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Fukk your corny debates
Is This the Future Liberals Want?
October 2040: an exhausted nation readies itself for the third and final presidential debate of a grueling campaign season. Across America’s living rooms, bars, basement shelters, and prisons, augmented reality devices light up with images of the two contenders.
First-term California governor Malia Obama, vaulted to the Democratic nomination after her heroic response to the devastating Central Valley flood of ’39, introduces her Green Forward agenda. This ambitious plan, developed in partnership with Harvard University and the Bezos Foundation, aims to relocate 20 million workers from environmental and economic “brownfields” to productive metropolitan cores, where they can apply for federal grants, providing the displaced with access to education and skills training, along with civic engagement and entrepreneurship programs.
The proposal brings a throaty sneer from Republican president Allen Jones, the retired professional wrestling star formerly known as A.J. Styles. “The elite wants to make you move to Portland, Oregon, and eat plastic hamburgers in a cubicle until you die,” he says, referring to the city’s recent ordinance banning the consumption of animal products. In contrast, Jones pledges to protect Judeo-Christian values by building the largest military drone fleet in world history, implanting microchips in illegal immigrants (“just stamp ‘em!”), creating a million new American jobs in ocean-floor mineral mining, and cutting taxes.
As the debate ends, pundits remark that the country is more polarized than ever. Earlier in the campaign, Jones’s son Ajay, a freshman congressman from Georgia, made headlines by performing his father’s signature move, the Styles Clash, on longtime Texas senator Beto O’Rourke; images of “bleeding Beto” have featured prominently in campaign ads on both sides. But it is not clear how many Americans are really paying attention. One hundred and thirty million people sat out the last election, including a record share of lower-income and working-class voters. Even as wealth and income inequality soar to new highs, experts predict that less than a quarter of Americans without college degrees will cast a ballot in 2040.
The End of Class Voting
For socialists, this may be a dystopian vision, but this is the future many liberals want — or, at least, the future that professional Democrats have been aiming at for some time.
Chuck Schumer’s notorious boast about trading “blue-collar Democrats” for “college-educated Republicans” accurately captured the strategy that produced both the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2016 defeat and its limited victory in 2018. But the comment was not just an unusually candid confession of the party’s strategic priorities; it was also a neutral description of a much larger process that began long before Schumer reached the Senate.
Since the 1970s, parties of the left center have bled working-class support all over the industrialized world, with millions of “blue-collar” Democrats, Social Democrats, and Labor voters giving way to a new class of highly educated professionals. Schumer’s own political career, which began at age twenty-three, when he graduated from Harvard Law School and won election to the New York State Assembly in the same year (eat your heart out, Pete Buttigieg!) is just one illustration of this shift. In fact, Schumer-like politicians, and the professional-class voters they represent, have become the active leadership and core constituency within center-left parties from Brooklyn to Berlin to Sydney.
Thomas Piketty has dubbed this new configuration a clash between “the Brahmin Left” — educated professionals, defined by their cosmopolitan virtues — and “the Merchant Right” — business leaders, committed to the ruthless maximization of profit. Under this arrangement of forces, working-class voters have either dwindled into quiescent adjuncts of the professional-class left, gravitated toward right-wing populism, or dropped out of politics altogether.
It wasn’t always this way. Even in the United States, where racism and the two-party system have always sapped working-class solidarity, politics in the mid-twentieth century was polarized firmly along class lines. From the 1930s to the 1960s, if you were a working-class voter — a mail carrier in Harlem, a miner in West Virginia, a farm laborer in New Mexico, a garment worker in Cleveland — you were very likely to vote Democrat. If you were a manager or professional outside the Solid South — from Vermont to California — you were very likely to vote Republican. At its peak, in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, class voting was nearly as robust in the United States as anywhere in the industrialized world.
“the working people,” could denounce “scabs” and defend vigorous labor laws while calling for national health insurance, an end to Jim Crow, unprecedented mass transit and eldercare projects, and “a stabilized economy of full employment.”
There is no need to romanticize such mid-century Democrats, who also presided over the expansion of the security state and the murderous war in Vietnam. Yet neither can we afford to dismiss the victories in this era of class voting, which dwarf anything either Democrats or American leftists have won in the last fifty years. The Democratic Party was never truly a workers’ party, but its major achievements of the twentieth century were possible only because it was a party of workers.
This alignment has been under stress since the 1960s. Today, it is officially dead. The Democratic Party of our own decade, as New America’s Lee Drutman writes with palpable excitement, has become an unequal partnership between “highly educated professional whites” and “minority voters,” in which “wealthy cosmopolitans” play a role of increasing significance, not least as fundraisers and donors, but also in the party primaries, where the affluent disproportionately participate.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, has sharpened its identity as an alliance of bosses, cultural conservatives, and white nationalists. With a working class divided by race, and a managerial class divided by culture, more than ever it is education and moral values — rather than material interests — that form the battleground on which America’s two parties collide.
The causes of this broader shift, of course, transcend the conscious maneuvering of center-left party leaders. Racist backlash in the post–civil rights era served to undermine class solidarity everywhere. More broadly, globalization, financialization, automation — above all, the political victories of capital over organized labor in the late twentieth century — have combined to create a social reconstitution of the American working class. Its representative figure today is not a General Motors line-worker, close to the centers of power, but a home health aide (or atomized gig worker) whose labor, however necessary to society at large, does not always generate obvious leverage over capital or natural opportunities for collective action.
In the same decades, the rise of the “knowledge economy” swelled the numbers of credentialed professionals — especially in law, medicine, education, and engineering — and cemented their influence on American politics. With organized labor in decline, Democrats increasingly sought and often won this professional-class support, often clustered in affluent suburbs near universities, hospitals, and technology centers.
In the 1970s, the practitioners of the New Politics gave this process a progressive sheen, seeking to build “a constituency of conscience” in the era of George McGovern and Watergate. In the 1980s and 1990s, New Democrats in the mold of Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton tacked to the right, promising to rein in big government, forge public-private partnerships, and get tough on crime. But what both party movements shared was a laser-like focus on white-collar voters, accelerating the decline of class voting and paving the way for today’s even more comprehensive dealignment.
This fundamental shift — from the party of Humphrey to the party of Schumer — remains the most important American political development that confronts the Left today. It is no accident that the decline of class voting has corresponded with fifty years of retreat for American workers: stagnant wages, accumulating debt, and increasing precarity, even as corporate profits have soared. Nor is it a coincidence that even popular two-term Democratic presidents in this era, elected by such dealigned class coalitions, have proven unable or unwilling to push for structural reforms on anything like the scale of the New Deal era, even after facing the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression.
This is the heavy undertow that churns beneath the apparent rising tide of the American left. Yes, the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign helped bring social-democratic ambition back to national politics, revealing mass support for once-marginalized ideas like single-payer health insurance and free public college. Yes, the overwhelming popularity of these and other proposals — from debt cancellation to a Green New Deal — has encouraged mainstream Democrats to ride the wave the best they can, accepting some limited demands (a $15 minimum wage) while attempting to dilute others (“Medicare for All Who Want It”). And yes, by appearing to embrace most of Sanders’s platform, Elizabeth Warren has vaulted to the front of the 2020 primary race, leaving more cautious contenders like Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke far behind.
In one sense, these are cheering ideological victories, and a testament to the ongoing appeal of class-based politics. But the truth remains that all this has come about almost entirely within a political party whose own professional-class character, in the same years, has only grown stronger than ever. The 2018 midterms, after all, were won in the affluent suburbs; Democrats now control every single one of the country’s twenty richest congressional districts.
That's just the first 4 paragraphs.
