The media response to the failures of the Biden infrastructure bill, which was whittled down from $10 trillion to $550 billion, is that the left wing of the Democratic Party needs to be more moderate and accept the wisdom of people like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. The future of the party is Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, they say. The Democratic Socialists of America and the staff at the associated publication, Jacobin, have a similar problem: the left is too socialist, they seem to think, and should be more populist. In November 2021, Jacobin, in collaboration with YouGov, an Internet-based market research and data analytics firm, worked with the Jacobin-created organization, the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), to produce a research report titled Commonsense Solidarity: How a working-class coalition can be built, and maintained.1 The report is based on surveys that examine how some 2000 working-class voters respond to hypothetical candidates who present their ideas in universal versus woke terms. The report has been highlighted recently on the Jacobin YouTube channel as well as on progressive social media channels, like Krystal, Kyle & Friends.2 The report is not quite what it seems.
Whereas Jacobin refers to itself in this study as a socialist magazine, it is affiliated with the DSA, which itself is affiliated with the left wing of the Democratic Party. The DSA, which emerged after the breakup of Students for a Democratic Society, is a New Left organization that split off from those members who defended communism. Through the leadership of Michael Harrington and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, DSOC and the DSA have been known to de-emphasize the centrality of labour to socialist politics and to align itself with democratic left movements, feminist organizations, activist groups and other multi-tendency groups that are to the right of revolutionary politics. After the party coup against Bernie Sanders, the DSA supported the candidacy of Joe Biden as a necessary evil against a second Donald Trump administration. Due to the reactionary politics of people like Trump, anti-racism and other forms of anti-oppression politics have been elevated by the American left to the level of an all or nothing existential crisis, transforming what can and cannot be taken for granted in mainstream politics. This shift from questions of exploitation to questions of oppression, or from class issues to identity issues, undermines the usefulness of concepts and research methods that cannot be defined in terms of identity categories. In the US, identity politics has helped to keep progressive politics trapped within the bipartisan consensus. The CWCP report acknowledges this problem and has undertaken research that offers advice on the most effective forms of messaging for progressive candidates. However, for reasons that will be developed, the report acts as more of a placebo than a solution. A better understanding of left politics and a more effective solution to the detrimental influence of woke ideas on the progressive movement is required.
The recent debacle over the infrastructure bill and the increased threat of military conflict with China are two reasons, foreign and domestic, to question DSA strategy.3 Another is a more academic problem on the left in general and on the American left especially. This has to do with the “wokification” of socialist ideology and strategy. As the 2020 Sanders campaign leaned further in the direction of identity politics, around the time of the primaries, the impact of activists on the campaign, and by implication of postmodern academia on activism, became not only apparent but unfortunate, distracting from the universalist thrust of Sanders’ policies and platform. This is not to suggest that Sanders lost the nomination on account of some woke advertisements. However, this phenomenon does raise issues that are relevant to socialist strategy in the context of contemporary culture wars. Looking to the midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election, Jacobin has undertaken some soul searching with regard to strategy. It is an open secret that the members of the DSA are divided over class-first versus intersectional strategies. In order to influence mainstream politics, the goal of the CWCP report is defined as the transformation and expansion of the electorate.4 Because the New Democratic, or “centrist” tendency in the Democratic Party is oriented towards neoliberal policy, which dovetails with the same billionaire interests that control the Republican Party, the Democrats have made use of identity politics to add a veneer of progressivism to its platform. If some of this draws on the legacy of Civil Rights activism and the women’s movement, the universalist aspects of egalitarian, if not internationalist, struggle have been replaced in the last few decades with postmodern difference politics, now also referred to as equity. Shorn of universalism, which is the basis for any genuinely socialist conception of class struggle, for dialectics as well as materialism, the eclecticism of new social movement agendas is easily hijacked by Democratic Party efforts to combine the minority vote with the progressive vote. Since the progressive vote consists primarily of educated urban and suburban voters – often referred to as the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) – the failure to appeal to the working class with ‘bread and butter’ issues is not only a problem in actuality, but a serious problem for socialist strategy.
