Donald Trump’s impending return to the Oval Office will be a shattering experience for Democrats. The party and its supporters tried everything—mass demonstrations, impeachments, multiple indictments—and none of it worked. Trump isn’t just back—he now enjoys a higher level of popular support than ever before, including among racial minorities.
The 2024 election results have made it impossible to ignore the increasing narrowness of the party’s electoral base. As the economist Thomas Piketty has long argued, the Democrats have evolved into a “Brahmin” party, supported by citizens with high levels of income and education, even as the less affluent have moved toward the Republicans. What is less widely recognized is that the most pronounced elitism is found in the activist wing of the party, which often presents itself as representing working-class interests. I refer here not only to the Democratic Socialists of America and The Squad, but also to an ever larger share of the labor movement.
The left’s upper-crust appeal is well established. The most comprehensive study of this phenomenon is a 2018 report from the More in Common Foundation. This study divided Americans into seven ideological categories, with “progressive activists”—the most left-wing category of all—representing 8 percent of the population. Progressive activists had the highest average incomes and educational levels of any of the seven categories. The basic picture was confirmed in a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, which divided the US population into nine categories, from right to left, with “the progressive left” being the farthest left. The study showed that the progressive left was one of “the two most highly educated groups overall.”
“This image of a unionization uptick is a mirage.”
Defenders of progressive activism have disputed such charges of elitism, insisting that we can productively combine appeals to identity with those directed at class issues. In this vein, the labor studies professor and activist Eric Blanc argued last year that Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, and immigration struggles had fueled an “uptick” in unionization drives. But this image of a unionization uptick is a mirage. In 2023, unions represented only 10 percent of the overall workforce—the lowest level of union membership since the Great Depression, almost a century ago. Despite some recent union successes, the overall picture is one of steady decline.
What is more, the sectors of the workforce that are most heavily unionized—notably teachers and social-service workers—represent some of the most educated segments of the labor force. There has also been unionization on college campuses, representing faculty, graduate students, and staff. Labor organizers have proven far less effective, however, in reaching non-college-educated workers. More than 60 percent of US adults don’t have bachelor’s degrees, and they have mostly remained outside the union movement. On these grounds, The Economist recently declared that the US union movement is “gentrifying,” in that it increasingly represents the better-paid and better-educated elements of the workforce.
Perhaps we will eventually see a resurgence of a labor movement that represents the majority of workers, reversing previous trends. But if such a movement does emerge, it will be in spite of rather than because of the left.
Historically, the political left had its base in the broad American working class. This base existed not only in New York and coastal urban areas, but also in rural states, including Oklahoma. An academic study of socialism in Oklahoma was piquantly titled When Farmers Voted Red. Academics were also part of the socialist movement, but they were considered secondary to the working-class base and were expected to support and speak to that base. In 1936, Scottish academic Lancelot Hogben published Mathematics for the Million, which brought “the magic of numbers” to ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic. In Arkansas, the Socialist Party founded Commonwealth College, which educated working class youth.
The American left was largely destroyed in the early Cold War, the victim of McCarthyite attacks and FBI intimidation. When it was later revived as the New Left, its social base relocated from the factory floor and union hall to the more comfortable venue of the college campus. And after the 1968 election, the Democratic Party too began pitching its appeals to better-educated voters, a tendency that has accelerated over time. The elitist left was born.
When the US military withdrew from Vietnam, the antiwar movement that had anchored the New Left disappeared, and the left fragmented into separate organizations organized around themes of race, gender, and sexual preference, as well as environmentalism. The new social movements of the 1970s had little connection with low-income people. A study of feminist abortion-rights activists, for example, found that most were high-income and well-educated. The same was true of environmentalism.
The bourgeois slant of progressivism had a marked influence on the popular culture of the 1970s, which presented a dim view of working people, especially white males. In some of the most popular movies of the decade—Joe, Deliverance, Taxi Driver, Billy Jack, Easy Rider, Saturday Night Fever—working-class and rural whites were presented as ignorant, racist, and violent. The much beloved television show All in the Family also presented a negative view of the working class, with a heavy tone of condescension directed at the blue-collar character Archie Bunker.
The contrast with earlier eras of left activism was striking. During the 1930s and 1940s, progressive artists had celebrated the working class in public murals, such as those in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, in which ordinary people were depicted in heroic terms. The composer Aaron Copland, later blacklisted for his communist sympathies, produced Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942. By the 1970s, however, the common man was widely viewed with suspicion and contempt.
The left thus opened itself to a backlash, spearheaded by Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew, who in 1969 denounced the “snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” This was the opening salvo in the culture wars that rage on today. The right would time and again denounce liberals and leftists as snobs; the left had no effective response, since the accusation was bleakly accurate.
The surging culture wars of the 1970s took place against the backdrop of a mobilization by America’s wealthiest citizens that aimed at reversing the labor-friendly policies of the New Deal. The wealthy spent vast sums of money on building a dense infrastructure of free-market think tanks, lobbying groups, and publicity agencies, all aimed at achieving a policy revolution that favored the already well-to-do. The effort culminated in the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both of whom moved the policy consensus in a pro-business direction. In the end, the rightist juggernaut achieved success in shifting policy, effectively overturning much of the New Deal order and allowing wealth to once again be concentrated to extraordinary levels.
“A gentrified left was simply no match for the New Right.”
This happened in part because business interests met almost no serious opposition from a left that was overwhelmingly focused on non-economic issues, based as it was in an educated and affluent constituency. A gentrified left was simply no match for the New Right.
The massive concentration of wealth resulting from the pro-business policies of the neoliberal era finally produced a popular backlash after the 2008 financial crash, the worst since the 1930s. Commentaries critical of economic inequality began to appear not only in liberal and left-wing publications, but even in some conservative outlets. In addition, there was growing opposition to overseas interventions, especially among combat veterans who felt they had been used to benefit the rich. The political ground gradually shifted against wealth concentration and militarism, leading some conservatives to become disillusioned with the GOP establishment.
One could view these shifts as an opportunity for progressives to expand their base and achieve an authentic realignment of US politics. If elements of the right are becoming critical of free-market capitalism, why not recruit them into a broad coalition for fundamental economic reform? But for the most part, the American left has refused to do this—and indeed, has stigmatized those among its ranks who attempted any outreach of this sort.
“If the left fails to mobilize the working class, the right will do so instead.”
The fallout of the popular podcaster Joe Rogan’s 2020 endorsement of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid was a particularly revealing incident. When Sanders cited Rogan’s statements of support in his campaign advertisements, there was uproar among his supporters, who detested Rogan for his views on gender issues. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ceased campaigning for Sanders, effectively boycotting his campaign for a time. Sanders ultimately succumbed to the pressure and distanced himself from Rogan, losing an opportunity to expand the left’s base of support. After Trump scored Rogan’s endorsement in 2024 and went on to win the election, some on the left called for “a Democrat Joe Rogan,” seemingly having forgotten that Rogan’s endorsement of a Democrat in the previous cycle was met with horror and outrage.
I have spent my whole life on the left end of the political spectrum, a political identity I retain today. However, I have come to believe the left bears a large measure of blame for its own unpopularity. The underlying problem is that the left disparages working people, especially those who lack a college degree. And it is a basic rule of politics that if the left fails to mobilize the working class, the right will do so instead. That is exactly what has happened.