Is This Really the “Age of Class Dealignment”?
Class dealignment perspectives tend to overstate the extent to which center-left parties can boost their fortunes today through a strict focus on pocketbook issues.
Steelworkers line the front row of a campaign rally for Donald Trump on October 19, 2024, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
There’s no doubt the social base of the Left has changed in recent years. Routine manual and clerical wage workers with low education and low incomes were, for many decades, the bedrock of the Democratic Party and its center-left counterparts abroad. That is no longer the case. Across the rich capitalist countries, these voters have become a swing group, while a new constituency has taken their place at the core of the left-wing electorate: lower- to moderate-income but highly educated voters working in white-collar and professional settings.
The actuality of this development is not in question. What’s at stake is whether this means we are living in an “Age of Class Dealignment”; if so, who or what is to blame for it; and how parties of the progressive left should approach today’s strategic landscape.
A New Terrain
I’ve burned many hours browsing FRED, the St Louis Federal Reserve’s sprawling economic data website, for numbers on the Marxian Rate of Profit or educational attainment in Lee County, Iowa. But there’s one page I’ve returned to again and again, and that’s the innocently titled blog post “Job Polarization.” If you’re looking for a skeleton key to understanding the last few decades of political development in the United States, this chart may be as close as you can get:
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