-college-educated voters.

Since the 1970s, education has gradually replaced income as the strongest predictor of party support in American politics (Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty 2021a: 1–3, 114). To some, such as Thomas Piketty, the reorientation toward education as the central cleavage confirms the view that class has declined in relevance as an indicator of political alignment. While Piketty refers to the decreasing role of income in shaping party support, framing this shift as a “class dealignment” can obscure how educational attainment itself has become a more significant marker of class status (Karp 2023). This is clear not only in income differences but also in other sharp material disparities between those with or without a college degree (Klein and Pettis 2020: 211). A multidimensional view—which identifies class based on the composition and volume of cultural, social, and economic capital—provides a more effective tool of analysis. This is not only because it accounts for significant components of how class functions in a postindustrial economy but also because factions within both major parties have discussed (and acted on) a definition of class understood in similar terms, especially in respect to education. The class character of this educational divide is apparent in US politics and is clearest where increased rates of support from the college-educated correlate to shifts in the most affluent parts of the country toward the Democrats (Karp 2023). In fact, in 2020, the Democrats became the first center-left party in any Western democracy to do just as well with the top 10 percent of the highest income voters as they did with the bottom 90 percent (Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, Piketty 2021a).

In this sense, the new educational polarization between the parties represents not a shift away from class but rather the ways education itself has become more central to how class is constituted in advanced, postindustrial economies. Industrial-era definitions of class are based primarily on divisions between those who sell their labor for a wage (workers) and those who are dependent on the purchase of labor or investments in industry (capitalists). But in the globalized economy, manual labor is largely outsourced or automated, and education shapes new socioeconomic divisions between so-called blue-collar workers and professionals. The former now compete in a much wider labor market, while the latter rely on specialized knowledge to extract income from cognitive and creative work. Instead of a single working class, class fractions are reflected in these contrasting occupational roles and respective social conditions. Divergent outcomes between the educated and the rest are largely affected by economic and social policies pursued by both parties since the 1970s, which have left vast portions of the workforce underemployed in a low-investment, consumption-based economy (Klein and Pettis 2020: 213–20). This trend reflects major structural changes in these developed, capitalist states—specifically, the international integration of industrial economies into global markets, and a subsequent transitions toward a “New Economy” based on the creation, analysis, and dissemination of “information” or “knowledge” (Giddens 2001). Consequently, the divide between those who participate in and benefit from the new, globalized, information economy (usually requiring a degree) and those “left behind” is defined by more than just income (Sandel 2020: 17–30). Furthermore, as the college-educated grow dominant in the “symbolic” industries such as the media, the arts, and academia, they rely on specific social and cultural resources to protect access to these privileged positions, maintaining their ability to extract an income from their educational status. The consequence is a growing class division that, while economic at its base, is also expressed in cultural terms, because of the function of nonmaterial assets in providing opportunities for advancement into the relatively well-paid, white-collar sectors.

Pierre Bourdieu provides a useful set of tools for theoretically clarifying the divisions between these new class fractions. His work emphasizes that, as economies move toward more diverse occupational roles, the conventional class definitions of proletariat and bourgeoisie are fragmented by immaterial assets such as cultural knowledge and social connection, which he theorizes under the term “distinction” (Bourdieu 1979: 50). Through this lens, workers and capitalists are divided into intraclass fractions, based on the volume and mix of their specific kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural). As Bourdieu points out, the value of symbolic assets are almost always dependent on their scarcity or inaccessibility, incentivizing those rich in cultural capital to protect their status by reproducing the distance between their own tastes, knowledge, and practices from those of the average person. In our so-called information economy, education (and the cultural capital it provides) acts as a sorting mechanism that regulates access to participation in many industries, especially those closer to the production of ideas or narrative (116, 222). This is apparent in the ways that workers in highly paid, credentialed professions guard the translation of cultural capital to their children as a means for socially reproducing their class status, given that (unlike economic assets) a degree or professional position cannot be directly inherited (Reeves 2017: 60–69).

This also helps explain how cultural antagonisms between the two class fractions are shaped. In Bourdieu’s (1979: 227) words, “Because the distinctive power of cultural possessions and practices . . . tends to decline with the growth in the absolute number of people able to appropriate them, the profits of distinction would wither away if the field of production of cultural goods . . . did not endlessly supply new goods or new ways of using the same goods.” Thus, the professionals’ struggle to reproduce the scarcity of cultural capital incentivizes adversarial stances toward the tastes and practices of the noneducated, creating a feedback loop of cultural conflict between those eager to maintain the value of their cultural status and those excluded from this “distinguished” realm. These dynamics are evident in the so-called culture wars that have emerged throughout the West since the early 2010s. In “global cities”—hubs of investment where white-collar employment is concentrated—participation in the “new economy” is often tied not only to formal credentials but also to expressions of class-specific cultural and political tastes, such as investment in cosmopolitanism and bohemian affectations (Brooks 2000). On the other side, those in the so-called hinterlands express a parallel, oppositional taste through a conspicuous rejection of the professionals’ cultural sensibilities, showing attachment to national citizenship and, in some cases, racial, religious, or ethnic chauvinism. In Bourdieu’s terms, right thinking and good taste among those rich in cultural capital are based on the “negation” of popular preferences. For something to be good, something else must be defined as bad, and quality in this dynamic is determined by the limits on its obtainability. Thus, those excluded from good taste by this process of distinguishing what is refined from what is popular are necessarily rendered “vulgar” relative to those who frame their own preferences as reflecting virtue and superiority. This extends class beyond mere income differences into subtle lifestyle habits that mark one’s status, such as one’s diet, TV/film viewing habits, uses of slang, clothing, and even tone of voice (Bourdieu 1979: 183, 224; Wane 2015). The noneducated, thus, not only are left materially poorer and politically less powerful but also are culturally humiliated.

If one accounts for these connections between the material and cultural dimensions of class in the postindustrial context, the educational reversal between the parties is revealed to be a class realignment, not only in purely economic terms but in the related areas of cultural power and social esteem. The growing ideological divergence between the parties reflects the conflict between these class fractions, for as the educated professionals come to represent the typical Democratic voter, noneducated, working-class resentment and distrust toward the party intensifies. Furthermore, there is a relationship between the cultural effects of these class divisions and the seeming inability of the Left to construct a narrative of common obligation between citizens capable of contesting right-wing populists. The decline of neoliberalism’s legitimacy should be a great opportunity for the Left to reopen debates about major principles of how developed economies function. Instead, that opportunity is being seized by Donald Trump and similar right-wing populists. I argue that this is a direct by-product of the political and cultural role the educated have taken on the center left, and in particular, their growing centrality in the Democratic Party’s coalition. The influence this class fraction exerts over left-wing politics, and the drive for “distinction” necessary for membership in that educated class, undermines attempts to democratically resolve the major challenges facing postindustrial states at the end of neoliberal hegemony (Gerstle 2022: 268–93). It puts an implicit limit on the popularization of a left platform, giving greater authority to Trumpism, whose advocates can then claim to exclusively represent a majoritarian class interest. In addition, those in the less-educated class fraction are likely to be motivated by a sense of resentment toward a progressive, educated fraction whose left-wing political identity is seen, implicitly, as a statement of cultural and moral superiority.

Sympathetic critics of the Democratic Party (in both popular and intra-elite discourse) often acknowledge these circumstances but characterize the party as a victim of conditions beyond their control. In these framings, Democrats are beholden to broader structural forces that are reshaping politics and the economy or are strategically incompetent. They want to maintain/rebuild their support with working-class voters, or so it goes, but have allowed themselves to be characterized as a professional-class party (Maher 2019; Reich 2020; Teixeira and Halpin 2017). These critiques provide catharsis for critics of growing inequality who want the Democrats to live up to their New Deal legacy or believe Democrats are still representatives of the working class in policy terms, and who blame ignorant workers for “voting against their interests” (Madrick 2020; Plutzer and Berkman 2018). But this implicit faith in the party’s intentions leads many to misunderstand the long-term political goals of major Democratic factions and thus to fail to recognize the strategic logic underlying loss of support from the non-college-educated working class. Close inspection of discourse among key party figures reveals that, rather than an accident or failure, the defection of the working class from the party is by-product of deliberate choices made in a long-term effort to reorient away from the New Deal coalition. Democratic elites, with this long-term goal in mind, have not “failed” to reach working-class voters but have intentionally deemphasized them in their messaging and policy priorities.

