Where Do Dems Go From Here? The Chimera of Appealing to the Working Class

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

In (what feels like) the thousand years since the election, the postmortems have been coming fast and furious, including one on this very blog. The theories for the Democratic debacle are many, from the perseverance of systemic racism and sexism, to the global turn to strongman leaders in times of strife, to the practical matter of Biden’s late withdrawal, to the triumph of individual-influencer culture over traditional media. But the leading explanation among pundits and party hand-wringers so far is that the Democrats have finally reaped the full repercussions for abandoning that briniest of all salt-of-the-earthers, the “Working Class.” As the story goes (and it largely a true one), Clinton’s triangulation strategy forsook the traditional mainstays of the party: unions and other blue-collar people, folks who shower after work, not before. And the Dems have been chasing big money and out-of-touch Hollywood stardom ever since, leaving the regular checkbook-balancers out in the cold, forcing them into the arms of culture war demagogues, almost against their will. This Democratic abandonment of the working class theme might be the most significant trope swirling around liberal circles right now (“Identity politics is dead, get back to household budget basics!”), but it is a mirage in the truest sense, a shimmery oasis of salvation that is forever fleeting, ultimately vanishing if approached too closely.

Before we get to the reasons why this rapprochement with working people is a fool’s errand, let’s start (as we always seem to) with Trumpism, to throw things into relief. Has Trump really addressed working class issues? Kind of, but only in the most cursory way. Mostly, what’s on offer from Trumpism is culture war and immigration on the one hand, and neo-Randian punishment of the parasites on the other (the “Rand” in “neo-Randian” here is Ayn Rand, of Atlas Shrugged fame). Neither of these strands of Trumpism has any serious content for helping actual working people. Both can be seen as delusional fantasies with built-in excuses for why they never seem to work (i.e., there are always plenty of Libs to blame for thwarting the plan). And in reality, this could hardly be otherwise, considering the complete stranglehold the plutocrats have on our economy, society, and culture, and considering the nature of the main mechanism deployed to accomplish this, the Polarization Industrial Complex.

Despite their sweeping electoral success last month, the GOP is actually in a touch spot right now, because there are three main segments to their current coalition: the Culture Warriors, the Neo-Randians (think Musk), and the recently-flipped pragmatists, who signed on for cheap gas and groceries. As the culture warriors and neo-Randians enact their programs of revenge, social revanchism, and economic austerity, the pragmatists will quickly become disillusioned, as the rollback of wokeism fails to spawn a miraculous surge of popular prosperity and general American awesomeness.

In the longer view, the coming failure of Trumpism is not surprising, because as consumer industrial capitalism continues its erosion of our ecosystems, our economies, and our psyches, conservatism only resonates because it is a grand narrative of grievance, heel-digging, and anti-change for anti-change’s sake, Trumpism is not a system designed to create anything positive emanating from government. In essence, the only positive side of Trumpism is to remove all the Democratic stuff, which will then allow the magical, automatic flowering of conservative utopia. And when it doesn’t work, Republicans will just say that they need more time to remove the stubborn residue of liberalism.

Trump’s favorite characterization of our myriad crises is that they are easy fixes, because all he’s really doing is removing the people who do bad stuff, and then just doing what he does, which is good by default. But of course, Trump doesn’t really care about remaking society for the better, for the masses. He’s just out for his own personal fortune and legacy (along with his progeny), and whatever else happens along the way is irrelevant. This will not leave much for his would-be successors to work with, even by 2026, let alone 2028. If Trump goes ahead with mass deportation, tariffs, and Musk’s haircuts, it is likely that those middle-of-the-road, oscillating pragmatists may just pendulum back to the Dems again, as they have been doing for the last 45 years or so.

But for Democrats, it would be a mistake to just wait for the Trumpists to do themselves in, assuming that the pendulum will swing back their way. And indeed, to their credit, most of them are not just sitting around. Thus the emerging theme in Democratic circles that the party needs to ‘reconnect’ with working people as their number one priority. This seems like a sensible, proactive, commonsense thing to do. After all, working people are the backbone of the nation, so opening up dialogue with those who labor seems like a no-brainer.

