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:

Here we see four lines representing four different occupational groups. In the early 1980s, roughly equal numbers of US employees worked in three of those categories: management and professional, sales and office, and manual blue-collar labor of various kinds. The number of workers in personal care services, which includes jobs like home health aides, trailed significantly behind the others. Since then, the number employed in personal care services has moved toward convergence with blue-collar and sales and office workers, whose numbers have stayed roughly constant over the last few decades.

That’s an important development in its own right, but the big story here is the green line representing management and professional occupations. It separated from the pack in the 1980s and just won’t stop going up. In 1983, 28.5 million workers were employed in management, professional, and related occupations. Their number has simply exploded since, more than doubling to over 70 million workers by 2024’s end.

Today workers in management and professional occupations account for 43 percent of all employed civilians in the United States, far and away the single largest occupational group in the country. The runner up, in a distant second, is the group of workers in sales and office occupations, who comprise just over 19 percent. Together, these two groups constitute nearly two-thirds of the entire labor force, around a hundred million people.

The upshot is that there are now more people employed as health care practitioners and techs as there are in either construction or production jobs. Today roughly as many people work for nonprofit organizations, most of which are in health care and educational services, as for manufacturers.

A transformed workforce, in turn, is a transformed electorate. In an important 2019 paper on shifting partisan dynamics among white voters, political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm chart the massive occupational recomposition of the US electorate between 1960 and 2015. According to their calculations, the largest occupational group in the electorate at the beginning of this period was, by far, blue-collar and “lower-white-collar” workers (the latter being an occupational designation for routine clerical-administrative office workers). Composing nearly 43 percent of all white voters in 1960, they were two to four times as large as every other occupational group in the electorate.

By 2015, however, that picture had dramatically changed. No one group predominated, the proportion of blue- and lower-white-collar voters shrunk by nearly half, and sociocultural (semi-)professionals and capital accumulators — the ever-rising green line in FRED’s job polarization chart — mushroomed to compose nearly half the electorate.

What accounts for these developments? Many on the Left blame Democrats and social democrats for the erosion of their own social base. The decline of the blue-collar industrial workforce, in this view, was (at least in part) a policy choice center-left politicians thought they could manage by embracing a different electorate. In short, they attacked their own traditional social base and traded it in for a new one.

There’s no doubt the Third Way politics of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder contributed to the center-left’s long-term electoral crisis. Socialists are right to criticize it. The Third Way turn in center-left politics, however, is perhaps better understood as a symptom of decline rather than its cause.

The political economist Björn Bremer characterizes it as a “Faustian bargain” with economic centrism, a misguided and ultimately self-defeating attempt to deal with a real strategic problem: the transformation of social democracy’s traditional base in the transition from industrial to post-industrial capitalism. In glossing over that transformation — one which occurred across the rich capitalist countries, regardless of whether center-left or conservative parties predominated — 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.

What’s the Problem?

Group identities are rooted in social structures, and group identities are the stuff of politics. Work is far from the only place where people form their group identities and political preferences, but it would be foolish to discount its impact. What we do to make a living shapes our lives, from our moral values to our political views and partisan identification. Major transformations in the occupational structure haven’t, on their own, determined the political outcomes of rich capitalist democracies like the United States. Politics matters, and politics is not reducible to sociology.

Nonetheless, the social theorist Göran Therborn reminds us that “the latter may give useful hints of the limitations and potentials of the former.” Those limitations and potentials are simply not the same today as they were at the high tide of industrial capitalism.

This should be the starting point of any meaningful consideration of the challenges facing socialist and progressive politics today. Unfortunately, so much left-wing commentary on the transformation of social democratic, labor, and center-left parties effectively holds social structure constant instead of treating it dynamically.

The method typically proceeds by looking at what percentage of blue-collar manual workers voted for these parties at one point in time, or at election results from a geographical unit like a county, then comparing it to a new observation at a later point in time. Because today’s blue-collar manual workers do indeed show less of a propensity to vote for progressive parties than their forebears, this is taken as evidence that the working class per se is abandoning the Left for the Right.

At the same time, progressive parties have won rising support from voters with relatively high levels of education, a group Thomas Piketty and his collaborators dub the “Brahmin Left.” This is taken as evidence that center-left parties, including the Democratic Party, have been captured by elite professional-class voters more interested in fighting the culture war than redistributing income and wealth. To win back the working class, therefore, the Left should downplay, ignore, or triangulate on polarizing sociocultural issues and focus on bread-and-butter economic demands.

