Psst. The Working Class Is Moving Left on Social Issues

Just not as fast as the Brahmin left, so Democratic politicians are still wise to sidestep most social issues and focus instead on economic populism.

The East German uprising of 1953.

In his famous poem “The Solution,” about the East German uprising of 1953, Bertolt Brecht commented on leaflets distributed by the Communist authorities that complained the people “had forfeited the confidence of the government” and would have to win it back. To that, Brecht replied acidly:

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

I think about that quote when I remember that Donald Trump won back the presidency fair and square, spending less money than his opponent and securing, in addition to an Electoral College majority, a popular-vote plurality. (See my December piece, “Democracy Is No Bulwark Against Oligarchy.”) Democrats don’t propose dissolving the people, but they do flirt with writing off the working class, which constituted 57 percent of the electorate in the 2024 election, and which Kamala Harris lost by 13 percentage points.

A better alternative, I think, is to work harder to understand the working class. The nonprofit Center for Working Class politics has a new study out that does just that, with a focus not only on its cleavages with the Brahmin left (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Piketty) but also on points of commonality. One especially valuable finding is that the working class is not, as is often reported, moving rightward; it’s moving leftward, though more slowly than the Brahmin left, so that the gap between the two on social issues is widening. The gap between the two on economic issues, however, is mostly narrowing, because the Brahmin left is catching up with the working class—though in some instances widening as the Brahman left, after catching up with the working class, moves further left. The Brahmins may wish to dissolve the working class and elect another, but in the not-too-distant past it was the working class that had reason to want to dissolve the Brahman left and elect another. Like everything else worth paying attention to in life, it’s complicated! It’s also the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.