Across the bay from Bar Harbor lies the small town of Sullivan, Maine, population twelve hundred and nineteen. On August 16th, Graham Platner, the bearded, strawberry-blond co-owner of the Waukeag Neck Oyster Company, brought his Carolina Skiff over to the Sullivan Harbor launch. It was three days before a video titled “Platner for U.S. Senate” would drop, catapulting this local oyster farmer, harbormaster, and former marine onto the national stage.
The video was produced by Morris Katz, a top political strategist for New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’ ” Katz recalled, of his first meeting with Platner. The video was meant to present the forty-one-year-old Maine native as a rugged and likable working-class Democratic candidate running to unseat Susan Collins, but it could just as easily have been the opener for a reality-TV show called “Oyster Man.” A macho pastiche with a Jeep-commercial soundtrack, it shows him diving in his wetsuit, chopping wood, hauling oyster cages, and doing kettlebell swings. There are closeups of his tattoos, along with shots of him holding hands with his wife, Amy Gertner, as they walk along a beach with their two dogs. Standing at the helm of his boat, Platner tells the camera, “When I tell people around here that I’m running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is, ‘What the ——?’ ” There’s a bleeped-out expletive, and Platner laughs. Then he gets serious: “It seems like the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians profiting off destroying our environment, driving our families into poverty, and crushing the middle class.”
The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party. “Platner has never run for office and seldom wears a suit,” Mother Jones noted. The launch video was viewed more than two and a half million times on X in the first twenty-four hours alone. The streamer and leftist commentator Hasan Piker showed it on his Twitch channel, where comments included “TAX THE RICH AND EAT THE OYSTERS” and “Wow this guy looks like a progressive mind in [a] MAGA body.”
I’ve spent almost every summer of my life on Frenchman Bay, near Sullivan, and, like many of my neighbors, I’ve had Platner’s number for years, and have picked up oyster orders from his boat. I’ve seen him shuck oysters at parties, fund-raisers, and at the local summer music series, where a half-dozen oysters go for twenty dollars; he also shucks them at Ironbound, a restaurant in the town of Hancock which is owned by his mother, Leslie Harlow. I first learned of Platner’s Senate run in late July by text from a friend who is close to Platner; she wrote, “Big news…” Soon, my friends were discussing over gin-and-tonics how they always knew he would be famous.
That morning in August, I met Platner at the launch, and he drove us out on his boat to his oyster farm on the bay. It’s situated off an island with a ledge so rocky that lobstermen know not to drop traps there; Platner keeps tow ropes on hand in case he needs to help stranded boaters. The haze from Canadian wildfires, which covered the bay for much of the summer, had lifted, and Mt. Cadillac, on Mt. Desert Island, was a bright green. Once we were moored, Platner pointed out the busy wildlife: bald eagles, osprey.
Earlier in the summer, a few weeks before Graham Platner fever swept Maine and beyond, a group of mostly millennial Democrats, coördinating with Maine labor leaders, community activists, and volunteers, many of them Bernie Sanders campaign alums, had been scouting the state for a candidate who could unseat Collins. These Democrats thought that the five-term, seventy-two-year-old Republican senator was vulnerable: her approval ratings were down, and Kamala Harris had won the state in 2024. After they saw a video featuring Platner—this one made by the local Frenchman Bay Conservancy in 2020, to stop a commercial salmon farm from building in the bay—they decided that he was exactly what they were looking for: a working-class guy with a military background and a deep connection to Maine.
Jason Shedlock, the president of the Southern Maine Labor Council, was involved in the search (and was the only member of the group who would speak on the record). “What we’re looking for is someone who understands that solidarity is not a spectator sport, it’s an action word,” Shedlock said. He heard that Platner was “the real deal.” They had their first conversation over Zoom. “The Zoom camera was bobbing up and down because he was on an oyster boat, and I just got off of a job site, and we had the conversation right then and there, with the wind blowing, and it was like talking to somebody who I would meet in a union hall.”
Several Maine labor figures reached out to Katz and Calvello, who closed the deal. Platner was taken by surprise by their interest. “They’re, like, ‘We think that right now Susan Collins is uniquely weak,’ ” he told me. “We think the Democrats are going to choose a bad candidate for this race specifically, and we think that you’re a good candidate for this. And Amy and I promptly told them, ‘That’s fucking insane. We work full time. We don’t have any money.’ . . . We’re just normal fucking people who have very busy schedules, and running for U.S. Senate is the most ridiculous thing that I could’ve ever heard for myself.” Platner pulled up a cage. He lifted out a mesh bag full of tiny oysters, each the size of a pumpkin seed, explaining that as the oysters grow they need more space. “It’s very much like gardening,” he said. “I’m just thinning.”
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Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.
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But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obama—only to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.
Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.
Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties’ center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterday’s most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issues—even as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.
These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a “racial reckoning”—a revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.
For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixon’s “silent majority”; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-“woke” rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.
This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls “democratic capitalism”—not a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesn’t fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas—“a form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.”
All three—power, culture, and investment—combined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americans—progress, Leonhardt writes, that “reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes.” In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economy’s growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the country’s top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.
This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early ’70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the ’60s, “the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards.”
Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? “In the standard progressive telling,” Leonhardt writes, “the explanation for this political shift is race.” Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats’ embrace of the Black freedom movement in the ’60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their “southern strategy”) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. It’s morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; it’s politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?
Leonhardt’s subtler account is rooted in the working class’s growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the country’s upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.