But this appeal to the working class is problematic for two reasons: first of all, it is a misunderstanding of the nature of Trumpism and of the Polarization Industrial Complex in general. Even the pragmatists who voted for Trump were not doing so for only economic reasons. The PIC is a highly-engineered, expertly-crafted narrative about class, character, and morality, and even those who claim to not believe Trump’s extreme rhetoric can’t help but be drawn into the intensely dualistic way of viewing the political/cultural landscape. Trump and the GOP are not just seen as better managers of practical matters. No, the PIC has created a potent mix of hard and soft sexism, racism, and petite bourgeois moralizing. So liberals are seen as weak, depraved, traitorous, and blasphemous. That means that there is no guarantee that the regular oscillation of middle-ground voters will automatically swing back to the Dems, even if economic conditions continue to erode. Even if the Democrats talk about working class policies all day long, every day, who in the Trump camp is actually going to listen to them, and will it be enough to overcome the decades-long project of dualistic demonization of the Left by the Right? It’s useful to remember that the most influential ads from the last cycle, according to polling, were spots about Harris supporting transgender rights, hardly something that could be considered a working class issue per se.

The second problem with the proposed Democratic appeal to working people has to do with content. What are Dems going to talk about? Are they just going to promise the same old thing: greened-up economic growth, maximum employment (with training for the ‘jobs of the future’), higher minimum wages, re-invigorated labor union membership, free daycare, free college, etc.? This is a pretty exhaustive laundry list, and on paper it looks great for working class fortunes. But the Dems have been talking about these things for years and years, and it’s not resonating with enough people.

Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where all of these liberal policy goals have become delusional, futile, or even counterproductive — and people sense that. Folks aren’t buying what the Democrats are selling. And what’s worse, what we actually need, considering the dire ecological straits we’re in, is the exact opposite of these pro-working-class ideas. We need less of everything, not more: less work, less production, less people, less growth, and a general reduction in economic and technological activity of almost every kind. We need to massively and rapidly reduce human impact on the planet, which means less of everything, everywhere.

So we’re at the point where Trumpism is engaged in a delusional, easy-answer fantasyland, where everything can be solved just by being tough, by removing the liberal evildoers, and by committing ourselves to a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia of sexual coercion, religious zealotry and indoctrination, strongman leadership, and a neo-Randian purging of economic parasites and the racially inferior. And the Democratic alternative on offer is another delusion, a Lake Wobegon fantasy where we can all be above average, working in the amazing green jobs of the future, driving our electric cars to employee-owned coops for our locally-sourced food and sundries. This is not a great menu of options.

On the practical side, the obsession with paid labor as the only route to actual, physical survival will become increasingly useless, as AI and the continued evolution of corporate practices will relentlessly erode the economic value of human skill and labor. This is a global phenomenon, and nothing we do in the US can force new wine into old wineskins. Paid employment will cease to be a realistic way of organizing our society. This will only be a catastrophe if we fail to use our social imagination to dream up and enact something different, another way to link together the strands of work, morality, and political identity.

The current lack of social imagination for real alternatives, as opposed to the chimeras on offer from Trump and the Dems, is not a surprise, because we have no concrete examples of a different way to live. This is why I push so heavily on this blog for a project building model Bigger Home Bases (BHBs), supported by a Universal Basic Income equivalent, which would then eventually be buttressed by a third stool-leg, Modern Money Theory, as the guiding philosophy of a federal spending plan that directly supports all Americans.

Democrats can’t just sit back and hope for the usual pendulum swing of anti-incumbent sentiment to come back their way. And they can’t just cobble together the usual tactics for helping the working class, because those things haven’t resonated so far, and they won’t work anyway, due to actual ecological and economic realities (this is perhaps why they haven’t resonated in the first place). And we certainly don’t want to see an endless parade of Dems to Joe Rogan’s studio, to the CMAs, and to the diners and rodeos of flyover-land.

Instead, the Dems should be , and should tell the uncomfortable truths that could seed the soil for a BHB/UBI/MMT national project: the old world of work is not coming back, so we need to create a radically-different central organizing mechanism for our country; the social engineering of Trumpism will not work, as it is an age-old scheme designed to perpetuate and augment the plutocratic stranglehold on our lives; yes, change is scary, but trying to exactly replicate formats from the past is not possible, no matter how much you might want it to be (as Walter Lippman wrote: “ People who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. “).

In a way, we could say that liberals should offer an easy-answer counterpart to Trumps’s dualistic-demonization easy answer. But the liberal version, if concretely enacted in a BHB/UBI/MMT project, would be a pincer-movement plan with simpler change coming from above (UBI/MMT), applied from below via the BHB. This would not actually be that complicated, but it contains the seeds of transformation that could yet save the world.

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on December 19, 2024.