If the party’s ultimate goal was to achieve a large governing majority with which they could enact major socioeconomic reforms that challenged the current concentration of wealth, then the professional-class strategy poses major obstacles. Even as college enrollments surged in the 1990s through the 2010s, those with a four-year college degree still only represent roughly 38 percent of the total population (Schaefer 2022). But one must consider the relationship between the party’s path to electoral power and their preferred policies when in government. If the party intends to claim the mantle of center-left opposition to inequality while also promising wealthy donors that “nothing [will] fundamentally change,” then educated professionals are, potentially, a more politically useful base (Derysh 2019). This strategic reasoning around class and the party’s ideological direction is not hypothetical but has been a regular feature in party discourse for the last fifty years. Key intellectual voices such as Lanny J. Davis, Ruy Teixeira, Al From, Will Marshall, and Stanley Greenberg, among many others, saw a new group of affluent, white-collar professionals as the core constituency around which this new coalition would develop. Specifically, they believed that college-educated voters’ relative insulation from deindustrialization and their ideological investment in individual merit would allow the party to construct a coalition built around a postmaterial form of progressivism that defined social injustice in implicitly neoliberal terms, and from which the sort of working-class interests and large-scale projects that animated the New Deal order would be largely excluded.

These figures contributed to an emergent strategic view in the party that, by invoking moral-meritocratic narratives preferred by educated liberals, they could politically manage dissent over the living standards driven down by globalization and related neoliberal policies. In this sense, it is not that college-educated voters have driven Democratic policy but rather that in a political landscape where the governing party’s goal is to ease the public into an “age of diminished expectations,” the professionals offer a more reliable source of electoral support and legitimacy (Krugman 1995). Tracing the history of this discourse clarifies how new social cleavages inherent to the postindustrial order have been integrated into the major parties’ respective public philosophies and policy agendas. To do so, the following section will present key examples of intraparty discourse, foregrounding the effects of postindustrial class divides on Democratic strategy, with a focus on the relationship between: (1) the emergence of new class divisions; (2) the normative preferences and political goals held by the party elite; (3) how they strategically interpreted the educated as instrumental in the pursuit of these objectives; and (4) the growing defection of non-college-educated workers from the party.

The “Emerging Democratic Majority” from 1972 to 2024

Looking for a “New Politics”

The shifting emphasis and character of the party’s position on class has been affected most by the structural challenges to the postwar economy toward a neoliberal model (Gerstle 2022). Threats to the broader political-economic system underlie the breakdown in ideological consensus within the party between redistributive labor politics and liberalism. Since then, single-party control has been narrow and brief, reflecting a deeper challenge (for both parties) under the terms of the new, global capitalism, to cohere a new public philosophy able to motivate voters and consolidate enduring majorities (Muirhead and Tulis 2020). These obstacles to long-lasting control, and thus meaningful reform, are in part a result of the disciplining effects of market integration on democratic politics in the United States (Streeck 2016: 75).

By the late 1960s, waning postwar growth put greater demands on democratic states in the developed world (from capital and financial interests) to lower barriers to global labor and trade arbitrage. Globalization had two key effects on the political dynamics implicit to the earlier postwar system. First, it weakened the power of labor by decentralizing production, undermining the mass-membership model of the largest and most influential unions in the Democratic coalition (Cowie 2010: 12, 14, 45, 361; Sugrue 2014: 148–52). Second, it provided a legitimation narrative that presented the deindustrializing effects of trade as “a natural evolutionary process unstoppable by political means.” For some Democrats, this helped justify a new, assumed division between economic policy and social demands based on the supposed limits of the state to direct or alter the global market (Streeck 2016: 22). As pressure grew from the profit-dependent classes to prioritize growth and control inflation at the expense of social spending and wages, the Democrats were faced with an irreconcilable conflict implicit to the New Deal class settlement they oversaw, which they believed could be resolved politically by creating a nonredistributive coalition of educated workers.

The class differences driving dynamics between the parties can be traced back to this transition point, away from industrial capitalism to a “New Economy.” While the “New Deal order” relied on state management of domestically bound industry, the goal of this reorientation was to dissolve the leverage of domestic labor and maximize returns on investment—or, as Jack Welch is reported to have said in 1998, to put “every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy” (Meyerson 2011). As Welch’s comments capture, globalization was and continues to be a mission for greater labor flexibility, built around limiting the state’s capacity to shape the market. In Wolfgang Streeck’s (2018) words, “neoliberalism, and the globalization that underlies it, fundamentally changed the politics of capitalist democracies,” forcing parties of both center left and right to embrace “politically unmanaged international markets as a precondition to which national politics and individual lives had to adapt.” These parties, unable to fulfill demands tied to the postwar consensus without fundamentally altering the state’s relationship to the market, tried to form new bases of political support. In the United States, this had the greatest effect on the Democratic Party, because the postwar order had been so fundamentally shaped by the New Deal system they had successfully created. The growing tension between “class-based,” redistributive politics and a new cohort of business-aligned Democrats (dubbed “Atari Democrats”) contributed to growing support in the party for a range of new narratives, aimed at a different coalition. As manufacturing and other unionized, blue-collar industries shrank and unions grew weaker, party strategists associated with this Atari faction argued the party should focus their energies on capturing support from “well-to-do liberal reformers” (Edsall 1989).

These shifts were reflected in George McGovern’s successful 1972 bid for the Democratic nomination. McGovern himself does not look like a neoliberal by today’s standards. He publicly endorsed expanding Medicare and increasing Social Security benefits and advocated for a minimum wage increase indexed to inflation and a guaranteed jobs program for the unemployed. But his political strategy was premised on eschewing the central role of organized labor. McGovern targeted educated workers specifically, advocating for a “peace economy” that combined appeals to the professionals’ latent antimilitarism with infrastructure and investment policies that would “guarantee a bright future” for technology and scientific workers (Geismer 2015: 149). During the general election, McGovern was the first postwar Democratic presidential candidate to achieve higher margins with college-educated voters than noneducated workers (Piketty 2018: 112). McGovern forged a coalition out of highly educated engineers, scientists, and academics by appealing directly to “issue-oriented” liberalism—while also circumventing much of the old Democratic, union-based party infrastructure. While not all of his proposals were explicitly “pro-market,” this shift in strategic emphasis set a precedent that would have longer-term effects on the policy priorities in the party. For even while he maintained support from blue-collar workers in California and parts of the Northeast, McGovern’s platform was expressly aligned with professional-class politics, in respect to its social base and organizational character. Instead of relying on typical New Deal patronage, McGovern tied himself conspicuously to a middle-class-centric, cultural, and social liberalism. As such, his campaign was fixed on “the huge academic-research complexes” around Boston rather than the declining urban-industrial centers. This election demonstrated a potential reorientation in Democratic politics (culturally, economically, and geographically) around what McGovern called “a new center of the Democratic Party” (Geismer 2015: 149).

While McGovern failed spectacularly in 1972—winning only Massachusetts and Washington, DC—suburban, educated professionals would continue to exert greater influence over the Democratic Party. This was in part a response to the efficacy of Nixon’s “silent majority” strategy at attracting working-class voters, including significant nonwhite support, on the basis of cultural appeals and a thawing of the Republicans’ relations with organized labor (Davis 1974: 192; Johnson 2015). As the labor segment of the Democrats’ postwar redistributive coalition became weaker in opposition to this “class aware” Republican strategy, support from these newly dominant, liberal, educated voters offered a potential alternative (Davis 1974: 127). The educated workers were independent of unions and relatively advantaged by the postindustrial model. This made them receptive to the individualist, meritocratic appeals of a neoliberal public philosophy and thus a more dependable voting bloc in the face of structural challenges to redistributive politics. As such, the educated seemed to be the key to an electoral coalition through which Democrats could maintain their power as they lost working-class support (Streeck 2016: 78). Lanny J. Davis, the former national director of youth for Edmund Muskie’s failed nomination campaign and later a key adviser to Bill Clinton, came to similar conclusions. At a time when Democrats were reeling from their 1972 defeat, Davis (1974: 220) argued in The Emerging Democratic Majority that the path to enduring power lay not in an exact restoration of the New Deal coalition but in strengthening the party’s growing support with formerly Republican, educated voters. His contention is that, rather than a failure for the Democrats, McGovern’s constituency represented a model for the future. His work was an early indication of a shift in priority toward professionals within the party, which grew more explicitly into a rejection of New Deal politics under the Atari Democrats by the 1980s (Frank 2016: 52).

