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working class
Revenge of the Deplorables?
Think about it this way, maybe it's the Democratic Party which has become deplorable to the working class.
Nov 20, 2024
Did the working class, especially its white members, elect Donald Trump again because they are basically racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic? Are they craving a strongman who can protect white supremacy from a flood of immigrants and put the woke liberals in their place? Didn’t Harris lose primarily because she’s a woman of color?
More than a few progressives, as well as the New York Times, believe these are plausible explanations for Harris’s defeat. I’m not so sure.
The working class started abandoning the Democrats long before Trump became a political figure, let alone a candidate. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the working-class vote; In 1996, Clinton 50 percent; In 2012, Obama 40.6 percent; and in 2020, Biden received only 36.2 percent.
This decline has little to do with illiberalism on social issues. Since Carter’s victory, these workers have become more liberal on race, gender, immigration and gay rights, as I detail in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers.
These voters of color don’t fit comfortably into that basket of deplorables Hillary Clinton described, but they are a part of the working class that’s been laid off time and again because of corporate greed.
Furthermore, my research shows that mass layoffs, not illiberalism, best explains the decline of worker support for the Democrats. In the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, as the county mass layoff rate went up the Democratic vote went down. The statistical causation, of course, may be off, but the linkage here between economic dissatisfaction and flight from the Democratic Party is straightforward.
Did the Working Class Give Trump 1.9 Million More Votes?
Trump improved his vote total from 74.2 million in 2020 to 76.1 in 2024, an increase of 1.9 million. Did the white working class support him more strongly this year?
No. According to the Edison exit polls, Trump’s share of the non-college white vote dropped from 67 percent in 2020 to 66 percent in 2024. (For 2020 exit polls see here. For 2024 see here.)
In fact, the largest increase for Trump this year came from non-white voters without a college degree. Trump’s percentage of these voters jumped from 26 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024. These voters of color don’t fit comfortably into that basket of deplorables Hillary Clinton described, but they are a part of the working class that’s been laid off time and again because of corporate greed.
The Defection of the Border Democrats
Perhaps the most astonishing collapse of the Democratic vote is found in the Texas counties along the Rio Grande. Take Starr County, population 65,000, most of whom are Hispanic. Hillary Clinton won that county by 60 percent in 2016. Trump won it this year by 16 percentage points, a massive shift of 76 percentage points, almost unheard of in electoral politics. Trump won 12 of the 14 border counties in 2024, up from only five in 2016. Interviews suggest that these voters are very concerned by uncontrolled border crossings, inflation, and uncertainly in finding and maintaining jobs in the oil industry.
(I hear whispers among progressives that Hispanic men just don’t like women in leadership positions. Yet just across the Mexican border, Hispanic men seemed quite comfortable recently electing a female president.)
The Big Story Is the Overall Decline of the Harris Vote
Harris received 73.1 million votes in 2024, a drop of 8.3 million compared with Biden’s 81.3 million votes in 2020. That’s an extraordinary decline. Who are these voters who decided to sit it out?
So far, while the final votes are tallied and exit polls are compiled, it looks like they are a very diverse group—from young people upset about the administration’s failure to restrain Israel to liberals who didn’t like watching Harris go after suburban Republicans by palling around with arch-conservatives Liz and Dick Cheney.
Personally, I think many working-class voters of all shades sat on their hands because Harris really had so little to offer them. Harris was viewed as both a member of the establishment and a defender of it, and the establishment hasn’t been too considerate of working-class issues in recent decades.
Many working-class voters of all shades sat on their hands because Harris really had so little to offer them.
Harris’ highly publicized fundraising visit to Wall Street certainly made that clear. And in case we missed that signal, her staff told the New York Times that Wall Street was helping to shape her agenda. It’s very hard to excite working people by arguing, in effect, that what’s good for Wall Street is also good for working people.
The John Deere Fiasco
For me, the symbolic turning point was the Harris campaign’s pathetic response to the John Deere company’s announcement about shipping 1,000 jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. Trump jumped on it right away, saying that if Deere made that move, he would slap a 200-percent tariff on all its imports from Mexico. If I were a soon-to-be-replaced Deere worker, that would have gotten my attention.
The Harris campaign responded as well, but not in a way that would convince workers that she really cared about their jobs. The campaign sent billionaire Mark Cuban to the press to claim such a tariff would be “insanity.” He and the campaign said not one word about the jobs that would soon be lost. Trump promised to intervene. Harris promised nothing.
