Portside

No American ever did more to create an abundant economy that benefited the working class, or more to regulate the economy in ways that constrained capital and benefited the working class, than Franklin Roosevelt. So, forgive me if I think that the real divisions within today’s Democratic Party aren’t fundamentally those separating the “abundance” crowd and the pro-regulatory crowd. Those divisions are real enough, but I think they are largely stand-ins for a more fundamental set of differences about what the Democrats should do to regain the support of the American working and middle classes.

The measure of a first-class mind, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs and not be paralyzed by the contradictions. In this instance, I don’t even think that the tenets of abundance-ism and those of a critique of American capitalism are necessarily or invariably counterposed. Jon Chait in The Atlantic and Molly Ball in The Wall Street Journal have both written that these differences have led to an intra-Democratic civil war. But that’s only because they’re proxies for the real internecine conflict.

After all, it should be clear that it’s the economically powerful—whether you call that homeowners associations opposed to apartments in their neighborhoods or corporate giants opposed to the emergence of new corporate rivals—that disproportionately invoke regulations to stop the intruders, whoever they may be. An entrenched economic power will often use whatever power it can access to thwart the emergence of newcomers who may threaten its power.

Just because abundance advocates may attack restrictive zoning regulations doesn’t mean they necessarily support repealing the laws restricting what banks can do with depositors’ savings, or consumer product safety standards. By the same token, a pro-regulation (or even pro–public ownership) critic of capitalism doesn’t necessarily support keeping every regulation in place, particularly in times when the public interest requires public initiatives. As the Obama administration struggled to generate job-producing projects during the much-too-slow recovery from the 2008 crash, the regulatory obstacles to getting those projects off the ground condemned millions of Americans to unemployment or part-time gig work, as I documented at the time in Prospect pieces. The contrast with FDR’s success at putting more than 10 percent of the nation’s workforce to work on public projects within a mere two months was instructive, and sobering.

The anger that the male working class feels is most commonly expressed in cultural and racial antagonisms, but its root cause is economic.

Still, the two sides of this conflict are having at each other these days, though I think it really stems from their conflicting ideas as to how the party can win back its onetime working-class base. Each side begins with acknowledging the loss of that base, and the acquisition of a new base among more affluent college-educated voters. Centrists believe that Democrats need to distance themselves from some of the beliefs and policies associated with this new, more educated base: cultural norms, minority-oriented identity politics, and in some cases, a more egalitarian economics. Leftists defend a number of those cultural norms and identity politics, but not as audibly as they did before last November, and want to double down on those more egalitarian economics.

Both sides, I think, misunderstand the root causes of the working class’s estrangement from center-left politics, which now defines politics not just in the U.S. but throughout almost every nation with an advanced economy. The anger that the male working class in particular feels toward elites targets both cultural and economic norm-setters, but even as it’s most commonly expressed in cultural and racial antagonisms, its root cause is economic. At bottom, it’s the recognition that manual labor is no longer compensated at levels that can sustain a family or a stable work life, and the fear that this will only grow worse.

The lives lived by these young men’s fathers or grandfathers are no longer attainable. Manufacturing requires radically fewer workers than it once did, while offshoring and deunionization have greatly reduced the compensation for those still working in factories. Construction is considerably more mechanized than it was 30 years ago, and robots loom over the transportation and warehousing sectors. Jobs in retail, health services, and education usually don’t pay very well, and require different skill sets from those that many working-class men possess. Even warfare no longer needs masses of soldiers; a single drone operator can now wipe out Russian bomber squadrons while sitting at a desk.

It would be astonishing if these changes didn’t produce a rage at the established order, which has lost its capacity to provide the kind of broad-based prosperity of the post–World War II economy. As the reality and prospects of a sustainable, non-precarious working-class life have vanished, it’s completely understandable that rage at elites has soared. It’s characteristically been accompanied by a disdain for the liberal orders that are both out of reach economically and culturally alien to some working-class norms. It’s also been accompanied by a cult of hypermasculinity (often faux hypermasculinity, but the appearance can be all) as a form of compensation for the decentering of, and diminished value placed on, manual labor.

My friend Jim Lardner recently remarked that there’s an “anger gap” between the two parties. Republicans come before voters fairly drenched in anger; right-wing media have been exploiting and stoking it for decades. During that time, Democrats have generally “gone high” and appealed to the better angels of voters’ natures. The differing tones of the Harris and Trump campaigns provided a kind of reductio ad absurdum to this gulf.

The two wings of the Democratic Party are now addressing that anger gap in very different ways. The centrists want to reposition the party’s social policies, to diminish or disown many of the younger progressives’ cultural norms, in order to tamp down the working class’s anti-Democratic cultural rage. At the same time, they deny the economic fury that underlies that working-class anger, arguing that economic populism provides no cure for the Democrats’ ailments—even though poll after poll shows that economic populist positions like more progressive taxes, more government-funded health coverage, more unionization, more worker rights, and higher minimum wages are very popular with working-class voters. They conflate the economic leftism of many younger Democrats with their cultural leftism, though polls show that levels of popular support for those two forms of progressivism couldn’t be more different. They rage at the Democratic left for its support of both those species of leftism, which only positions them as a target of the working class’s economic fury.

Leftists want to direct that economic fury to the financial architects of the working class’s instability; that’s why Bernie Sanders connects not just with left populists but many right populists as well. There’s no anger gap in the Bernie road shows; there’s an acknowledgment of the anger, and a pellucid presentation that directs it at the real authors of working-class distress. While Sanders’s socialism is alien to most Americans, it also inoculates him from the taint of being part of the establishment, which is a major plus to populists of all descriptions, and many not-quite-populists as well.

Democrats may succeed in tamping down the prominence of some cultural norms that repel potential voters, but they won’t win elections until they are also in touch with working-class anger. Republicans have working-class cultural rage covered; there’s no room for any Democrats who seek to go there, even if it didn’t require repudiating some norms that Democrats quite rightly defend. If the anger gap is to be closed, it will be by someone in the mold of Sanders: calling out the authors of our discontent and charting some paths to viable working-class lives.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.