The CWCP report seeks to solve the riddles of the 2016 and 2020 elections by correctly dispensing with the myth of the reactionary nature of the “white working class” and pondering why it is that in 2020, all minority groups increased their support for Trump. After the summer of George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, the 2020 exit polls not surprisingly showed increased concern about racism. Whereas in the 2016 exit polls, identity issues scored at below 1 percent, with 50 percent of voters considering economic worries their main concern, the 2020 exit poll questions added to the mix the emphasis on racism as a way to modify and diminish the concern with questions of political economy. The fact that half of the people killed by police are white and that the vast majority of those killed are working poor has not been emphasized enough by activists who seek to make BLM into the spark that will set off of a chain of events. From the other side of this issue, BLM has been by and large co-opted by NGOs, foundations, Hollywood and Wall Street. The establishment and the corporate media could all the more easily do this insofar as a now neoliberal and postmodern academia censors radical leftism by promoting instead trendy research topics like intersectionality, privilege theory and critical race studies. Left journalists and online streamers consistently waffle on these issues, inviting Adolph Reed or David Harvey to talk about these problems one day, and then having more moderate guests, like Wendy Brown or Robin Kelley, on the next. Some, like Richard Wolff, are strong on economic issues, but weak on social issues. Others, like Slavoj Žižek, are so adept at mental gymnastics, that strategy can on occasion change from one minute to the next.
Rather than solving these class and identity issues at the level of ideology and programme, the democratic socialist left is looking for a means to keep its ties to the progressive movement in and around the Democratic Party, while at the same time building some awareness of the problem with woke politics. The report, however, does not address or challenge woke ideas. It simply identifies the unpopularity of woke messaging, especially with working-class voters. These are the main findings of the study:
1) Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and who frame those issues in plainspoken, universal terms. This is especially the case in small towns.
2) Populist, class-based progressive campaign messaging appeals to working-class voters at least as well as mainstream Democratic messaging.
3) Progressives do not need to surrender questions of social justice to win working-class voters, but certain identity-focused rhetoric is a liability.
4) Working-class voters prefer working-class candidates and are less concerned with a candidate’s race or gender. Class background matters.
5) Working-class nonvoters are not automatic progressives.
6) Blue-collar workers are especially sensitive to candidate messaging – and respond even more acutely to the differences between populist and ‘woke’ language.
To these main findings of the study, and without any further commentary on the quantitative analysis, some theoretical reflections can be put forward:
1) The fact that voters prefer working-class candidates is most likely because working-class candidates, of whatever identity, are most likely to advance a progressive platform that speaks to people’s class interests. If the labour movement has been demobilized in recent decades, one should not ignore the intellectual and cultural demobilization that has accompanied the shift from the so-called old left to the new left. The shift in baby boomer politics towards consumerism, counterculture, lifestyle concerns, yuppie careerism and anti-solidaristic individualism cannot be separated from the shift away from socialist ideology in the Cold War era. Common sense implies that if something cannot be explained to people, it may not be valid, especially where public policy is concerned. Common sense also refers to shared values, which can only be changed for the better through a common effort rather than through manipulation, spectacle, coercion and corruption.
2) The report states: “On the whole, populist rhetoric proved most appealing when combined with a progressive, economically-centered agenda, and when delivered by a candidate with a non-elite background.” It could instead have said that a progressive, economic-centred agenda was the most popular. The graphs identify statements that are classified “woke progressive,” “woke moderate,” “mainstream moderate,” “populist progressive” and “Republican.” However, what the study understands by populist progressive is in fact class-oriented. The study describes “progressive populist” sound bites as those that oppose “people who work for a living” to “the superrich.” The exact message given by the progressive populist candidate states: “This country belongs to all of us, not just the superrich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.” Class-based rhetoric has therefore been conflated with the concept of populism. This slide in terminology is not innocent, but serves to distinguish the concerns of the American working class from the rest of the world. Nothing in the online summary of the report explains why the terms universal and progressive should be identified as populist. It could easily be referred to as socialist instead, if only the report did not reject the left-to-right spectrum as “one dimensional” and unable to capture the “complexity” of voter preference. For all its complexity, the progressive populist statement does not use the word capitalism. In fact, none of the soundbites present a straightforward leftist statement that rejects scapegoating, emotional or sentimental appeal, special pleading, change rhetoric, moral invective or American exceptionalism. As far as complexity is concerned, one rather finds end-of-ideology simplicity. The report is of little use to a genuine socialist. Public education on class politic would mitigate problems like the propensity of Latino respondents to favourably view cuts to government spending. The study mentions that populism is on the rise on the both the left and the right. This rise in populism is very inadequately explained as a decline in support for establishment parties. However, populist anti-elitism cuts both ways and it is better to lead with popular education on what socialism is and what it is not. Socialism is neither plebeian nor anti-elitist. Because of that, socialism cannot be conflated or confused with right-wing populism. Socialism makes use of what is best and most helpful to social harmony, emancipation and prosperity.
