Looking Ahead after Bernie
A Working-Class Politics in Search of Worker Support
Bernie Sanders’ campaign to win the Democratic primary revealed both the accomplishments and limitations of his movement. For a brief time following the Nevada caucuses, he was, remarkably, the favorite to win. The eventual victor, though labelled a moderate, can only be described as such because Sanders and his supporters have changed the context of Democratic Party politics so much in recent years. However, the consolidation of voters behind Joe Biden suggests that most Democrats doubted Sanders’ ability to realize his policy goals and disliked his personal style of politicking. Whether or not his ideas make a technically sound diagnosis for America’s ills was less of an issue than the limits of his relationship with primary voters.
As the left considers the path forward, it must grapple with the meaning of Sanders’ successes and failures. At 78, Sanders is unlikely remain the face of his movement for long. How can his supporters maintain the inspiration and clarity of his message, while adjusting their approach to persuade more voters to embrace it?
Like any political movement, one of the left’s key challenges is in developing a compelling story and language. Voters need these tools to make sense of their reality, recognize commonalities with people who don’t share their political perspective, and justify embracing the policies that leaders propose. Despite his flaws, Sanders has built a considerable foundation for his movement. At its core, his message is one of working-class solidarity. This frame, once a staple of the Democratic Party, occupied a dwindling portion of its messaging during the eighties and nineties in favor of inclusive but vague rhetoric about the middle-class. Sanders’ refrains, once lonely, have become familiar: millionaires and billionaires exploit workers, who must join together to reform the tax code, weaken corporations, enact universal health care, etc. It’s an old approach to politics that, in its most successful American form, forged the New Deal Coalition from an unlikely set of constituents: southern whites, northern blacks, urban ethnics, and reform-minded elites. Despite the many ethnic and racial animosities splitting the party in its mid-century heyday, most of its core members were truly working-class. If Democrats had a key institutional infrastructure during that era, it was provided by labor unions. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” helped him govern, to be sure, but these intellectual elites existed in a healthy tension with blue-collar supporters, the latter of whom successfully advocated for their own policy goals and provided the electoral muscle to win an impressive string of elections.
The most curious aspect of Sanders’ rhetoric was how, despite its popularity amongst many Democratic primary voters, it did not prove persuasive to most of the working-class electorate. His chief rival for left-leaning voters in the primary, Elizabeth Warren, who also explicitly organized her campaign around themes of economic inequality, faced the same dilemma. How can a movement succeed when the chief protagonists and beneficiaries of its ideology are largely unmoved by it?
Developing a message that can appeal across the working-class has become increasingly complicated since the late sixties, when the New Deal Coalition began to dissolve. The politics of the various elements of the working class have diverged, perhaps irreconcilably. In his 2012 book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, Jefferson Cowie details how the New Deal Coalition came apart between 1968 and 1982. He focuses on the white working-class people who, in his telling, gave up on the legacy of the New Deal. Increasingly economically insecure due to globalization and outsourcing, they embraced the Republican Party’s elevation of cultural issues, particularly in response to the excesses of sixties counterculture and the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, they were abandoned by Democratic politicians who increasingly sought votes among the growing professional/managerial class.
Cowie argues that a new wave of labor unrest during the early 70s could have led to another outcome. Labor leadership, until then largely dominated by white men, had a chance to welcome women and minorities into the fold. But, spurred by the reactionary head of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, it generally chose to protect its own, even going so far as to flirt with Nixon during the ’72 election. There was a chance, Cowie implies, to create a more inclusive story of the working class at that point, but it was gone by the end of decade, as cultural resentments and intra-class oppositions hardened. Sanders, who first won election as Burlington Mayor in 1981, did not draw the same lessons from this period as the Democratic strategists who pushed the party to move on from its confrontational traditions to the moderation embodied by leaders like Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton. Forty years later, Sanders based his presidential campaigns on the proposition that an inclusive working-class politics can once again yield an electoral majority.
Despite winning a passionate following and pushing the Democratic Party to the left, Sanders’ effort remains unfulfilled. The Republican Party can continue to rightly claim to be the party of choice for the white working-class, and the small portion of this class segment that still votes Democratic ultimately broke for Biden. Working-class black voters remain loyal, moderate Democrats; their overwhelming support for Biden was the key factor in halting Sanders’ momentum after the Nevada caucuses. The segment of the proletariat that was most receptive to Sanders’ pitch is its best-educated cohort — college grads stuck in the gig economy, who are saddled with student debt, low-quality health care, and difficult long-term job prospects. They are an important group, but they do not compose a sufficient base from which to win the White House, even when combined with professionals who vote with working-class interests in mind.
The irony is obvious: Sanders tells a story of solidarity among working people, but it doesn’t resonate with most of the people it’s designed to inspire. That reality should be the central question that the left tackles if it wishes to transform its movement into a political force truly capable of winning elections. If it can’t devise a story that appeals more effectively to its most basic potential constituency, then left politics will remain for the working class, rather than of it.