It’s a compelling narrative with a certain truthiness to it. But political scientists Silja Häusermann, Herbert Kitschelt, and their collaborators on Beyond Social Democracy make a convincing case that this narrative, which they call the “industrial capitalism class-centered analysis,” misses the forest for the trees. Coeditors Häusermann and Kitschelt contend that it “largely ignores multidimensional and complex societal challenges that are experienced by the vast mass of twenty-first century inhabitants of knowledge capitalist society.” Center-left parties’ big problem with working-class voters, on this view, is different from what commentators promoting the class dealignment perspective assert.

Social democracy’s traditional base in the blue-collar section of the working class, particularly those with lower levels of educational attainment, “is numerically and proportionally shrinking, particularly so among younger voters. In a very long-run structural perspective, there is only a subdued electoral future, therefore, in a Social Democracy primarily pinning its hopes on such voters.” In their contribution to the book, Daniel Bischoff and Thomas Kurer find that social democratic parties have been losing many core voters to aging and death without replacing them with new voters from younger generations, who often turn to other parties on the Left.

“Social democrats,” they conclude, “live from the old and die from the young,” who have been politically socialized in a very different environment from their parents and grandparents. “The public narrative of original social democrats’ dealignment and realignment into the Radical Right is not supported.”

Recall the ever-increasing green line in FRED’s job polarization chart, or the fact that no one occupational group predominates in the electorate anymore. There is now, according to Häusermann and Kitschelt, “a broad group of middle-income, intermediate-skill citizens in society, working in private enterprise or in nonprofit institutions and civil service administrations, who are captured neither by categorization as the declining working class nor by that of academically higher-grade certified professionals.”

This includes working people in the sociocultural (semi)professionals category, which encompasses many millions employed in education, health care, and social assistance occupations as well as workers in media and the arts. They have relatively high rates of educational attainment, but many of them earn moderate or even lower incomes. As such, they tend to support progressive economic and redistributive demands. Because of their educational experiences and interpersonal work logics, they tend to strongly emphasize progressive positions on racial and gender equality, immigration, and cultural integration, too.

Since these constituencies now make up a rather large share of the electorate, their interests and concerns have to be prominently featured in progressive parties’ programmatic and strategic frameworks. The electoral math simply doesn’t work otherwise, particularly in majoritarian party systems like the one we have in the United States.

While the social democratic idea has not died, the classical social democratic project was, as Häusermann and Kitschelt remind us, “the offspring of industrial society and the rise of the blue-collar working class.” The secular decline of that part of the working class, together with its institutions, networks, and organizations, means that a return to an older mode of class politics is quite unlikely.

Nonetheless, Häusermann, Kitschelt, and their collaborators show that knowledge societies are generating constituencies that are still receptive, on the basis of both interests and values, to social democratic ideas, but in a different way. Too often, however, our ways of thinking and speaking about these questions have yet to catch up to the new reality.

Who’s a “Worker” Anyway?

“The transformation of the left is an international phenomenon,” the historian Tim Shenk notes in his recent book Left Adrift. So it makes sense to analyze the state of the Democrats together with their closest counterparts abroad. Left Adrift seeks to explain why, in Shenk’s telling, Republicans and other right-wing parties around the world “now represent so many of the people who struggle” while Democrats and their counterparts abroad “are closer to an alliance between professionals and the poor, with the balance of power weighted toward the top.”

Shenk traces the colorful, globe-trotting careers of two political consultants, Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen, to tell an engaging, crisply written story of what happened to center-left politics in the United States, Britain, Israel, and South Africa.

Shenk is clearly sympathetic to Greenberg’s dogged efforts to convince Democrats to coax a latent “social democratic impulse” out of white working-class voters by dropping the cultural liberalism of the educated set and focusing instead on bread-and-butter issues. “The old formulation from the 1992 Clinton campaign still applies,” Shenk insists. “Voters want a candidate who will promote their interests and honor their values. That doesn’t mean trying to roll the clock back to the stone age, but it does require finding a position on questions like crime and immigration that fits within the broad center of public opinion — a center whose death has been conveniently exaggerated by polarizers of the left and right.”

To his credit, Shenk concedes that the transformation of center-left parties “wasn’t the result of a deliberate strategy to court upscale votes at the expense of the left’s working-class base, at least not entirely.” He acknowledges, if in passing, that our societies have changed, and that attacking the power and privileges of our homegrown oligarchs isn’t enough to win elections. If it were, “Bernie Sanders would be sitting in the White House today planning his next summit with Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn,” a scenario that’s not happening anywhere but in socialist fan fiction.