3) Nothing about the working class is inherently progressive or regressive. From a socialist perspective, the same cannot be said about the ruling class. The ruling class may be anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. However, the ruling class, as a class, is not and cannot be anti-capitalist, even if it also suffers from problems caused by capitalist competition, such as bankruptcy and environmental degradation. Why is identity-focused rhetoric a liability? If this liability was for the wrong reasons, would it make sense to avoid it? For example, it is not popular with some people to transition away from fossil fuels or private health insurance, but the correct approach demands it. The same logic should apply to issues of class politics as it relates to social justice issues. Real solutions require that the left determines the correct line and not the line that is popular at whatever moment with voters in whatever region. Of course policies must be open to modification. In addition to these considerations, the idea of ending systemic racism is a nebulous concept in comparison to Medicare for All, which already exists in most developed countries. In general, societies that have a caring attitude towards the less fortunate also have less of the kinds of problems that are addressed by disparity discourse. If ending systemic racism means equally redistributing wealth disparities across racial groups, then little will be achieved through this to reduce poverty or eliminate unemployment and homelessness, etc.
4) Nothing about class background makes one candidate better than another. Demagogues come in all shapes and sizes. Corrupt labour union leadership should be enough to put that notion to rest. But this is also a question of theory. The point about the class background of candidates is valid but should be questioned as the kind of tendentious class reductionism that has nothing to do with socialist theory. It is better to discern if the candidate’s concerns about social equality is reflected in their policy. Joe Biden’s class background has been used as a means to lure working-class voters into the clutches of the donor class. To say that “class matters” is the same kind of pseudo-left “matterism” that claims that bodies matter (Judith Butler) and race matters (Cornel West), etc. Toying with absolutes and relativism in naive materialist theories only seems intellectually sophisticated. It very problematically leads the left into the intersectionality quagmire. To take one example, Sanders was popular with young voters under 40, who tend to be more familiar and comfortable with woke messaging. This demographic nevertheless failed to turn out in large numbers at the voting booths. What made Sanders the best candidate in 2016 and 2020, nevertheless, was that for the most part, excepting some of his views on foreign policy, he was the most democratic candidate.
5) The evidence presented that working-class voters are not inherently progressive is the flipside to the claim that feminists and anti-racists are not inherently anti-capitalist. However accurate, these are two sides of the same problem of reductionism. While the assertion that elements within the working class are not automatically progressive is no doubt true, and Marxists have never claimed otherwise, it avoids the crucial question of political ideology and strategy, which this study claims to advance. Leftist politics are working-class politics because capitalism is a class politics. One could expect the editors at Jacobin to acknowledge this simple premise of socialist politics.
6) It makes complete sense that voters without college degrees and from low-earning households would not respond positively to terms and phrases that emphasize identity markers, whether these terms are everyday terms or academic lingo. Contrary to the claims of the report, educational attainment cannot be substituted for social class, which relates to the ownership of the means of production. Furthermore, subjective class identification does not solve the problem of objective class position. The fact that education in the US is associated with social outcomes does not imply that education is synonymous with class. Rather, this reality describes the class function of education in a stratified and unequal society. The real issue in this case is not the familiarity of the terminology – which the media and communications technology could domesticate for most people in next to no time, just like it did with the term COVID-19 – but rather the problematic aspect of sorting social problems through the specific concerns of identity groups. The concept of unity is a term that can of course be used for different political purposes. However, leftist opposition to anti-democratic government and the corporate state is not the same as anti-oppression discourses that nowadays combine with neoliberalism. This progressive neoliberalism, as Nancy Fraser refers to it, needs to be distinguished not only from the progressive populism of Bernie Sanders but also from the progressive end-of-ideology post-politics that fears radical socialism and promises instead the kinds of material benefits that can only come from relations of exploitation. Not surprisingly, the narrow focus on the American electorate ignores the global division of labour that allows a petty-bourgeois society to avoid the conflict of capital and labour by focusing on identity.
Although the CWCP report is working in a progressive direction, and one would not want to be overly critical, it is mired in half measures and narrow horizons. One obvious problem of this research is that it has focused on woke messaging rather than on woke ideology. By studying the “behaviour” of working-class voters, it has ignored its own behaviour, that is, the behaviour of the academic and activist class that has over the last several decades of neoliberalism reoriented the left towards identity politics and away from socialism. In terms of ideas, it has done so in many ways, through structuralism, post-structuralism, identity politics, Cultural Studies and the many variants of postmodern theory. This is in no way to defend common sense against intellectualism. On the contrary, and in contrast to the methodology of this study, which is more than simply data-driven, debates on the uses of identity against class, or on the hybridization of identity with class, as in the concept of “racial capitalism,” for example, have been accepted by the woke left without much scrutiny. In the current climate of cancel culture and neo-McCarthyist witch trials, anyone who wants to protect the years of sacrifice they dedicated to building their career does not dare go against the current. This allows Cold War concepts like “institutional racism” to operate like magic formulae. Although solid critiques of the latter two concepts exist on the left, the activist desire for greater social mobilization relies on the expediency of these trendy topics in much the same way that “general intellect,” “immaterial labour,” “no borders” and “un-power” circulated in activist circles in the early 2000s. These concepts disappeared along with the tactic of summit hopping. Perhaps Cedric Robinson’s ill-conceived and non-Marxist theory of racial capitalism will disappear along with climate catastrophe.