The sad part is that the Biden-Harris campaign could have at least tried. They had the power of the entire federal government. They could have cajoled and bullied, waved carrots and sticks. In short, they could have easily made a visible public effort to prevent the export of those good-paying jobs by a highly profitable corporation that was spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enrich Wall Street and it’s CEO. Here was a chance to defend jobs against overt greed. Instead, they essentially told working people that Harris wasn’t willing to fight for those jobs.
But Didn’t the Working-Class Abandon Sherrod Brown?
I haven’t yet found any comprehensive demographic data about Brown and his working-class support. We do know, however, that he ran well ahead of Harris. Brown lost his Senate race by 3.6 percent in Ohio compared to a Harris loss by 11.5 percent.
Rather than blaming working-class voters for not rejecting Trump out of hand, the Democrats should reflect on the failure of their brand and their failure of nerve.
Brown knew that he was carrying a heavy load as a Democrat, especially because of the passage of NAFTA, which was finalized during Bill Clinton’s presidency. As Brown put it: “The Democratic brand has suffered again, starting with NAFTA…. But, what really mattered is: I still heard it in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.”
Brown, as a loyal Democrat, was stuck with that dubious brand, and with Harris, as she was clobbered in Ohio. Tom Osborne, the former local labor leader and a refreshing political newcomer, shed the Democratic Party burden by running as an independent in Nebraska. He lost his Senate race by 6.8 percent compared to 10.9 percent for Harris. Brown did better than Osborne but it’s highly likely that both did much better than Harris with working-class voters.
Maybe the Democratic Party Has Become Deplorable to the Working Class
Rather than blaming working-class voters for not rejecting Trump out of hand, the Democrats should reflect on the failure of their brand and their failure of nerve.
- Biden’s ego kept him in the race at least a year past his sell-by date and the Democratic leadership did not have the nerve to act until he completely lost it in the June debate with Trump. (A few of us urged Biden to step aside in November 2023).
- Harris was anointed without going through a rigorous primary process. She failed miserably at that in 2020, and she probably was not the strongest potential Democratic candidate this time around either.
- Refusing to run on a strong progressive populist platform pushed much of the working-class to Trump. The Center for Working Class Politics survey of Pennsylvania showed that a strong populist message was the most popular among working class voters, and that the Harris focus on democracy was the weakest issue for that group. But the Harris campaign doubled down on the democracy issues late in the campaign and paid the price.
- The failure to say anything at all about mass layoffs and stock buybacks was nothing short of political malpractice.
- And placating Wall Street was flat out deplorable.
Will the Democrats learn from this debacle and change their ways? I’m not optimistic. They are the defenders of the liberal elite establishment and have grown very comfortable (and prosperous) in that role.
We may not have all the data we desire or need as yet, but we know this much: something has to change. And that change is not going to come from the old guard of this deplorable Democratic Party establishment.
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When David Brooks Goes 'Bernie Bro' (Sort of)
The longtime conservative NYT columnist is certainly not a member of the political left. But his recent admission still has something to offer us.
Nov 14, 2024
Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times’ most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” To read his “morning-after” piece—“Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”—might well make you think so.
Responding to the polls showing that more working-class voters in all their diversity had voted for the Trump/Vance ticket than for that of Harris/Walz, Brooks proffered nothing less than an historical class-analysis of what had led them to turn from the “Party of the People” to the party of a billionaire real-estate mogul and his Make America Great Again politics. In fact, even before Sanders himself issued a post-election attack on the Democratic Establishment stating that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Brooks charged the Democrats with having failed to fulfill their primary political responsibility.
“The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality," wrote Brooks. "Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it.” And he then went on to declare: “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
So, has Brooks joined the Left—and if so, why should we care?
I have always taken Brooks seriously, going all the way back to his years writing for The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative magazine published by Rupert Murdoch and edited by Bill Kristol. Brooks originally caught my attention because he was posing questions about the “purpose and promise of America” that I sincerely believed needed addressing, but which my left comrades— in contrast to past progressives and radicals from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr.—were failing to ask, if not outright scorning them.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here...
At the same time, I never failed to recognize that as much as Brooks was asking the right questions—most notably in “A Return to National Greatness” (1997); “What is America For?” (2014) and “What are We Supposed to Do (about the growing class divide and the impending nomination of Trump)? (2016)—he was consistently offering the wrong answers. As I wrote in response to the second of those pieces: “(How could the conservative Brooks effectively answer that question?) How could he possibly appreciate and write informatively of America’s purpose and promise—the promise inscribed in our historical memory and imagination by Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s Declaration, the Founders’ Preamble to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech? How could he appreciate the promise that inspired not just a revolutionary war, but also generations of Americans to struggle to expand both the “We” in “We the People” and the democratic process through which “the people” can genuinely govern themselves?”