He recognizes that neither Schoen, who had no real ambition beyond winning elections, nor Greenberg, a chastened Marxist who remained committed to a class project, “had come up with a reliable program for turning out either blue- or white-collar voters.” Neither consultant had ready-made answers for the electoral dilemmas bedeviling the Democrats, the labor parties of Britain and Israel, or the African National Congress in post-apartheid South Africa. “This is a war that both sides lost,” Shenk dolefully concludes. The trials and tribulations of center-left parties continue apace.

Nevertheless, Shenk endorses Greenberg’s practical prescription for the Democratic Party, which would entail “key members of the Democratic coalition accepting the compromises that could build a bottom-up majority committed above all to standing with workers.” He shares Greenberg’s view that a call to class politics can only be heard in this country if the Left’s political leaders turn down the volume in the culture wars. And that, in turn, can only be done by running rightward on polarizing, “hot button” issues.

Shenk does not get into specifics in Left Adrift, but he does in a New York Times essay that summarizes the book’s core themes. There, he argues for “an unapologetic defense of the bipartisan border security bill Mr. Trump torpedoed earlier this year, and then asking Republicans how their proposed system of migrant detention camps is going to work.”

But what was actually in that bill? It would have done nothing to resolve the status of the millions of undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. Moreover, it would have given the president new powers to expel asylum seekers from the country. Passing the bill would have ratified MAGA’s fundamentally anti-immigration political thrust, while doing nothing to guarantee electoral success for Democratic candidates. Shenk’s advice flies in the face of convincing evidence that taking “tougher” stances on immigration and cultural integration legitimizes and strengthens right-wing parties instead of neutralizing them.

Here is where the widely held assumption that “workers” per se are abandoning the Left for the radical right creates serious analytical and political problems. Like others in the class dealignment school, Shenk contends that a supposed breakdown of left-right divisions along economic lines has allowed “educated professionals to find a home on the left” while “providing rightwing populists an opportunity to make deep inroads with workers.”

The contributors to Beyond Social Democracy, however, marshal a pile of evidence to offer a different picture. Tarik Abou-Chadi and Markus Wagner, for instance, use voter flow data to show how voters who left European social democratic parties “were disproportionately centrist and educated” and that “social democratic parties lost their by far largest share of voters to parties of the Moderate Right and to green and left-libertarian parties.”

While some working-class voters have indeed defected from, say, Germany’s Social Democrats to the Alternative für Deutschland, this is not the main story. To the extent that social democratic parties lost voters over their positions on cultural questions, Abou-Chadi and Wagner show, they lost them primarily to green and left-libertarian parties with even more progressive positions. In their book’s conclusion, Häusermann and Kitschelt contend that these and other findings “disconfirm the widespread claim of social democratic parties having lost vote shares first and foremost because working-class voters allegedly shifted toward national-conservative parties.”

Attempting to “win back” working-class voters from the radical right by moving toward their positions on migration or cultural integration, as the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has tried to do in Germany, is therefore self-defeating: “Radical right voters are mostly recruited from center-right parties and from the pool of nonvoters. This also includes mostly workers who have never voted for parties of the Left in the first place.”

Much of the confusion over the political proclivities of “workers” stems from the persistent conflation of educational attainment and class location in both popular commentary and academic research. Shenk, for example, does it in the second page of his introduction: “Voters are divided by levels of education, which is a crude but useful proxy for class.”

Educational attainment is a very important predictor of political behavior today, but those credentials, in themselves, do not distinguish members of one class from another. Learning a trade, for example, doesn’t take a manual worker out of the working class. Like a college degree, it can help to secure a higher income or job security in the labor market, but a credential or a skill isn’t a capital asset like land, buildings, or machinery. Moreover, since educational attainment has an age gradient (i.e., it’s generally lower among older people than younger people), it is often something of a proxy for age. This may be one of the reasons why research finds stronger evidence for programmatic trade-offs among different age groups rather than class groups.

These may seem like merely academic questions, but they are not. They have real implications for our understanding of voters’ views and preferences, so it affects the way we think about political strategy and coalition building.

“Trump’s Kryptonite,” a useful study from the Jacobin-affiliated Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP), astutely reminds us that “when we measure the working class by educational attainment rather than occupational status, it appears that the working class is more conservative with respect to both economic and social policies than it is when measured by occupation.” If you’re going to use educational attainment as a proxy for class, or read class interests off the (non)possession of a college degree, you do so at your own analytical peril.

The research in Beyond Social Democracy employs an occupational class schema, originally developed by the Swiss sociologist Daniel Oesch, that seeks to overcome these kinds of analytical problems.