White Working-Class Distrust of the Left
Why do the left, and liberals more generally, have such difficulty appealing to white working-class Americans? Bernie Sanders has tried sincerely, and to considerable effect, to tell a story about the US economy that can unite the working class as a whole, but its resonance among working-class people, particularly those who do not possess bachelors degrees or who live outside of liberal cities, has proved limited. The people whom his message was supposed to bring into Democratic primary electorate mostly failed to show up.
Sanders enjoys considerable credibility with people who feel left out of mainstream Democratic politics, which is likely why he received so many protest votes in the 2016 primary campaign against Hilary Clinton. But, despite his consistency and independence from mainstream party politics, he, and other politicians who run to the left, face a serious issue simply by running as Democrats.
The Republican Party, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, has told working-class white people a powerful story that many left-leaning people dismiss too easily. This message has festered as Democrats, in the wake of the dissolution of the New Deal Coalition, began tailoring their message to middle-class professionals, leaving the (accurate) impression that they are uninterested in appealing to the white working-class. Republican candidates have filled the vacuum, routinely insinuating to these voters that liberal elites have coopted Federal government to enrich themselves and minorities. The tactic is rich with hypocrisy and cynicism, and it papers over massive gaps in its story, but it does address a reality of economic futility and contain bits of truth, despite the missing context. The affirmative action programs that Republicans vilify, for example, may be justified given the legacy of slavery and ongoing segregation, but to many working-class white people, they appear to function simply as legalized discrimination.
Liberals and members of the left counter the Republican narrative in two ways. Neither approach rebuts them effectively among the explicit target constituency, but they do serve a purpose in shoring up support among the well-educated constituencies that already lean left. First, liberals attempt to disqualify racial appeals on moral grounds — an upstanding but ultimately impotent tactic, at least with a white working-class audience increasingly sensitive to its racial identity and which regards certain kinds of racial stereotyping as a marker of blunt authenticity. Second, they point out the technical advantages of their own programs. A recent piece in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the well-known doctor and journalist, provides a noteworthy example of this latter technique. Gawande, a dedicated liberal, summarizes research investigating why mortality among poor and working-class white people in the US has risen so sharply in recent years, even as it improves among their black and Latino working-class counterparts. Concluding that the culprit for these “deaths of despair” is unemployment, exacerbated by the high costs of hiring for employers who must cover the bulk of health-care costs, he proposes shifting payment for health insurance (whether public or private) from employers to the government. Funding the system through a payroll tax would free employers from the disproportionate costs associated with hiring low-skilled workers. It’s a neat, rational solution that any ambitious, reform-minded politician on the left would be smart to embrace. Of course, its practical impact among the New Yorker’s well-heeled audience would be limited. Gawande’s argument boils down to noblesse oblige, despite the technocratic language. He is appealing primarily to readers’ moral concern for the white working-class, rather than their immediate self-interest, though by improving social welfare for those who suffer in the global economy, the policy will make capitalism more socially sustainable. I don’t intend these points as a criticism of Gawande’s analysis on technical grounds but simply to acknowledge that he, and the New Yorker, speak from a particular class position which by now has negligible credibility with the working-class white people who are the article’s primary subject.
The New Yorker is not an official organ of the Democratic Party, but it might as well be. Had it endorsed a primary candidate, it would undoubtedly have chosen Elizabeth Warren.
Most people in the working class have a remarkable ability to sniff out condescension (both real and imagined) and latent self-interest amongst their better-educated peers. As well-meaning as Gawande, or any liberal or left-leaning leader may be, they are automatically subject to suspicion amongst this group because of its fifty-year antipathy to liberalism and its suspicion that liberal and left ideas are, at bottom, self-serving.
Bernie is different: he sounds almost exactly the way he did in 1981. He very obviously did not enter politics to amass power or riches, and he disdains behavioral and stylistic markers of elitism. His allies, however, are very dubious from the point of view of most white working-class people. Moreover, he bowed to many realities of the contemporary Democratic coalition in his quest to become its candidate. He evolved to support liberal immigration policies, curtailed his support for gun rights, and embraced the explicit language of liberal identity politics in, among many other examples, deliberately referring to his “multigenerational, multiracial coalition.” Much has been written, justly, about how Bernie has pushed the Democratic Party to the left; what is less well appreciated is how the Democratic primary contests have made him (and Elizabeth Warren) a far more conventional politician. Cumulatively, these changes undercut his potential to appeal to the white working class and helped to make his dream of achieving a broad working-class politics unattainable, at least for now.
A Realistic Path to Build on Bernie’s Foundation
Despite the challenges of assembling a trans-racial working-class political movement, modeled on the old New Deal Coalition, there are some ways in which the left could make good on the potential of the movement Sanders has ignited. A crisis, flagrantly and publicly bundled by the Republican President, is at hand. We do not yet know how serious the damage will be, but the pandemic, and particularly the economic destruction it has unleashed, may shake suffering people from the political orthodoxies that have congealed since the 1970s. It is worth pointing out that although populist organizers and politicians first attempted to knit together a broad working-class alliance in the 1890s, it took the Great Depression to make the New Deal Coalition coalesce.