One of the central elements of Davis’s (1974) analysis is that New Politics Democrats should capture more culturally liberal, former Republicans by consolidating the party’s image as the defenders of civil rights. It is crucial to note that these divides within the party over race between New Deal, mostly labor-aligned, and New Politics factions were not a question of either including or rejecting racial justice as a political aim but a matter of intra-left, ideological conflict over the strategic basis and ideological definition of reform (Fong 2023). Although historical accounts of the civil rights movement’s effect on the Democratic Party regularly emphasize the recalcitrant conservatism of white southerners, this account risks obfuscating how conflict over the substance of racial politics among activists and the older party establishment shaped this transition. This is especially relevant in respect to debates over the role of organized labor and whether/how the movement should expand its political goals beyond racial issues. Earlier civil rights activism, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr.—tied closely to organized labor through Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph—had regularly invoked broad, universalist ambitions that centered class in ways that were compatible with major features of the New Deal’s public philosophy (Cowie 2010: 267; T. Reed 2020: 44). This was clearest in the Poor People’s Campaign, a follow-up to earlier efforts that was meant to shift the movement’s energy from race-based issues exclusively to a more general economic platform. In the 1970s, however, there were fierce conflicts between labor-oriented civil rights leaders, such as Rustin, and “the New Politics liberals” (Social Democrats USA 1973). As the base of the party became more represented by professionals, the target audience for progressive social appeals shifted significantly, sidelining labor-aligned advocates of racial justice.

Advocacy for this new, progressive politics focused more explicitly on social injustice in terms of racial disparity and, thus, contested inequality in implicitly meritocratic terms that limited the ability to build a class-based coalition (Michaels 2020). Whereas the welfare politics of the New Deal and Great Society gave emphasis and benefits to workers, through appeals to general collective interests, professionals often qualified the necessity of racial reform on the basis that white Americans enjoyed “unearned privileges.” Through this lens, racially blind, worker-centered agendas gave undeserved preference to individuals who not only lacked sufficient meritocratic achievement but whose social advantages relative to exceptionally marginal groups disqualified them from expressing legitimate grievance. Efforts to realize racial justice through broad, New Deal–style programs (such as the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act) lost ground as social activism became more dominated by these professional-class views of race (Cowie 2010: 262). Post-McGovern Democratic discourse, from Davis and the Atari Democrats, would adopt the same lens, implying that realizing “progress” on social issues meant abandoning the earlier prioritization of working-class constituencies as a prerequisite. Thus, the “new politics” sought to reconcile racial justice with meritocracy and neoliberalism (A. Reed 2022: 30–31). This new coalition offered the Democrats a path to electoral power that did not interfere with the most significant structural features of the emerging globalized market, and thus it would help the party negotiate the “distributional conflict” between the industrial working class and the profit-dependent interests. The focus on educated voters compounded the Democrats’ loss of working-class support, who increasingly perceived the party as aligned with student activists rather than its traditional labor base. There were also growing ideological gulfs over what a “good society” looked like between the class fractions, as educated liberals embraced a countercultural ethos centered on individual freedom while rejecting key features of the New Deal’s social settlement. To many who identified with the “New Left,” unions, the federal government, and private corporations were often seen as interchangeable pieces of a “system” that limited human flourishing (Gerstle 2022: 99–100). Through this lens, the economic stability and prosperity offered by the New Deal order was increasingly seen to be at odds with an alternative vision that emphasized self-fulfillment and authenticity rather than material security.

While this orientation away from the New Deal coalition was not absolute—nor was Davis (1974: 207) himself uncritical of the New Politics liberals’ views of the working class—the 1970s marked the beginning of a longer-term intellectual development in the party. The professional-aligned, post–New Deal tendency would grow more dominant over time, gradually pushing the party toward a more open conflict over its political commitments to certain class-based policies and the underlying principles of the New Deal Order. A key aspect of this new rift was captured in a 1981 interview given by former Carter adviser Alfred Kahn, who, when explaining the administration’s efforts to implement economic reforms, admitted, “I’d love the teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. . . . I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers . . . insulated from competition can increase their wages . . . without regard to their merit or to what a free market would do, and in doing so exploit other workers” (Miller Center 1981, quoted in Frank 2016: 54). According to this more hardline New Politics narrative, unions were interest groups, seeking unfair advantages at the expense of “other [supposedly more deserving] workers.” Prosperity and security should be awarded on merit to maximize the efficiency and innovation of a dynamic free market. Their growing economic insecurity throughout the 1970s, then, was a consequence not of inherent structural conflicts between classes but of their lack of merit. It was actually a sign, according to Kahn’s logic, that the economy was rewarding the “right” people, enriching the meritocratic educated class and disciplining the industrial holdovers, who needed to learn to abide by the rules and meet market demands. By these terms, the workers’ attachment to the older industrial economy and their cultural values were related; in the eyes of a class defined by meritocratic achievement and self-conscious, personal morality, the archetypical New Deal constituency—the idea of “common people” with common interests—was not only an anachronism but an affront to progress itself (Muirhead and Tulis 2020: 340). Kahn’s sentiment was typical of many prominent Atari Democrats, such as Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas, both of whom were openly critical of organized labor and whose political visions mixed neoliberal, market policies with the promise of a new, technology-oriented economy (Cowie 2010: 122; Geismer 2015: 251; Frank 2016: 52). While Davis had argued the New Deal and New Politics could be reconciled, the “emerging majority” was increasingly viewed by these labor-skeptical Democrats as a political means to reorient the party’s identity and agenda further away from the interests of their older base.

Clinton, the New Democrats, and the Democratic Leadership Council

The basic terms of this professional class orientation (referred to herein as the “New Politics”) has maintained a presence in the party since the 1970s but has been interrupted by temporary, rhetorical reversals in key elections. After three failed presidential campaigns, a new pattern developed wherein “insurgent” factions reintroduce a pre-1970s-style language of class and make explicit arguments among themselves (and to the public) about the necessity to restore a worker-centered coalition. However, these overtures to working-class support have been followed (in each case) by reversions to policies consistent with the New Politics orientation and an abandonment of even the populist rhetoric. This dynamic produces brief periods where certain Democrats claw back significant margins among low-education, low-income voters—only for the cleavage between educated and noneducated voters to reemerge in following electoral cycles to an even more extreme degree (Piketty 2018: 112).

This false class reversal was self-evident in the ideological trends within the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) from 1988 to Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996. Dubbing themselves “New Democrats,” the DLC was initially created to reorient the party away from its association with “Massachusetts liberals” and their persistent failings with white, working-class voters (Geismer 2015: 105). This complicates more recent perceptions of Clinton on the left that, in hindsight, view the DLC as an inevitably neoliberal organization and Clinton’s politics circa 1992 as avowedly anti–New Deal. As Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein point out, in the late 1980s “the Clinton cadre” of academics and strategists were widely seen as ideological critics of Reaganism and the Democratic direction since the 1970s. In their words, the reforms discussed in the Clinton circle “promised to break with Reaganite, laissez-faire and renew the allegiance of blue-collar voters to the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson” (Lichtenstein and Stein 2023: 2–3). In many ways the DLC project grew out of opposition to the New Politics orientation in the party post-1972 (Coalition for a Democratic Majority 1972: 81–84). In this sense, early members of the DLC viewed the drift away from the party’s New Deal identity as a strategic failure and ideological dead end. They were not only critical of free trade and its deindustrializing effects but also of how the focus on the concerns of culturally liberal, educated workers had deemphasized the costs of neoliberal policies on the broader working class (Galston and Kamarck 1989). For instance, in “The Politics of Evasion,” one of the most circulated documents from the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), later Clinton advisers William Galston and Elaine Kamarck asserted that “contemporary liberals have lost touch with the American people.” They go on to explain that the party has become “a coalition dominated by minority groups and white elites” uninterested in centering the “economic interests” or “moral sentiments” of a “majority” of voters (Galston and Kamarck 1989). Galston and Kamarck tied this development explicitly to the party’s New Politics turn, negatively comparing Mondale’s and Dukakis’s performances to the New Deal, or the “liberal governing coalition” in its “heyday,” “that brought white working-class voters and minorities” into the same party on a popular economic agenda.

On the surface, then, the DLC’s growing power in the party seemed to indicate a turning point away from the New Politics coalition pursued under Mondale and Dukakis, and toward some effort to restore a variant of the New Deal coalition—that is, to recenter class and economic concerns over the social and cultural liberalism of affluent professionals. Rhetorically, Clinton’s 1992 campaign was anchored by these themes. For instance, in his announcement speech, Clinton invoked “the forgotten middle class,” speaking forcefully about economic inequality, while also framing these issues in a collectivist, patriotic language that promised to defend “national interests” at home and abroad. He spoke about broad socioeconomic themes, such as Americans “spending more hours on the job” while “bringing home a smaller paycheck to pay more for health care and housing and education” (Clinton 1991). In almost every respect, his rhetoric suggested a realignment away from the New Politics and toward an older New Deal paradigm. These discursive shifts, however, were underpinned by a policy agenda in office that (in actual terms) doubled down on components of Mondale’s and Dukakis’s failed platforms, further undermining the Democrats’ association with the New Deal order (Geismer 2015: 252; Lichenstein and Stein 2023: 287–434). Despite emphasizing the economic plights of workers in his rhetoric, Clinton continued Reagan’s efforts to dismantle public services and social insurance programs (Clines 1996). Even though he condemned Republicans for abandoning Americans to the exigencies of global competition, in 1995, Clinton spearheaded and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, accelerating deindustrialization and leaving his working-class support more vulnerable than ever before.