Brooks, unlike his own comrades on the right, had never been completely oblivious to questions of class. But he never wrote the kind of piece that he did on November 6 of this year—a populist class analysis and narrative that clearly holds the nation’s elites accountable for Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2020. The very title of the column signals Brooks new sympathies. While he definitely has no affection or admiration for Trump and the MAGA crowd, he takes seriously the working-class voters who lined up with them on Election Day. Notably, he does not dismiss them as simply “deplorables,” as so many liberals have done ever since 2016. “There will be some on the left,” he writes, “who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again…. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.”
As Brooks tells it, the past 40 years of American history, which he dubs the “information age,” saw the emergence of a post-industrial class structure, a society divided into two classes, that is, a governing class of highly educated university graduates and a lower class of the less educated, in essence, the working class. In this order, “those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the post-industrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies [trade policy, immigration policy, education policy, environmental policy, and technology policy] to meet our needs.” And while “we” benefited, the less educated definitely did not. They have endured, he points out, not only lower incomes, less financial security, and fewer social and cultural opportunities, but also less healthy and shorter lives. Making this social order all the more oppressive, he says, the educated class has looked down upon and lorded it over those beneath them: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.”
Inevitably, the “chasms” created “led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal” on the part of the working class.
He acknowledges that the Democratic Party was not insensible to inequality. But it “focused on racial inequality, gender inequality, and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality,” not class inequality. And he states, as “the left veered toward identitarian performance art,” Donald Trump “jumped into the class war with both feet...” and put together what the “Democratic Party once tried to build – a multiracial working-class majority.”
Of course, Brooks notes that “the Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus.” But he observes: “there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.”
With those words Brooks himself answers the question posed at the outset: Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” For all of his expressed populist sympathies and sensibilities, Brooks is not one of us. Sure, respect matters—it matters deeply. But it wasn’t the lack of respect that brought about the class divide and the injustices endured by working people.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here and what we need to do not only to begin to find our way out of the political abyss into which we have fallen, but also go on to lead Americans to truly transcend the ever intensifying crisis of democracy that we will surely continue to confront.
So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been...
In short, Brooks’ narrative ignores the real class war from above waged these past 50 years by corporate bosses, Republican conservatives, and yes, Democratic neoliberals—a class war against the democratic rights secured and the progressive achievements accomplished during what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “Long Age of Roosevelt” from the 1930s to the early 1970s. That “great sucking sound” to which Brooks refers was not simply sucking up and redistributing respect upwards to an educated class. Even more so, it was sucking up the wealth that working people were producing and redistributing it up to multimillionaires and billionaires.
Brooks says, “The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking.” That’s putting it mildly. To save the Democratic Party and redeem the nation from the grip of billionaires and reactionaries, and the serious threat of outright Fascism, the Democrats are going to have to not only join with the Labor Movement in favor of articulating a progressive and social-democratic vision and agenda that polls repeatedly show the great majority of Americans truly want. They will also have to stop promising to fight for the people and, by their own actions, start encouraging the fight in the people.
Okay. So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been (fascists can do that to you). Thus, he can be an important ally in the struggle to defend and enhance democracy. From his perch at the Times, he speaks to not only conservatives, but also to moderate Democrats, without whom we cannot transform the Democratic Party and start taking back America.
So, David, welcome to the left, sort of.
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Beware the Fasci-Clown: Working Class Anxiety in an Age of Climate Catastrophe
Much of the working class, feeling neglected and sidelined by the Democratic Party for decades, are increasingly prepared to allow Trump to twist and turn their grievances into shapes that fit a fascist agenda.
Nov 13, 2024
We now live during the time of the fasci-clown. In post-election analyses, all the discussions of the appeal of his racism and patriarchy capture important things. But they may not speak starkly enough to why these sentiments run so deep and cut so broad a swath, though for different reasons, through both the white donor class and so much of the working class. Neither do they explain how and why growing segments of the populace laugh so much at Trump's fascist humor. Dressing up and clowning as a "garbage man" illustrates only one recent instance of that conjunction.
The donor class knows, and much of the working class senses, that neoliberal capitalism cannot survive in its old form for much longer. Knowing that, the donor class intends to capture as much wealth and power as it can in the time left to it, prepared to support a transition from neoliberalism to fascism if that is what it takes. Elon Musk is a perfect exemplar here, turning Twitter into a propaganda machine, becoming the fasci-clown’s Goebbels, and informally assuming the role of his economic lieutenant, preparing to impose punishing austerity in the name of a restoration of a pre-New Deal government. So much of the working class, feeling neglected and sidelined by the Democratic Party for decades, are increasingly prepared to allow Trump to twist and turn their grievances into shapes that fit a fascist agenda.
