Thomas Edsall is a NY Times columnist who I’ve come to see as the doomiest of doomscrollers. His columns almost never contain any good news for anyone. What they do often contain is a lot of hot takes from university professors around the country and today’s installment is no exception. What makes this intersting (to me) is that his topic today is the Democratic Party and why they are struggling.
The gist of this piece is that Democrats used to be seen as the party of the working class, including the white working class, but they aren’t that any longer, at least not exclusively. In fact, there has been quite a shift among people at the top of the income ladder toward the Dems.
The numbers show that white voters in the 68th to 100th income percentiles — the top third — cast 49.05 percent of their ballots for Joe Biden and 50.95 for Donald Trump. White voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted 52.9 percent for Biden and 47.1 percent for Trump.
These figures stand in sharp contrast to election results as recent as those of 2008. Among white voters in the top third of the income distribution that year, John McCain, the Republican nominee, beat Barack Obama 67.1 percent to 32.9 percent.
So Republicans used to dominate top earners but not anymore. This shift has been taking place since the 1990s but in the past ten years the Democrats have become the party of the wealthy and well-educated. And the problem is that Democrats haven’t really adjusted to this new reality. They still see themselves as the party of the working class even though they really aren’t that anymore. As the founder of a Democratic consulting firm put it, “Democrats are lost without that core idea.”
Here I’m going to insert my own take where I think Edsall and some of his academic interlocutors seem hesitant to say the thing bluntly. Democrats are struggling to counter the conservative argument that they have become the party of the elite because…Democrats have become the party of the elite. Elite in this case specifically means those who are doing well and well-educated and that tracks with something else that starts with a ‘w’. The well-educated tend to be the people pushing a woke agenda. A political science professor argues this makes it increasingly difficult for Democrats to reach the actual working class.
To the extent that partisan conflict is structured by issues like gay/transgender rights, abortion, immigration, race, and gender equality, the social liberalism of educated Democratic voters and activists makes it difficult for the party to develop appeals to more socially conservative and religious voters.
And that brings us to Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, who argues that Democrats by siding with the woke elite have alienated the working class in a way he suggests is not reversible. He argues there are still a lot of people in the working class, i.e. those who don’t have degrees, who can be won back by Democrats. However, he says they have been put off by the party’s embrace of wokeism: [emphasis added[
…lower-to-middle-income highly educated white progressive urban Democrats tends to press the cultural identitarian ethnic and gender agenda of the Democrats the most assertively, alienating formerly Democratic voters from that party, including many minority voters, above all Hispanics and Asians, but increasingly also African Americans…
The party has been captured by specialized “rent-seeking” groups that have tried to carve out specific benefits for their respective unique constituencies.
The party has been captured! Kitschelt doesn’t name the “rent-seeking” groups he has in mind but it seems a safe bet he means BLM, trans activists and others pushing benefits for their group to the exclusion of all else. These are the social and cultural elites that turn off so many working class voters.
So what can be done by Democrats to remedy this problem? Kitschelt’s answer to that seems designed to be a bit inscrutable. Once again, I think he knows he’s not supposed to say what he actually thinks, not plainly anyway.
The party has to embrace a universalism of political demands that rejects any kind of bias against citizens based on ethnic, religious, gender and other cultural grounds. The party should teach a conception of citizenship that acknowledges, recognizes and tolerates differences, albeit without ranking and prioritizing any particular way of life. This implies abstention from a divisive agenda of defining privileges and special tiers of consideration for specific groups that would precipitate the fragmentation of the party’s electoral coalition.
I’ve parsed through that 3 or 4 times. He’s saying Dems should reject a bias against people based on ethnic, religious, gender grounds. I think, in context, that’s an awkward way of saying Democrats should stop showing bias against straight white men and religious people. The party needs to ditch the “divisive agenda of defining privileges and special tiers of consideration for specific groups.” Again, that might as well be a definition of woke identity politics.
Democrats just need to stop that and their problems will be solved. That should be simple, right?
Good luck with that. The woke genie is out of the bottle and putting it back in would require undoing about 175 years of our history going back to Marx. Wokeism is relatively new to most people, but I think James Lindsay (and others) have made a convincing case that it is fundamentally just Marxist theory applied to race instead of class. Everything about woke identity politics works against the “conception of citizenship” without tiers of privilege and privation. The concept of a citizenship that judges people on the content of their character, ability, hard work, merit, etc. is also very old but those views are hated and mocked on the left now. So, again, good luck bringing those ideas back in vogue on the left. You might as well ask the earth to stop spinning on its axis so the sun never sets.
Talking with @recychology about why the major indicator of Woke is identity politics as the end of an entire worldview that is ultimately Woke, however it presents itself. It’s all about the class conflict element and the adoption of a pitiful “slave morality.” pic.twitter.com/0U2FoV59Po
— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) June 4, 2025