The contradiction between Clinton’s rhetoric and the party’s policy agenda was emblematic of a deeper shift throughout the DLC and, by extension, the party. This is clear in The New Progressive Declaration, wherein PPI founder and DLC affiliate Will Marshall said that the party had to focus its political energy on realizing the opportunities of the “Information Age.” This “new progressivism” would be focused not on universal, federal programs but on “individual empowerment,” promising “equality of opportunity for all and special privilege for none,” emphasizing the recognition of merit more than anything else. In place of collectivist appeals for common security, Marshall’s declaration praised the “ingenuity of private markets” as a positive social force. He evoked Kahn and the Watergate Babies¹ in rejecting the political role of “special interests” that demand privileges without evidence of merit. In his words, “We must restore the American Dream by expanding wealth, rather than redistributing it,” and by “empowering [workers] with greater responsibility for their own economic well-being” (Marshall 1996). Other DLC members similarly reverted to a New Politics orientation, emphasizing the electoral centrality of the educated to the party in familiar ways. For instance, in the pages of the DLC’s official magazine, Blueprint, DLC founder Al From asserted that “the problem with a political strategy that mainly targets downscale working-class whites [is that] the messages necessary to attract them—populist, class warfare oriented economics—are hardly popular with voters in the rising learning class” (quoted in Arens 2001). The contrast between these documents (from 1988 to 1996) reveals that, after a brief period where they presented themselves rhetorically as working-class-centric populists, the New Democrats reasserted their commitment to the “rising learning class.” In this respect, Clinton’s 1992 campaign was more a reflection of the DLC’s temporary lack of electoral confidence in educated voters (after two failed presidential campaigns) than it was a genuine ideological shift. The party elite’s long-term view of redistributive economic policy, and the class character of their preferred electoral coalition, remained the same.

This long-term strategic reasoning also had effects on the party elite’s normative view of the relationship between state power, democracy, and markets. After 1994, elected officials and intellectuals tied to the party began speaking more often about the possibilities of a “new economy,” alongside discussions of the political importance of educated professionals. As Robert Reich (1992: 171) argued, rather than “irrelevant” jobs in manufacturing, the heart of this economy would be creative or intellectual workers, what he called “symbolic analysts.” Access to these “knowledge” jobs, however, would also be shaped by new forms of meritocratic incentives, in direct contrast to the shared benefits ensured by collective bargaining. Alongside economic discourse, prominent party members introduced new ideological framings of this system and its relationship to the party’s normative goals. As Bill Clinton explained in 1995, the “new way” would focus on providing “opportunities” rather than ensuring minimum outcomes. It would “empower” the American people by “injecting choice” in place of the “inflexible bureaucracies” that ensured the wage increases and benefits typical during the New Deal order (Clinton 1995).

This meritocratic turn had deep implications for the ideological concepts that had been the core of Democratic Party’s public philosophy, especially the emphasis on the relationship between democratic politics and popular, social interests that animated the New Deal. The new emphasis on “empowerment” and “choice” rather than the general interests of a majority represented a transition from a narrative based around common ambitions to one focused on individual fulfillment. Through this lens, by clearing the way for individual talent rather than “rigid,” collective solutions, the new economy would create its own wealth to supplement what was lost. Americans may not be able to rely on steady employment, but instead of being trapped in the drudgery of the “old” system, they will be free to “choose” a path unique to the “talents” or imagination of the individual. But this narrative also implicitly legitimates a decline in economic conditions for some, creating new measures of economic or social grievance, based around merit, that separate deserving from undeserving. If one’s standard of living falls under the conditions of the new, meritocratic system, one only has themselves to blame. Unlike the older public philosophy, the “new” way essentially excised democratic politics as a potential vehicle for affecting material change or expressing popular discontent. Without the state or organized labor’s role, there is no alternative tool proposed for expressing collective interests. Instead, it is assumed that such interests are unmeetable, except on an individual level, based on how one chooses to respond to conditions, rather than by changing them. Put otherwise, what “communities” can expect is limited to what individuals can do within the constraints of the “new economy,” given their “talents,” rather than how “popular will” can be translated into a political project to address the terms or conditions of the economy itself.

Crucially, there was a relationship between these strands of normative and strategic reasoning within the party. The turn to meritocratic liberalism was premised on the strategic view that educated workers would be relatively unaffected from the decline of industrial jobs and thus would be amenable to an individualist reframing of economic outcomes. Political support from this insulated class would help legitimate the integration of the United States further into transnational markets. In this new public philosophy, progressive cultural appeals and acceptance of the global market were often equated with one another, as intellectuals emphasized the openness and “bohemian” sensibilities of metropolitan, educated professionals alongside their hostility to older, class politics. Thus, supposedly “sociocultural” dimensions that typify conflict between educated and noneducated voters in the United States can be read as ideological effects of material divisions between how this professional class and an older, working class are structurally situated in the postindustrial economy. This trend is manifest not only in how Democrats spoke about the economy but also in how the general ideological shift affected their representation of other issues—specifically, toward postmaterial redefinition of social injustice. As Nancy Fraser (2017) notes, the decline of class-based policies was supplemented by a corollary turn to an “identity-based” politics of recognition aimed at granting esteem to various, ethnic, cultural, and sexual groups, alongside a defense of free markets. These narratives were conceptually compatible, allowing the party to form coalitions based on a triangulation between a meritocratic, market-based appeal and sociocultural recognition of distinct identities (Inglehart 1977: 1–3, 262–90). Thus, this liberal platform sidesteps promises to “interfere” in the market for the benefit of a national public while still maintaining an ostensible commitment to social justice. Progress is redefined as respect for identity groups, or the protection of those relatively worse off, rather than the expansion of public control over the economy and the advancement of a majoritarian, common good.

Discourse among major liberal-intellectual figures from this period captures the ideological implications of this shift in position back to an educated coalition. The main normative premises central to the recentering of the educated in the discourse are presented clearly in “Five Realities that Will Shape Twenty-First Century US Politics,” by William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck (2001). This article is of particular significance because Galston and Kamarck (1989) were both firm advocates of nearly the opposite reasoning in “The Politics of Evasion,” where they argued Democrats were prioritizing the needs of the educated at the expense of working-class support. By contrast, in “Five Realities,” they present five shifts in “the plate tectonics of our national life” that should guide Democratic Party politics in the twenty-first century. Crucially, for them, the first and most impactful “reality” is that “the new economy favors a rising learning class over a declining working-class.” They explain,

Furthermore, they specify that members in this class derive economic security and self-image from their individual, “intellectual capital,” rather than from collective, social or civic bonds/assurances. As such, they argue not only that this group enjoys relative prosperity and security within the postindustrial economy but that their structural role as “dynamic,” “learning” workers predisposes them to prefer this more marketized “new economy,” favoring “privatization of public services,” higher immigration, and other “market mechanisms” that suit their outlook and experience. The key, then, is to articulate an agenda that appeals to this group, one that replaces “unifying appeals” with “opportunities in the new economy.” They are explicit that, even though “many lower-skilled workers” will be displaced by these continued economic transformations, the Democrats should offer to “increase access to education, training, and life-long learning” rather than attempt to appeal to these downwardly mobile workers using the “old-fashioned politics of redistribution.”