Most importantly, the left needs to consider the electorate with a realistic eye. Inspiration and energy are not enough; its strategy and tactics need a thorough overhaul. Vague calls for solidarity and revolution are unlikely to move people dealing with pressing pocketbook issues and inclined to distrust potential allies.
Clearly, the changes to the working class since the 1970s pose a massive challenge. The majority of wage laborers now work in the service sector, though manufacturing remains a major source of employment. While the working class was more diverse at mid-century than its popular image, it is now truly a rainbow, drawing from a vast array of ethnic identities, men and women, age groups, etc. Education is a particularly underappreciated source of difference within these ranks. Despite the stirring appeal of Sanders’ message, he was ultimately unable to transcend these divisions. Mainstream Democratic politicians have not given up on appealing to a broad swath of working people because they are fools. They concede much of the working class vote because they doubt a single unifying story can unite its fragmented segments as it did during the New Deal Era (maybe the old story wasn’t really so unifying either, as it excluded women and blacks in important ways). Their pursuit of centrist suburbanites is as much about pragmatic strategy as it is ideology. The left’s goal of a transcendent working-class politics may be possible, but its pursuit defies many expert analyses.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the politician generally thought most likely to carry on Sanders’ struggle. A 30 year-old Latina graduate of Boston University who worked as a bartender and political organizer before running for Congress, she appears to have little in common with an entry-level factory floor worker in Greenville, South Carolina, an itinerant farm laborer in California’s Central Valley, or a dental technician in Peoria, Illinois. She has experience with economic instability, yes, but of a variety that differs from what many potential allies have suffered. Just as during the Progressive Era, when union organizers struggled to unite people who understood their identity to be far more complex than simply economic class, these differences will not be overcome easily.
If Ocasio-Cortez or a movement peer is to unite the people I described above, they will need to ease the intra-class resentments among working-class people that have smoldered for half a century. That means responding directly to working-class concerns as they are, not as movement leaders imagine them to be. Trump’s popularity with the white working class provides important clues to strategy that might win some of its votes. Changing affirmative action from a race-based to class-based policy would be a good place to start, particularly as a symbolic gesture of inclusion. Why not institute hiring and admissions practices that favor all poor people, not only minorities? Additionally, Trump’s defense of entitlement programs shows that many members of the white working class do not necessarily oppose government intervention into the economy, but that they want to make sure they are primary recipients of Federal attention and largesse. Their concerns about immigration should also be taken seriously. This does not mean condoning the barbarity of Trump’s border policies, but it does likely entail accepting reasonable limits to immigration and maintaining control, though necessarily building a physical wall, along the US border with Mexico. These policy positions fit well within traditional leftism, and indeed have been adopted successfully by social democrats who have recently won power elsewhere in the world, but they have become unpopular in the US as the American left’s own version of cultural politics has gained prominence. Fearing accusations of racism and wary of making the hard choices that come with responsible leadership, liberal and left policy makers prefer to avoid acknowledging the obvious tension between a generous welfare state and liberal immigration policies.
The left will also need to increase its appeal to non-white working-class groups. On this front, Bernie made progress in 2020, particularly with Latinos, but the general limits of his appeal to blacks became clear. His failure with this constituency has less to do with his policy proposals — African-Americans have more faith in the welfare state, at least when administered by Democrats, than their white counterparts — than their justified skepticism that his campaign could make good on its promises. The challenge for the left now lies in developing leaders who can convince this constituency to embrace the political risk that the left offers — a daunting task, given its historic vulnerability. Surmounting this difficulty will take time, listening, and sustained personal outreach. Most importantly, the left needs to nurture organic, authentic voices that can make its case to this constituency, much as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has with Latinos and young people in general.
Finally, as part of this general outreach process, leaders of the left need to come to grips with the composition and posture of the movement beyond Bernie. Part of his appeal is his ability to speak plainly and directly, but many of the well-educated activists and academics who occupy key positions in the movement employ a language and tone that makes them seem out-of-touch and condescending. Is it a good idea, for example, to use a term, Latinx, to describe the fastest growing political constituency in the country, when most of the people who belong to this group have not adopted it?
A left politics that does not respect working-class sensibilities is bound to alienate its most vital constituency. While intellectuals and well-meaning professionals can contribute to the movement, it will resonate most authentically with working-class people only if it genuinely responds to their existing priorities, not those that it wishes from above that they hold. Noble policy ideas are meaningless unless the primary beneficiaries actually want them. As in most efforts to persuade people to join a cause, listening to them, avoiding patronizing attitudes, and truly empowering them to take on positions of leadership will demonstrate the genuine respect that is needed to win support and loyalty.