Why? Filtering into the sense of extreme entitlement of the superrich and desperation of growing segments of the working class-- sliding into those intensities in ways electoral polls do not directly capture--is a sense that the old alternatives are not working and cannot be sustained into the indefinite future. Workers, for instance, probably do not truly believe that climate wreckage is a liberal farce. Many sense that it is real, but that attempts to really reckon with it would leave them in the lurch. So they laugh at the clown's outrageous jokes, hateful comments about women, race, transgender people and immigration, and allow the fasci-clown to twist their grievances into support for his themes.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler, the fascist, malignant narcissist, and vicious humorist, summarized in two sentences the essence of his campaign to become Fuhrer:
"It belongs to the genius of a great leader to make even adversaries far removed from one another to belong to a single category, because in weak and uncertain characters the knowledge of having different enemies can only too readily lead to the beginning of doubt in their own right." And: "If he suspects they do not seem convinced by the soundness of his argument, repeat it over and over with constantly new examples."
The irony, just lurking below the rhetorical surface, is that neoliberal capitalism, in both the past and today, fosters the climate wreckage that helps to drive refugees north; and it will increasingly do so in the future.
For Hitler, writing after the massive German defeat in WWI, high inflation, and the return of hardened soldiers from battle with no jobs, Jews became the "red thread" to which he tied, through constant repetition, military defeat, social democracy, and communism. He thus condensed multiple adversaries into one enemy. For Trump, living during a time when imperial instabilities and climate wreckage create more and more refugees heading from southern to northern states, immigrants of color become the new red thread. The stagnation of the working class, the problems facing large cities, the "uppity-ness" of women of color, the snarky-ness of the liberal snowflake, and the loss of "black jobs," are all tied to the red thread of immigration. As you intensify opposition to immigration by, first, treating immigration as something insidious as such, and, second, linking it to everything else you oppose, you thereby loosen the rhetorical reins previously restraining public attacks on women, Blacks, Democrats, cities, and secularists. They are all now placed on the same line of associations, with resentments to any one magnified by those felt against others. A brilliant, cruel campaign.
The irony, just lurking below the rhetorical surface, is that neoliberal capitalism, in both the past and today, fosters the climate wreckage that helps to drive refugees north; and it will increasingly do so in the future. That is the truth that Trump and his followers must resist and shout down whenever it rears its ugly head. That is one reason racism must be intensified by the fasci-clown. This core truth must never be acknowledged: America works to produce the immigration it increasingly abhors.
But what about us? That is, what of those of us on the democratic left who have resisted Trump, supported Harris, and oppose the regime the fasci-comic seeks to impose? We participate, in at least one way, in the very condition we resist. As neoliberal capitalism morphs toward fascist capitalism during the second Trump term, we too have failed to come up with an alternative that could both work and attract droves from the working and middle classes to it.
This core truth must never be acknowledged: America works to produce the immigration it increasingly abhors.
As productive capitalism forges a future it cannot sustain in the face of growing climate wreckage, as many flirt with fascist capitalism to avoid facing this truth, nobody really believes in the alternative models of rapid growth and mastery over nature supported by classical social democracy and communism either. The danger of fascist capitalism, indeed, is tied to the failure of other familiar critical traditions to respond in a credible and sufficient way to the time of climate wreckage. This failure insinuates itself inside climate denialism and casualism today.
Such a failure encourages many to deny climate wreckage, that is, to embrace fascist tendencies. It may also encourage others to pretend that it can be resolved within either old forms of productive capitalism or one of the twentieth century alternatives to it. So, we critics, too are caught in a bind. We insist that immigration is good economically, by which we mean that it will lead to greater economic growth, when the truth is that the pursuit of that growth is at the heart of our current crisis. Is our failure connected in some subliminal sense to the growing attractions of many others to Big Lies today, to lies that growing numbers embrace without necessarily believing?
Our sense—though we cannot prove it—is that growing attractions to, and tolerances for, fascist capitalism within the working classes is tied to a larger intellectual failure to show how to evolve a political economy that curtails the future scope of climate wreckage while speaking to real grievances and anxieties of the working class writ large. Unless and until that happens it will not be that hard for fasci-clown leaders to attract the billionaire class and capture large segments of the working class. Fascist humor flourishes when no other responses to deep grievances appear credible.
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