Their assumption is that, by embracing a more working-class-centric agenda or rhetoric, aimed at those who have failed to take advantage of the “new economy,” Democrats will be sacrificing the far more significant support of the “learning class.” In the years following “Five Realities,” several of Galston and Kamarck’s central theses recur in the work of other party-elite intellectuals, eclipsing competing tendencies, particularly some working-class-centered strategic views still latent in the DLC. In an especially revealing example, strategist Ruy Teixeira coauthored an extensive critique of the party’s post-1996 strategy after Gore’s loss in 2000, only to advance the inverse argument one year after “Five Realities” was published. In America’s Forgotten Majority, he and Joel Rogers critique Penn and others, arguing that the fixation on “soccer moms” and the educated middle class hurt the party with the “forgotten majority,” who are mostly “white” and “working-class.” As they write, “It’s next to impossible to cement a dominant electoral coalition without capturing the support of a good share of the forgotten majority” (Teixeira and Rogers 2000: xi). They defend their focus on “white” voters as a strategic calculus based on their demographic weight. But, in addition, they also assert that popularizing a progressive economic agenda with the “forgotten majority” will benefit minority voters most, explaining that “rather than being isolated in one corner of American politics, while affluent soccer moms and wired workers supposedly dictate a cautious and conservative agenda, minority voters, with enough forgotten majority support, can potentially put a strong universalist program—around issues like health, retirement, education, and economic security—squarely in the center of public debate” (xiii). Not only do Teixeira and Rogers center “shared material interests” among workers as “an excellent basis” for the Democratic Party’s campaign messaging, but they juxtapose this strategy directly against a coalition based on a framework “unnecessarily limited” by the affluent and educated (Teixeira 2001). The dichotomy, they claim, between the interests of the white working class and Black and Hispanic voters, is an illusion (Teixeira 2001). These assertions directly contradict Galston and Kamarck’s argument, demonstrating a clear intellectual divide among core, party-elite intellectuals over these issues following the 2000 election.

But in 2002, Teixeira reversed his position, advancing nearly the opposite argument in The Emerging Democratic Majority, coauthored with John Judis (Teixeira and Judis 2002a). This sudden reversal reflects a deeper shift in ideological gravity and the loss of resistance within the intraparty elite. While the DLC began as a project to distance the party from New Politics, Teixeira, one of the last remaining advocates for working-class politics with ties to the New Democrats, was now calling for “George McGovern’s revenge.” Fittingly, the book recycled McGovern strategist Lanny Davis’s 1974 title and advanced a very similar argument—specifically, that the Democrats should make appeals to the educated workers of the “new economy” on nonmaterial issues (Davis, quoted in Frank 2016: 52). They argue that no group has voted more dependably for Democrats than “highly skilled professionals” and that to solidify this support into a “new Democratic majority,” the party had to “consolidate progressive views that increasingly dominate the center of American politics” (Teixeira and Judis 2002a: 38).

Later that year, Teixeira and Judis elaborated on their analysis in an article for Blueprint, wherein they identify a correlation between “Democrats . . . gaining strength in areas where the production of ideas and services has redefined or replaced an economy dependent on manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction” and a turn toward “socially liberal, fiscally moderate priorities.” They describe this new triangulation as “progressive centrism” (Teixeira and Judis 2002b). The social base of “progressive centrism,” they argue, is the “talented” professionals that inhabit the “ideapolises,” or metropolitan centers in the postindustrial economy where informational and creative services are concentrated. This “new” social base and ideological tendency, they claim, is a by-product of the professionals’ “libertarian and bohemian ethos,” influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, as well as their position in the economy as highly skilled and credentialed workers. These “ideapolises,” then, reflect conceptual links between the professional class’s affluence and their offbeat cultural preferences, as is clear in their taste for “ethnic and vegetarian restaurants, multimedia shopping malls, children’s museums, bookstore-coffee shops, and health clubs,” as well as their desire to “work for companies and live-in communities that reflect their openness and tolerance.”

Crucially, though, Teixeira and Judis warn that these open-minded, talented people are also “leery of the old Democratic politics of ‘big government’ and large-scale social engineering.” As they highlight the connection between the “socially liberal” or “bohemian” attitudes, their consumer habits, and their “leeriness” toward the “old Democratic politics,” Teixeira and Judis advance a strategic narrative that posits a nonredistributive, “progressive centrist” agenda as the key to consolidating this “emerging Democratic Majority.” The “old politics,” in this case, are implicitly redistributive, working-class-based policies and appeals. In this sense, they saw a relationship between a politics framed toward bohemian individualism, as they say, “shaped by the social movements of the 60s,” and a rejection of majoritarian framings of class interest.

This outright preclusion of the “old” working class as an organizing basis for Democratic Party politics became more explicit after Kerry’s loss in 2004. For instance, in 2006, Stephen Rose wrote “The Trouble with Class Interest” for the Progressive Policy Institute, which was later republished as “Class Dismissed” in Blueprint (Rose 2006). Rose addresses Thomas Frank’s critique of the Democratic Party’s post-1970s turn away from “class-interest populism.” He asserts that the deindustrialization of the United States economy undermines Frank’s contention that appeals to “blue-collar” workers on economic policy can be an effective foundation on which to expand the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Specifically, he cites “the rising levels of education among most U.S. workers” as justification for his view that appeals to “an outdated concept of workers’ interests” risks alienating college graduates in “elite jobs,” who he claims will make up an increasing share of the electorate. In his words, Democrats should “modernize their policy agenda and political message based on a sound understanding of American society as it really is” and “speak to the plain realities of middle-class aspiration in the 21st century.” All these arguments advance a similar set of claims, about the educated class, its “values,” its strategic importance or desirability to the party after 2000, and how this should inform the party’s view of its “old” politics built around “class interest.” What they reveal is an increasingly dominant view among party elite, not only that college-educated professionals are the new base of the party but that this shift will allow for a deemphasis on labor issues and redistribution in favor of appeals to the educated’s cultural beliefs as the core of the party’s agenda.

Obama: The “Smart” President

Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign adapted major components of Clinton’s 1992 strategy, representing yet another reversal in the party’s short-term class appeal. While Obama did not run to the right on cultural issues, as Clinton had, his campaign adopted a similar (even more forceful) emphasis on the structural flaws of the postindustrial economy. This was most apparent in his framings of the 2008 financial crisis, in which he regularly condemned “greedy CEOs” and the “corrupt” campaign finance system (Obama 2008b). Also, Obama showed a greater willingness to endorse large-scale, state-led economic policy than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He promised a comprehensive set of federal interventions to reverse unemployment, curtail financial speculation, restore declining public services and infrastructure, and provide a public health insurance system (Democratic National Committee 2008). In Obama’s own words, the 2008 crisis demanded an approach that “recasts Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) social compact to meet the needs of a new century,” drawing a direct parallel between his own commitments to “change” and New Deal–era politics.

This was distinct from the framing Clinton and other Democrats had used since 1996, which often cast the New Deal as an obstacle to the promises of the “new economy” rather than a model to adapt to the contemporary context (Leuchtenberg, quoted in Obama 2006: 180). After running a campaign based around this New Deal–inflected messaging, the Democrats achieved even greater margins than Clinton had with working-class (low-income, low-education) voters in 1992, even among white workers, picking up states such as Iowa and Indiana (Piketty 2018: 112). The latter state had not been won by a Democrat since 1964. Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 followed a similar, populist strategy, seizing on Mitt Romney’s wealth and history at Bain Capital to frame the election in class terms (Parker 2012). This was clearest in how the Obama campaign characterized the now infamous leaked recording of a speech Romney (2012) delivered to donors, in which he drew a distinction between his affluent supporters and the “47 percent” who paid no income tax. Again, this class-based messaging helped the Democrats achieve similar levels of working-class support, winning Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin with comfortable margins.

But as Thomas Frank points out, Obama never governed as a populist (in either his first or second term), nor did he establish the enduring working-class coalition FDR achieved through social spending or economic policy. Rather, even in the midst of the Great Recession, his policies replicated key planks of the party’s earlier agenda (Frank 2016: 139–59). These were not just Obama’s preferences but were largely representative of the views advanced by the party’s majority in Congress, who on several key issues, attempted to “moderate” the agenda (Pear and Calmes 2009). He abandoned the public option after 2009, pursuing a health care reform package similar to what Republicans had proposed in 1994 (Carlsen and Park 2017). He also cut down the proposed stimulus package, which subsequently failed to restore pre-2008 employment levels. Rather than employ Americans directly to construct art deco post offices and paint murals, Obama opted for policies consistent with a neoliberal approach known as “nudging,” based off advice from his National Economic Policy adviser Lawrence Summers (Klein 2021a). FDR’s policies were explicitly aimed at making federal intervention visible, to ensure political investment in the party from the public. By contrast, Obama’s approach was meant to affect the behaviors of individual actors in subtle ways, adapting logic from neoliberal economic theory (Sunstein and Thaler 2008). This small-scale, surface-level approach shaped much of Obama’s economic policy and affected the recovery. Even once the recession ended, millions of working-age adults had left the workforce, and pre-2008 levels of employment were never restored (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). In addition, the Democrats suffered heavily in down-ballot races throughout Obama’s two terms (Malone 2017). But more important, there was also renewed fascination among party elites with the “rising class.” Just two days after Obama’s 2008 victory, former Clinton strategist and progressive pollster Stanley Greenberg (2008) proudly asserted, “I’m finished with Reagan Democrats.” He explained that after Obama’s good performance in more affluent districts, the party should set aside its focus on “non-college-educated white voters” and embrace the “well-educated suburbs.” Mirroring appeals made by Davis and Reich as far back as 1974, Greenberg declared that the progressive, “high-tech professionals” were the “new America,” and that the party should abandon its commitment to the economic grievances of those stuck in the past. In his words, “good riddance.” Despite winning more than 40 percent of white voters without a college degree in 2008—which contributed to the party’s best result with low-education voters overall in decades—the Democrats did relatively little to maintain or enhance this restored support (Gethin, Martínez-Toledano, and Piketty 2021b: 115). At this point, there was no immediate strategic obstacle to rebuilding the party’s affiliation with the working class. In some ways, Obama’s entire campaign was presented as doing just that, comparing the 2008 financial crisis to the Great Depression, and himself to FDR.