Oesch’s framework is a real advance over earlier approaches to mapping class locations developed in the postwar period. Unlike older schemas, it registers the massive expansion of the service sector and introduces a “horizontal” dimension that differentiates occupational work logics within the same class groups. There are meaningful differences, for example, between sociocultural professionals whose jobs stress interpersonal relations, and technical professionals who deal mostly with objects or impersonal processes.

For all its virtues, however, this framework suffers from an important conceptual limitation: it draws a line of distinction between professionals and the working class, when such a distinction seems increasingly untenable both analytically and politically.

Because Beyond Social Democracy’s contributors employ Oesch’s schema, they draw this line too. In doing so, they shift an important segment of working people — one that is relatively highly educated and tends to vote disproportionately for Democrats in the United States, social democrats and other left-wing parties elsewhere — to a hazily defined middle class, making the questionable decision to define class locations based on things like educational credentials.

Many of these workers identify as professionals and are widely regarded as such. Many, but not all, work in the public and nonprofit sectors. Some enjoy comfortable salaries and job security by virtue of their skills and credentials, but many others don’t. They are among the most highly unionized groups of workers across the rich capitalist democracies, including the United States.

In Häusermann and Kitschelt’s dispassionate phrasing, such “[p]eople with high education but comparatively low capital asset ownership and revenues have become a new core constituency of the social democratic electorate.” They strongly support redistributive economic policy and “share a commitment to multicultural openness, both in terms of immigration as well as domestic cultural diversity.”

The differences and potential fault lines between, say, sociocultural professionals and non-credentialed service workers shouldn’t be ignored. But there are clear opportunities, on the basis of both interests and values, for the Left to interpellate them together as members of the same broadly defined social class.

Against Political Reductionism

Trump’s second election win loosened a tide of takes on the baleful role of the Groups, a pejorative shorthand for progressive issue advocacy organizations, in tarnishing the Democratic Party’s image among working-class voters. Much of this commentary came from centrist pundits, but a portion of it came from the Left, raising the specter of a strange new hybrid: a kind of Democratic Leadership Council with Bernie Characteristics politics.

We see this in the way otherwise admirable Bernieworld figures like Faiz Shakir extol figures like Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), who affects an aesthetic of rural blue-collar authenticity while thumbing her nose at metropolitan progressives. But Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez and similarly positioned Democrats like Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) have backed bills like the noxious Laken Riley Act, which shreds due process for many immigrants and gives reactionary state attorneys general veto power over federal immigration enforcement. There is simply no room for this in a progressive, pro–working class political movement.

The weight of the evidence in Beyond Social Democracy clearly leans toward strategies that combine, in one fashion or another, “Old Left” and “New Left” programmatic appeals. In summing up the findings, Häusermann and Kitschelt conclude that such a combination “appears as the most promising in terms of voter reactions,” and that “new left programmatic appeals are strongly supported also by left-wing voters with lower education or income levels, as well as by voters with strong redistributive attitudes.”

Crucially, the volume’s chapter on union members’ support for the Left finds that “unionists tend to be more redistributive on the economic dimension, yet also more libertarian and universalist on the societal governance dimension and more inclusive on the immigration dimension.” Considering the continued importance of organized labor to progressive political mobilization, adopting positions that actually cut against the preferences of many unionists is a self-defeating proposition. Let us not forget that the occupational group with the highest union membership rate — education, training, and library workers — falls squarely within the sociocultural (semi)professionals category.

Since the research in Beyond Social Democracy focuses on West European countries, it’s fair to ask whether these findings are relevant to the United States. The findings presented in the “Trump’s Kryptonite” study mentioned above, which also uses the Oesch occupational class schema, point in the same direction.

That study finds, for example, that “[w]orking-class respondents are less polarized around social issues than are non-working-class respondents,” suggesting that the effect of right-wing social and cultural appeals “may be substantially weaker among working-class” respondents. When partisanship is taken into account along with class, the study finds that “Democratic working-class respondents strongly favor candidates promoting progressive social policies,” while Republican working-class respondents sharply oppose them.

It is not surprising that all Republicans, regardless of their class background, express strongly negative views of progressive social policy proposals. But according to the survey results, working-class Republicans also tended to view the suite of progressive economic policy proposals they were offered quite negatively, often more negatively than non-working-class independents and Democrats.

For example, of all the groups in the study, working-class Republicans were the most strongly opposed to a $20 minimum wage. Their opposition to this policy proposal was stronger than even non-working-class Republicans in the survey. This suggests the proposition that such voters are simply conservatives and are not likely to be “won back” by left-wing or progressive candidates no matter how populist those candidates may be, nor how far they move rightward on social and cultural issues.

