The far-left intellectual chorus is now singing at high pitch: Democrats lost because they do not understand the working class that abandoned them for the Republican Party. It’s an odd lyric, routinely rolled out after election defeats. It ends with, “Bernie would have won.”
The far left is wrong for three reasons. Consequentially, it ignores the overwhelming evidence that the American majority, including a sizable chunk of the working class, voted for a socially conservative, perhaps even reactionary vision for the future.
The first reason the far-left is wrong is its conceit, dating back to Karl Marx, that intellectuals understand working-class interests better than the workers themselves. In this model, the workers understand that the Democratic Party will not attend to their interests. However, this same working class is incapable of figuring out that the GOP, which the far-left sees as catering only to robber-baron capitalists, cannot make them better off.
In this left-wing vision, the workers are half-stupid — they know what to abandon, but don’t understand what they adopt when voting Republican. These same intellectuals have an easy time telling us not to patronize workers as dumb or stupid, but they are doing the same thing themselves.
Second, those on the far left ignore many important factors in only noting that the working classes increasingly voted for Trump. It’s the white working class that votes for Trump. Most white women voted for Trump, despite his hyper-masculinity and the rape allegations for which he was found civilly liable. According to exit polls, 46 percent of Latinos voted for Trump, despite the racist rhetoric. The percentage of Black men who voted for Trump is also in double digits (21 percent), despite former President Barack Obama’s exhortations.
Meanwhile, 82 percent of white Evangelicals and a healthy percentage of Catholics voted for Trump. Is the Catholic pro-life Latino worker only concerned about class?
Culture dominates Trump’s sausage-making. While there may have been economic motivations, the through line for the groups above increasingly voting for Trump — Evangelicals, Catholics, white women, white workers, Latinos and Black men — is a social conservatism that borders on reactionary and, in some cases, racist or xenophobic views. Even economic motivations like inflation, for instance, cannot be understood solely from a class lens.
These groups like the answers Trump provides: closed borders, bashing on trading partners, telling people that immigrants take their jobs, that abortion and sexual non-comformity are sins, or that God saved Trump’s life from a shooting to save them and America. These views embody material and conservative interests of various hues, including class. It takes a leap of bold imagination to see only class as the overriding factor.
Third, the much-vaunted anger that Trump understands and spews himself is the anger of our times. It is not class anger — whatever that might be.
America had it good after World War II. The nation led the globe with innovation but protected its interests. When Democrats looked after workers, American cotton, clothes and cars ruled the world. Never mind that American farmers kept out other countries’ cotton out of global or American markets, or that American workers in Detroit and the Rust Belt rode the tide of cars, aluminum and steel while not letting these industries flourish in the developing world.
There was no “left-behind” American worker then — there was a left-behind world, and that suited American workers just fine. There was also enough money to go around — to erect social safety nets in the 1960s and 70s, for example.
The current cultural anger is a hissy-fit type of anger about Americans not being able to get what we want from a world we can no longer manipulate. That does not lessen the misery of the workers who are now getting left behind, in a way their parents never did. It just helps us understand why the parents were ahead in the first place.
If my lefty colleagues in academia and elsewhere wanted to learn rather than preach, they would look beyond class to notice the social conservatism and hyper-nationalism that white workers and women, and increasingly, Black men and Latinos have embraced to reelect Trump.
It takes a far-left imagination to see all of the above as amounting only to class. It takes intellectual elitism to assert further that this odd coalition does not know its interests. The far-left follows Marx’s lead: if workers do not understand their class interests, they must embody a false consciousness. Ergo, they follow fascists.
For the Democratic Party to build a vision that is inclusive and pro-growth, it would need to foster economies of innovation and competitiveness for small, medium and large enterprises. The old way was through the likes of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie that made the American worker proud. Perhaps the American worker sees that in a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, however repulsive that might be to the leftist intellectual.
Many of us share the disgust at economic growth that is exclusionary. America need not be great again through robber barons and monopolists or an oppressive society. We are better people than that, even if the next four years will test us on that historical strength.
The keys to that kingdom lie in the language of economic incentives and social inclusion, not class. Democrats would be wise to take them and open the lock.
J.P. Singh is Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy (Berlin). He is co-editor-in-chief of Global Perspectives.