But even after running an insurgent campaign, explicitly juxtaposing the “change” he offered against the DLC and Hillary Clinton, Obama went on to recruit several of his most important advisers and cabinet members directly from the Clinton camp (Hundt 2019: 3). Once in office, he quickly transitioned from his populist “New Deal” rhetoric, instead emphasizing themes consistent with the New Politics direction. He also cut back most of his reform agenda. As Reed Hundt observes, “he chose an economic recovery plan that benefitted educated, well-off people” rather than pursue “popular legislative solutions to common problems” as he had proposed during his historic campaign (1). Democratic Party rhetoric, too, reflected this return to a preoccupation with the sensibilities of the educated. Both figures in the White House and the media emphasized the “smartness” of all those involved in the new administration. Obama himself became a vocal advocate for (and even a symbol of) the benefits of merit-based, technocratic governance. He had gone from a populist who let out “tornadoes of fury” at executive bailouts to the “professor in chief” (Frank 2016: 28–31). As Sandel points out, while in office, Obama made over nine hundred references to his agenda using the adjective “smart.”

Rather than capture the anger of a public reeling from an economic crisis, as commentators in 2008 assumed he would, Obama chose to emphasize this “smartness”: “smart trade policy, “smart climate policy,” and “smart environmental regulations” (Sandel 2020: 107). As in the 1990s, discourse from the party elite can help clarify these developments. As Greenberg’s rhetoric demonstrates, key strategists still felt educated voters were central to a “national Democratic ascendancy” that would allow the party to distance itself from downwardly mobile workers. When read through this lens, the Democrats’ complacency after Obama’s victory appears less like a political failure and more like an informed, strategic decision. Why fight to rebuild a working-class party, passing legislation that could potentially alienate donors, if the goal would be to eventually transition toward educated professionals? As before, support from the new majority was seen as an excuse to avoid addressing the disproportionate costs of globalization and its effects for their older constituency, while promoting a new definition of “progressivism” based on a more economically secure base of electoral support. This long-term view endured even as Obama tactically adopted populist rhetoric in 2008 and 2012.

By the 2016 Democratic primary, these contradictions were putting strain on the coalition that Obama helped create in 2008 and 2012, which was based on the maintenance of gains with educated voters since the 1990s and a restoration of working-class support in several Rust Belt states. This “Obama coalition” was made up of a significant portion of the multiracial working class (including white voters in the Midwest) and the liberal educated—an unsteady balance premised on Obama’s image as both a sociocultural progressive and an economic populist (Teixeira and Halpin 2012). While there were breakthroughs in cultural policy under Obama, such as securing a national right to gay marriage, nonetheless socioeconomic inequality and the precarity of non-college-educated workers grew much as they had since the 1970s. As a result of this disconnect between the Obama administration’s sociocultural and supposed economic goals, splits grew inside the coalition. This was apparent in the 2016 Democratic primaries, when working-class voters in a handful of rural and postindustrial states supported Bernie Sanders’s left-populist, class-centered insurgency against Obama’s preferred continuity candidate, Hillary Clinton. These states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, disproportionately represented the white, working-class segments of the Obama coalition. They also contained the highest percentage of what would later become “Obama-Trump” voters—mostly white, working-class voters who had supported Obama once (or even twice) but voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 general election (Taylor 2016).

This Obama-Trump support has been interpreted by many as a “whitelash” provoked by the threatened social status of white workers in a diversifying America (Lee 2016; Desmond-Harris 2016). These analyses, however, often fail to account for the Democrats’ self-conscious efforts to deemphasize the party’s supposed working-class base—as they had in 1972, 1984, 1988, and 1996—and to instead run on appeals to affluent, educated voters. This line of reasoning also obscures how class preferences can affect the ways racial issues are defined in party rhetoric and broader, center-left discourse. It is a question not necessarily of whether these voters were motivated by “class or race” but of why they reject the professionals’ understanding of racial inequality, both historically and as it pertains to present-day policy areas. As Davis and Greenberg made clear, the party-elite saw a clear connection between the coalition’s “diversity” and its “affluence.” This was not because all nonwhite supporters were well-educated professionals but because their strategic calculus was based on a division of racial justice and economic policy that maintained working-class minority and educated support based on the same “postmaterial” platform. As the party-elite documents show, white workers were often explicitly singled out as a necessary or acceptable sacrifice to achieve this coalition, not because of their racial views, but because their economic interests were incompatible with the neoliberal model. Most “whitelash” explanations do not elaborate on the effect this may have had on white workers’ departure from the Obama coalition. As Democratic senate minority leader Chuck Schumer explained just before Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, “for every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in Western PA, we will pick up two, three, moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia.” Given these assumptions about the relevance of working-class support to their electoral chances, Clinton and the party decided to focus instead on “college-educated, Republicans or independents, in the suburbs” (C-SPAN 2016). This attitude was reflected in Clinton’s campaign, which combined progressive appeals on cultural issues with emphases on her “pragmatic,” market-centered reforms and meritocratic qualifications (Wheeler 2020: 141–42). In this sense, Clinton’s campaign centered on “suburbs” was comparable to Mondale’s and Dukakis’s, who similarly eschewed appeals to the working class on redistributive or class grounds to foreground their “hard,” “realistic” reforms and “competent” technocratic skill. By Piketty’s (2018: 145) account, this strategy reversed Obama’s 2008–12 gains with working-class voters entirely, producing a “spectacular” cleavage between low-education and high-education support for the two parties greater than any time since 1945. In 2018, Clinton offered a revealing reflection on this result. She asserted, similarly to the party elite before her, that the results of her failed candidacy provided a model for the party’s future. In Clinton’s words, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product . . . the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” whereas the postindustrial, working-class regions Clinton lost were “looking backwards” (quoted in Choi 2018). The significance of class divisions based on education to these shifts are even clearer after 2020, when Trump improved his numbers with nonwhite voters overall by making significant inroads with non-college-educated Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters. At the same time, Biden performed poorly relative to Obama with nearly every group—except those with a college degree. This recent development, when considering the discourse highlighted above, suggests early reactions to Trump underemphasized the class dynamics shaping the coalitional shift between the parties (al-Gharbi 2020c; Teixeira 2022).

The Contradictions of the Professional-Class Left

The previous sections capture a recurring conflict between an older, New Deal vision of the party that views Democrats’ raison d’être as ensuring economic and social rights for domestic, wage-earning workers and a “New Politics” vision that emphasizes severing these political obligations by relying on electoral support from more affluent, educated voters on the basis of a postmaterial definition of progress (Muirhead and Tulis 2020; Teixeira and Judis 2022b). The contrasting visions inside the party elite have a significant effect on the ideological character of public figures’ rhetoric and policy proposals, which has been subsequently reflected in increased polarization between classes.

The history of this tendency also helps clarify how postindustrial class divisions underlie ongoing debates about the threat posed by populism to a democratic society (Biden 2022). While the focus of this discourse often revolves around a critique of the far-right, the account presented above shows that Democrats have contributed to a longer-term hollowing out of the substance of democratic politics. Their attempt to reorient the party away from the New Deal vision of democratic capitalism meant advancing explicit and implicit redefinitions of freedom, democracy, and justice that were meant to constrain the grounds on which the public could manage the market through political participation. According to their older, New Deal vision, a state is democratic only as far as it is accountable to its citizens, constraining private interests for the good of “common people.” Thus, a party’s role should be to facilitate the expression and realization of popular demands or a vision of the common good: translated from the public into the party’s agenda, then enacted through the power of the state. The New Politics vision, conversely, assumes that this form of participation is an act of illegitimate “interference” whereby majorities abuse their numerical power to politically obtain unearned or unjust social advantages. This is a “thinner,” more liberal view of democracy that assumes individual choice is a preferable driver of both economic and social organization, emphasizing its ability to distribute resources according to merit (and thus using them more effectively) and to enable maximal, personal autonomy. In effect, how these concepts are defined within these narratives informs alternative views of the public, defining “justice” as either realized on behalf of the majority, through the expression of a popular will politically, or by defending minority and individual rights from the majority. In this sense, Democrats attempted to rely on cultural appeals to the educated to legitimize the abnegation of workers’ interests, establishing a vision of “progressivism” that implicitly forecloses on majoritarian, democratic interventions into the market. The educated were viewed as playing a key role in this strategy because they were seen as more likely to accept social and economic outcomes delivered by free markets as consistent with a “just” society. The basis of this compatibility is their investment in meritocracy, which underlies the symbolic value of their credentials. On these terms, outcomes in the market are justified on the grounds that, so long as individuals are not denied equality of opportunity based on discrimination or exclusion, hierarchies can be understood as reflections of earned rewards (Michaels 2006: 64).