It is crucial for Democratic candidates to stake out clearly progressive economic policy positions if they want to effectively appeal to winnable working-class voters. Winnable working-class voters care about these issues and often make voting decisions (including the decision to abstain) accordingly. By contrast, social policy issues like guns or abortion are often less important to them, including those with lower levels of education and income.

Candidates can win them over even if they don’t necessarily agree with progressive social policy positions, so long as those candidates also speak effectively to working-class economic needs and interests. At the same time, the voters for whom social policy issues are more salient, namely voters with college degrees, want Democratic candidates to stake out clearly progressive positions on these questions and to campaign on them.

The upshot, from both Beyond Social Democracy and “Trump’s Kryptonite,” is that the optimal electoral strategy for left-wing candidates and parties is to be consistently progressive on both economic and social issues, and to campaign forthrightly along both axes.

This conclusion contrasts with some prominent post-election arguments from the Left. For example, Bhaskar Sunkara recently argued for “a politics that is reductionist by design,” focused on pocketbook issues “in the practical application of its politics.”

But the Left isn’t the only actor in the political arena, and parties can’t just compete on the issues they choose. The Right puts its own issues on the political agenda, and progressive voters will not accept a strategy that focuses on a single programmatic dimension.

We would do well to internalize one of the most relevant findings from “Trump’s Kryptonite”: “[O]ur results also include an important caution for progressive candidates who might be tempted to keep quiet on social policy issues and pivot to other more popular economic issues. Our results indicate that when Democrats avoid stating their stances on social policies issues, respondents — particularly Democrats — punish them for not addressing important social issues they care about.”

This may be a “real conundrum for progressives,” considering how the US electoral system tends to punish the Left for having a social base more geographically concentrated in cities and metropolitan areas than the Right’s, a problem brilliantly analyzed by Jonathan Rodden in Why Cities Lose. There’s no clear solution absent the unlikely adoption of a multiparty, proportional representation system (and this is no panacea either, as a look at the state of European politics reveals). But it’s also a conundrum for those who would have progressives downplay, ignore, or triangulate on social policy issues for the sake of winning over working-class voters.

Contemporary political conflicts are irreducibly multidimensional and cannot, as Häusermann and Kitschelt put it, “be captured by simple wage earner/business class divisions alone or even primarily.” An economically reductionist politics is no way out of the challenges facing today’s left. Instead, we need to figure out ways to make more progressives, socialists, and Democrats in the hollowed out places where they are needed most.

This will not be easy. It will require a long-term commitment to place-based and workplace organizing beyond the rhythms of the electoral cycle. But there’s no other way forward.

Coda: New Party, Old Label?

It feels a bit odd to write all of this during the biggest constitutional crisis our country has experienced since 1861. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are running a smash-and-grab coup to hand even more wealth and power to the oligarchical billionaire class, particularly its reactionary vanguard in the tech sector. Writing about electoral strategy and coalition building in such a dire moment, when the very future of electoral democracy is uncertain, can seem almost beside the point.

But the second Trump administration can be understood, at least in part, as an attempt by a section of the ruling class to grapple with the developments described above, namely the progressive political potential of the educated, skilled workers they employed in their burgeoning companies.

As tech investor Marc Andreessen makes clear in a remarkable recent interview, these capitalists saw their employees organizing unions, protesting military contracts, demonstrating for racial justice, and denouncing sexism in the workplace — and hated it. So they turned to Trump and MAGA to smother what they experienced as an incipient revolution against them in the cradle. The “professional-managerial class” is their main target, but millions more will suffer from the fallout.

Even if the worst is averted, there is simply no going back to the status quo ante. This goes for all of our political institutions, including the Democratic Party itself. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the labor movement and the black freedom struggle united to accomplish a truly historic task: forcing racist, anti-labor Southern Democrats out of the party they had dominated for so long.

In their all-too-timely book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath remind us that “for the first time since Reconstruction, there is actually a political party that might bring” all the strands of America’s anti-oligarchy tradition “together at the center of its political program. It is the Democratic Party, no longer anchored in the reactionary precincts of the white South.” They are right, but there is a big catch: the Democratic Party has its own set of oligarchs and servants of wealth who stand in the way of the new reconstruction this country needs to restore the promise of democratic self-rule.

They are the Jim Crow Democrats of today, the hand that throttles the small-d democratic potential embedded in the party’s most progressive elements. As we fight the reactionary onslaught, let us begin, once again, to face down and throw out those Democrats who line up on the wrong side of the great moral and political question of our time. And perhaps, as Michael Harrington wrote amid an earlier moment of political upheaval, “a new party will bear an old label: the Democratic Party.”