The organizational thrust of the post-Occupy period is what makes this Jacobin study worthwhile. However, the postmodern-type activists are still active. The report seems to tell them: You can have your intersectionality cake but you should eat your working-class vegetables too. For all of its pragmatism, the study avoids the issues it claims to confront. By leaning in on what working-class voters want to hear rather than being concerned with what they understand, or by focusing only on what they already seem to know, the study reproduces the worst tendency of liberalism towards the public, accepting the picturesque disadvantages of the masses as the advantage of the elite, avoiding the necessary task of education (because that would take time we don’t have and besides, we cannot agree about these issues even among ourselves) and leaving the veracity of important concepts like equality, humanity, human rights, objectivity, secularism and universality in the clutches of conservatives. Deconstruction, discourse theory and historicism will not save us from this dilemma.
While it would be too much of a stretch to suggest that the CWCP report does little more than pander to the working class with the kind of messaging they want to hear, as opposed to offering something more elusive like the truth, the correct line or a platform that is worthy of collective struggle should not be substituted for a strategy that seeks to reconcile the conflicting tendencies in the progressive movement as a way to win electoral victories. If anti-elite populism can so easily combine with conservative libertarianism, what can the radical democracy critique of class essentialism offer socialists? The simple answer is: next to nothing. If the CWCP put class politics at the centre of its analysis, rather than at the margins of an electoral strategy, it would be good for everyone, regardless of their voting behaviour. However, Jacobin’s editors say that what they seek to do is expand the ranks of a nebulous grouping called progressives by winning a larger share of support from working-class voters. This is not socialism. It is a progressive reform movement. Seeking the working-class vote makes sense, they argue, because the working class constitutes the majority of voters. In other words, reading between the lines, if wokesters want racial justice and/or universal health care, they cannot afford to ignore the working class. The report thus defines itself as a “progressive coalition” advocating the kind of “progressive policy” that would benefit the working class. While it acknowledges that the victories of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement were achieved with working-class support, it avoids the untidy reality that these were the result of initiatives taken by working-class organizations in the context of the rise of communism worldwide. This expression of class formation was not simply a disorganized and confused electorate, or class-in-itself, that needed to be steered by a progressive PMC. It was a class-for-itself trained through decades of labour struggle. And this movement was not “class essentialist” as so many people claim today but was typically at the forefront of progressive social policy and no more backward than the surrounding capitalist society.
A socialist movement leads across the board and does not gerrymander victories according to demographic variables. If Sanders succeeded it was because of his universalist message and policy orientation. If the problems of identity politics are not to be swept under the carpet, or reserved for careerist intellectuals and activist misfits, they need to be debated and worked through at the organization and policy levels. Data and statistics are never innocent and require qualitative analysis. One can only hope that Jacobin and the CWCP will undertake this more complex work. If they did this, however, the woke virtue signalling of DSA-affiliated politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal and Jamaal Bowman would start to look as dubious as some of their voting behaviour in Congress. At present, regressive “means tested” diversity policies have been mandated for schools, board rooms and government ministries. We are now seeing some of the consequences of these policies as one bad decision after another is taken by indifferent administrations on the say-so of woke activists because it seems easier and more progressive to ruin people’s lives than to defend their rights. Unfortunately, the CWCP report comes across like one of those t-shirts worn by people who do not want to take responsibility for themselves: I’m with stupid.
Notes
1. See Center for Working-Class Politics, Commonsense Solidarity: How a working-class coalition can be built, and maintained (2021), https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/08095656/CWCPReport_CommonsenseSolidarity.pdf.
2. See Jacobin, “New Study: Why Democrats Keep Losing Working-Class Voters,” Jacobin (November 3, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu6J2Dwc0Xk; Krystal Kyle & Friends, “Episode 47: Katie Rader” (November 13, 2021), https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-47-katie-rader/id1547098165?i=1000541719131.
3. Patrick Martin, “Biden infrastructure bill targets China,” World Socialist Web Site (November 16, 2021), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/16/infr-n16.html.
4. Editors, “Commonsense Solidarity: How a Working-Class Coalition Can Be Built, and Maintained,” Jacobin (November 9, 2021), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/common-sense-solidarity-working-class-voting-report.