But meritocracy’s legitimating power in this liberal political economy goes beyond either the valorization of technical ability or of equal opportunity for advancement. There is a crucial cultural and moral component tied to these meritocratic claims, which is increasingly alienating the Democrats’ remaining working-class support. The difference between the educated “knowledge workers” and the working class is not just grounded in straightforwardly economic disparities. Divisions between classes are shaped by access to different forms of capital, which are used to protect access to economic resources and social status. These dimensions of class are especially relevant in the postindustrial context, given the growing (ideological and actual) significance of meritocratic credentials and “individual talent” to success in the new economy. Thus, the desirability of certain practices, ideas, or objects is a by-product of the inaccessibility to those without prerequisite knowledge or social understanding. Distinction, as Bourdieu (1979: 93) described it, acts as a social asset, cultivated by adopting a certain “way of life” that separates the merited from the rest. This is a clear component of how “merited” professionals legitimize their economic and social status in the current global economy, where “winners” are defined by their enlightened views as well as their official credentials. The process of professionalization involves not only obtaining skills or degrees competitive in the globalized labor market but also refining certain social attitudes, cultural sensibilities, and habits that emphasize the virtue of one’s distance from popular values, judgments, or sociocultural commitments. By these terms, there is a relationship between social and cultural distaste with society at large and one’s class status.

This class dynamic threatens to undermine attempts to build a left-wing, majoritarian politics, especially as the Democratic Party and broader Left organizations increasingly represent the most educated segments of the population (Last 2020). Because maintaining social status within this class depends on reproducing the scarcity of symbolic resources as “positional goods,” political values themselves can be transformed into tools for expressing distinction. Ideology becomes another opportunity to show refined judgment and taste. What’s “left,” in effect, can be captured and reworked into a means for cultivating or maintaining cultural capital. Daniel Bell observed this tendency in his analysis of the “adversary culture,” a term he borrowed from Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe postindustrial elites’ interest in constant novelty and a contradictory institutionalization of “anti-institutionalism” (Kazin, Dickstein, and Bell 2011). Under this regime of permanent, performed rebellion, cultural elites embrace the “self-consciously experimental” with the intent to “deliberately disturb the audience—to shock it [or to] shake it up” (Bell 1976: 42–53). Just as Bourdieu argues rarity becomes a source of value, Bell (1976: 52) observes that, within this cultural regime, “difficulty is clearly one source of [the] appeal to its initiates, for esoteric knowledge, like the special formula of the magi or the hermeticism of ancient priests, gives one an enhanced sense of power over the vulgar and unenlightened.”

Thus, by embracing normative arguments and language that are deliberately opaque, political debate can be constructed in ways that grants these “initiates” special status as interpreters of what is or is not a legitimate basis for political grievance. The link between cultural capital and left-wing sentiment is apparent in recent surveys that have shown those who consistently identify with the most progressive stances on every issue are three times as likely to have completed a four-year degree than the average American, and even more likely to have completed a postgraduate degree (Hawkins et al. 2018: 29–30). If identifying with “Left” values functions as a tool of distinction for these people, one has an incentive to maintain a definition of the Left that is counterintuitive, or even purposefully alienating, relative to what’s perceived as appealing to a majority of people. This does not have to be done consciously but comes about as a by-product of the social pressures within the group’s specific class position, where unspoken social rules of how one is meant to behave or think shape what political ideas are expressed and how (Henderson 2022). Recent studies by the Center for Working Class Politics demonstrate this divergence in preferences, showing that, when describing the same policies or normative principles, the language embraced most by the educated is least preferred by those without a college education (regardless of race or gender). As they write, “Potentially Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from progressive candidates or candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed that opposition in highly specialized, identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language” (Abbott et al. 2021: 5). Meanwhile, surveys of college-educated voters identify sharp disparities in not only the issues prioritized but their normative view of those issues and their relevance to broader social and economic questions. While most workers prefer universalist rhetoric and policies for addressing inequality, positing broad solidarity between the “many” against the privileges of the “few,” the educated prefer language that targets unearned “privilege” among the broader population, and they view disparities between median, white workers and minorities, for instance, as more pressing than the general welfare of a multiracial working class (Cooley et al. 2019).

These subtle differences between class fractions also complicate explanations of Trump’s popularity that rely heavily on the role racial resentment plays, without also accounting for how class differences shape the ways race is interpreted. This is not to suggest that racial inequality is just a figment of elite narratives. It is a clear historical and contemporary factor that shapes American life in significant ways. But the definition of race and its role in the United States is still affected by the class divisions mentioned above; it becomes conceptually entangled in the same symbolic struggles. This is potentially a reflection of how similar class differences are reproduced within racial cohorts themselves, suggesting that class can supersede racial cleavages in cases. That is to say, a Black American with a college degree is likely to share many sentiments as his white college-educated peers, and vice versa for those without a college degree. Despite how they are discussed in popular media, class and race are not codeterminative categories, and thus one should critically examine whether class shapes the ways race is discussed among the educated, or how the preferences and interests of nonwhite voters are constructed in this discourse (Bruenig 2019; Yglesias 2020). Surveys have shown, for instance, that nonwhite voters on the whole, but especially those without a college degree, diverge sharply from educated progressives on a number of key issues, such as in their views of criminal justice, the military, immigration, and drug legalization (Pew Research Center 2021). In these areas, their preferences are far closer to white workers than they are to highly educated progressives. Definitions of racism itself also diverge sharply between the educated and the vast majority of nonwhite Americans (al-Gharbi 2020a). But, in a context where the performance of certain values functions as a source of distinction, the unrepresentative or “esoteric” quality of the professionals’ views of race can make them more effective tools for reproducing class status. The tragic irony of this process is that it may hinder political progress on social reforms to address racial disparities (al-Gharbi 2020a). This is not to suggest that the role racism plays in American politics can be reduced to a purely economic question; rather, the framings of race preferred by educated liberals can preclude a democratic politics that ideologically reconciles majority and minority grievances.

Take, for example, two statements made by commentators in different portions of the professional class institutionally: a progressive columnist and the head of a DC think tank. In a 2016 Vox article, Zack Beauchamp (2016b) declares, “If you’re poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said.” In the article he explains that Sanders’s trade policies will come at the expense of the “global poor.” The argument is that attempts to shield American workers from labor arbitrage will inevitably “deny opportunity” to those in “poorer countries” and are thus at odds with a “progressive” Left politics. Expressing a similar claim, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute, at a Cato event argues that a focus on domestic manufacturing is characteristic of “a fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in” (Beauchamp 2016a; Stoller 2022). In both of these emblematic framings, political demands for protection from economic insecurity are characterized as “interferences” with the rewards of the market based on merit—but also, therefore, unjust attempts to preserve privilege by maintaining benefits the market would not otherwise provide. Thus, the concept of “privilege” or “marginality”—as mobilized in this social context—excludes groups deemed insufficiently deserving of moral recognition by the professionals in favor of more “authentic” subjects. This often has the effect of obfuscating the social realities of class conflict between these workers in the postindustrial context, instead shifting debate onto discussions of an imagined, class-neutral definition of the “privileged” versus “marginal.” Race is used to morally legitimate what are, at root, neoliberal principles. Thus, these progressive narratives can, perversely, characterize policies that lower wages and weaken democratic accountability to workers as an imperative of social justice. With this in mind, a rejection of the professionals’ preferred framing of race should not be misidentified as committed opposition to social reform in and of itself or a “white riot” meant to defend one’s “privileges” (Beauchamp 2017). But it may indicate a fundamental class contradiction that is politically weakening the Left’s efforts to popularize an egalitarian agenda around racial or economic issues.

