The Democrats Are Bad, But We Can't Leave the Working Class to the GOP

I sit down to make the case for why we can’t leave the working class in the hands of the Republican party with some trepidation. Left-leaning readers will accept its argument as too obvious to be worth making; I fully expect this essay to be tweeted by liberals saying “no duh.” Right-leaning readers are likely to reject its conclusions entirely.

Yet I feel it’s important to take the time to lay out a simple argument: as the Democratic coalition is increasingly defined by the college educated, and in a context where the phrase “white working class” is now often treated as a racist dogwhistle, we cannot allow the fortunes of the working class to be dictated by Republicans. The symbols and rhetoric of elite liberals may be increasingly hostile to those who are not college-educated urbanites with vocabularies carefully calibrated to signal that status. But Republicans are not an alternative; the GOP remains the party of plutocrats, and its populist rhetoric is employed in pursuit of lower taxes and less regulation for the rich and corporations.

My argument today takes place against a backdrop of one of the most consequential developments in recent American politics: the rise of educational polarization.