These sorts of attitudes were central to how Democratic elites understood the postmaterial, ideological preferences that would allow them to rely on the educated as the base of a “progressive centrist” coalition. This lens helps clarify the frequent debates in popular and academic commentary about the salience of “culture wars,” especially around identity politics, as a driving force behind the erosion of center-left majorities in the United States. The specific form of progressivism expressed by highly educated liberals is not a socially neutral body of ideas—that is, a general concern for sexual and racial disparities in their own right. Rather, the qualitative definition of these problems is a direct reflection of how specific classes have chosen to conceptualize and politically interpret various forms of inequality and social injustice. Put otherwise, they are narratives surrounding what Adolph Reed Jr. (2000: 6) describes as “ascriptive identities” projected onto society and assumed to have a particular political importance in a way that’s consistent with their desire to distinguish themselves as merited. This is not to suggest that the empirical metrics of racial or sexual disparities invoked in this discourse are simply an “illusion” conjured by “elites.” Rather, the specific characterizations of these problems advanced by or preferred by professionals have their own peculiar, conceptual logic, shaped by their social location. Careers in the media, arts, or academia increasingly depend on the ability to demonstrate distinct kinds of class-based sensibilities and maintain the scarcity of these resources to protect the value of such positions. Access to rarefied cultural practices helps reproduce the distance between these workers as members of a select group and shapes specific incentives for each based on how they maintain or reproduce their socioeconomic position. Thus, a potential connection emerges between the cultural effects of class divisions and the investment in “merit,” or “individual talent,” that Democrats incorporated into their postindustrial narratives. In this sense, the “ceiling” of popularity for progressive ideas with the general public is a feature, not a bug.

The educated benefit from rarefying the virtue tied to conspicuous political engagement and social awareness, maintaining a permanent, adversarial position relative to the public (Liu 2021: 11). A more popular form of critique, which recognizes and affirms the public’s self-image and interests while also acknowledging the empirical realities of various social inequalities, is not only possible but perhaps more likely to produce effective political action. But the moral, individual discourse precludes these alternatives by framing them as reflections of an essentially backward society and fixating on the individual’s complicity with or resistance to this corruption (Kendi 2019). Political and cultural narratives oriented at educated liberals, thus, center personal choices at the expense of discussing more substantive, collective solutions. The individual’s pursuit of virtue is more than inadequate: it is counterproductive. Its real effect (whether intentional or not) is to protect access to ethical credibility—as a kind of “social currency”—by insulating it in layers of hostility to popular taste and identities, creating a “scarcity” of virtue that increases the value of their own cultural capital (al-Gharbi 2019; Nagle 2017). This hyperindividualized view is consistent with the aims of a liberal market since it rejects and belittles forms of political consciousness or agency that might otherwise force the state to articulate and maintain a definition of the common good to legitimate itself. As such, its adherents present themselves as atomized bearers of human capital rather than citizens or members of a community (Brown 2015: 17–45; Lasch 1994: 45).

If this class only recognizes itself as a collection of distinguished individuals defined by their isolated meritocratic accomplishments and virtue, they would conceivably be more receptive to a view of justice that centers inequalities of access or barriers to success in the market premised on discrimination. Through this dynamic, grievances over inequality unrelated to exclusion from the opportunity to participate in meritocratic selection are disqualified. In this sense, for educated liberals, “vulnerable” or “marginal” groups function as a kind of alternative subject to the public overall (Ramsay 2022). By centering their relative deprivation to the means for advancing themselves meritocratically, liberals effectively narrow the state’s responsibility to consider the democratic demands of a multiracial majority. Members of the public can be recognized as having legitimate grievances on the grounds that they are an exception—but not as part of a majoritarian, general will, through which broad social demands can be made. Instead, this is replaced with a liberal mandate to ensure opportunity for the most marginal, or to manage unearned “privileges” between relatively well-off or disadvantaged groups. Class inequalities, rather than these sorts of categorical identity claims, are delegitimized since workers in the majority are not denied access to the opportunities necessary to advance themselves economically.

The concept of “privilege,” as its commonly invoked in liberal critiques of inequality, reinforces this class-blind meritocratic claim, in that it targets the unearned “advantages” of ordinary Americans as the principal cause of unjust social hierarchies (Parenti 2021; McIntosh 1989). These interrelated concepts play a crucial role in meritocracy’s legitimizing force as an alternative to democracy. Instead of accountability to public demands, technocrats and symbolic analysts manage a moral hierarchy within which shifting definitions of the “worse off” are used to qualify what counts as a legitimate basis for political intervention into the market. The moral valence of the narrative is used to justify lowered protections by creating new filtering standards for what demands state attention. While the authoritarianism of right-wing populism poses its own threats, the narratives salient with affluent liberals have been used to legitimate the erosion of the American state’s accountability to its citizens (Luke 2021). By appealing to the educated’s investment in individual distinction, on the basis of merit and virtue, critiques of inequality can be invoked to ideologically manage dissent over declining living standards. Thus the Democrats, by consolidating a professional-class coalition through these narratives, position themselves as the party most capable of maintaining political control, despite overseeing an increasingly insecure, unequal, and atomized society. In part, the enduring support for Trump—despite his clear flaws—may be a consequence of how the Democrats allow Republicans to monopolize the antipathy of the working class to the features of this liberal order. Rather than articulate their own alternative, they have acted as a bulwark against more meaningful political demands by creating a mandate for opposition that is ultimately compatible with broad features of the status quo. This is evident in the discourse highlighted throughout this article. Because they are insulated from these immediate costs, however, the educated have been more amenable to view the issue as a question of virtue, distinguishing “good” people from “deplorables” (Clinton, quoted in Montanaro 2016).

Conclusion: Whose Majority, on What Terms?

It is worth noting that there are signs that some within or around the Democratic Party that are now arguing for a more aggressive effort to decenter college-educated voters and fight back Republican advances with the working class (Kaplan 2022). Even Ruy Teixeira and John Judis (2023), who did the most to popularize the “emerging Democratic majority” narrative within the party, are now deeply critical of the Democrats’ failure to respond to working-class losses. Many have also noted that, under Joe Biden’s leadership, the Democrats have embraced industrial planning, seemingly eschewing major principles of the “new economy” mantra (Gerstle 2022). In addition, in the Republican Party, while there are significant shifts in intraparty debate on economic and social policy, the party overall has yet to prove that it seeks to appeal to working-class voters on more than issues of cultural grievance (Ahmari 2023; Cass 2023). Despite Trump’s rhetoric about abandoned factories and Americans “left behind,” Joe Biden arguably took more substantive steps to protect and expand American manufacturing. Trump’s only major legislative accomplishment was a tax cut right out of the Paul Ryan agenda; if all Republicans can offer is a president who eats McDonald’s, it is far from certain that they will be able to claim the mantle of the “worker’s party” (Smith and Bannon 2019). Similarly, some might argue that increasing economic precarity among professionals may also resolve the issue of intraworker divisions within the base. As college-educated workers become subject to similar economic pressures as the rest of the working class, it is possible they will be more interested in supporting a more robust labor-oriented agenda, abandoning neoliberal policies and narratives around meritocracy (Scheiber 2023).

There are still reasons to remain skeptical about both possibilities. First, if there was a time for the Democrats to abandon neoliberal policies and reconsolidate a working-class majority, it was in 2008. As the evidence throughout this article demonstrates, Democrats have made tactical embraces of populist rhetoric and policies before, only to resume pursuing the “emerging majority” when they feel it is again strategically viable. “Scranton Joe” may have been useful for a time, but the long-term social shift in the party has not been reversed, and it’s plausible some remain convinced a version of the New Politics reorientation is a desirable alternative (Abbott and Deveaux 2024). With respect to the declining position of the college educated, this phenomenon may actually have the opposite effect. When those rich in cultural capital face growing economic insecurity, the pressures to maintain distinction may be even more powerful, as the rarity of one’s cultural assets becomes their last bulwark against downward mobility. As Benjamin Studebaker (2023: 11) observes, when

Thus, the reconciliation of downwardly mobile professionals and the working class may be limited by the cultural contradictions implicit to this group’s attachment to their social status relative to those without a college degree. Given these obstacles, if Democrats rely on professionals as the basis of their “emerging” coalition, a potential realignment of the multiracial working class to the Republicans seems more likely than ever before. Whether or not leaders within the party view this as a trend to reverse, or a necessity for their long-term goal of realizing their new coalition, is an open question.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this article were adapted from my dissertation, titled “An Inconvenient Coalition: Elite Democratic Discourse on Class and Climate Change from 1988–2008.” I’d like to thank the members of the committee who guided that research and all those who provided their thoughts and assistance to improve it for this article.

Note

References