That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievance—I didn’t see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?
Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: “Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody.” As Democrats were reminded in 2022’s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants “will destroy New York.”
These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between “universal” values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and “communal” values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracy—built-in advantage at the top, underfunding below—has created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Americans of all colors.
A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier book’s thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: “What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. That’s something that we really didn’t anticipate.” Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Deal–style “economic liberalism” (but not Green New Deal–style socialism) and to reject “today’s post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism.” In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats’ “shadow party” of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.
The authors want a return to the party’s cultural centrism of the ’90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and others—the pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sex—remain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather that’s indifferent to such messaging.
Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.
Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.
Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the party’s struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump “reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency.” In the face of Trump’s bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the “maximalist” positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with “the groups on the receiving end of Trump’s ugliest barbs,” such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the party’s working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Green’s answer is to double down on economic populism: “Rather than fear the Republicans’ culture wars—or respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyone—Democrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.”
None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, it’s the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignment—for Republicans. Ruffini can’t resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a “cosmopolitan trap,” losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.
Ruffini’s most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesn’t think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. “Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base,” but they’re wrong, he writes. “When voters’ economic views and social views are in conflict, one’s social stances more often drive voting behavior … Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians don’t talk about them.” Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a “hard pivot against the cultural left”—he seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah moment—to neutralize Republican attacks.
Though Ruffini doesn’t spend much time on economic policy, it’s worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesn’t seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Party’s descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.
Ruffini’s formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasn’t kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffini’s desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, “pro-capitalist” families and low taxes. His “commonsense majority” would combine white people who didn’t graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because “the education divide makes a much bigger difference in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites.” It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.
Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.
These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, I’m an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats’ working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we can’t go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars aren’t easily put aside. “Guns and religion,” in Obama’s unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they aren’t inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues aren’t manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matter—that’s why they’re so polarizing.
The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sake—none more so than Trump.
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “What Does the Working Class Really Want?”
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There are times when products are inherently expensive. Homes are a classic example. So are vehicles. In those cases, the constant human needs for shelter and transportation have created natural solutions in the form of mortgages and auto loans.
Leasing is a classic business model. It involves renting an asset under a contractual agreement at a certain price for a set amount of time.
When leasing comes up, it’s usually referencing major assets such as a house or car. However, it’s completely possible to lease a wide variety of additional products.
Some companies aim to combat this by leasing solar panel systems to homeowners. The end result is lower energy bills that ideally cover both the leased equipment and reduce the original cost of energy for the home.
This approach to solar panel installation saves consumers tens of thousands of dollars in up-front fees. This makes it possible for homeowners to tap into the long-term savings of solar power without breaking the bank in the process. The same model is easy to reproduce for any brand that has a solid product and enough capital or investors to front the cash for equipment.
Interest is a major detracting factor that makes larger purchases unappealing. For example, if an individual purchases a car in New York and takes out a five-year $25,000 auto loan at 5% interest, they’ll end up paying over $2,600 more in interest.
Broken down over 60 months, this is nearly $45 per month in interest alone. To a working-class family, this is a legitimate cost that they must factor into their financial plans.
Savvy companies that sell big-ticket items have caught onto the toll that interest payments take on their customers. Some have opted to offer interest-free payments as an alternative.
Home Depot, for instance, regularly offers its customers coupons for 12-month and even 24-month interest-free financing. The Home Depot credit card also provides a round-the-clock six-month interest-free financing option. That means a customer can hold a balance with the company for that entire period (whether it’s six, 12 or 24 months). As long as they pay off the total before the payment period ends, they won’t pay a penny in interest.
This model assumes a certain degree of risk on the part of the company. However, when managed well, the interest-free financing model more than makes up for the risks in the amount of larger purchases it encourages from those customers with limited up-front funding.
Breaking things into smaller bundles and á la carte pricing
Sometimes, a grouped product selection can push something out of reach of working-class family budgets. When this is the case, splitting a product up into multiple components can help reduce the financial barrier to entry.
The exorbitant cost of cable television is a good example of this issue. Cable provider Spectrum has found a solution to the problem of its excessively priced full television packages by offering its Spectrum TV Choice bundle.
This allows users to choose from a variety of channels to fill up a smaller quota of total channels. They can change their selection once a month, making the arrangement sustainable and accessible.
Not all products come in individual pieces. Whenever that is the case, though, companies should consider innovative ways to repackage the individual components to make them accessible to customers without losing their collective value.
Making high-priced products accessible to everyday consumers
The middle class in America is able to make larger purchases. But they cannot do so with the same laissez-faire attitude as those with ample wealth and disposable income.
Companies that want to market higher-priced products to middle-class consumers must be willing to find unique and innovative ways to help them make a purchase. From leasing and financing options to á la carte and “buffet style” offerings, consider how you can make your brand’s big-ticket items accessible to your target audience.
Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it.
Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada.
The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by about 2.5 points in the previous two presidential cycles. But Nevada is going to be competitive, perhaps more so than ever.
Some of the Times/Siena poll’s internal numbers gave me pause. Among registered voters in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located and where 70 percent of the electorate resides, the poll found Trump ahead of Biden 50–45. But Democrats make up 34 percent of active voters in the county, compared with Republicans’ 25 percent, and Biden won Clark by nine percentage points in 2020.
Other recent polls, not quite as highly rated as Times/Siena’s, have found the presidential race here to be much closer than the Times did. Last month, a CNN poll of registered Nevada voters found Biden and Trump virtually tied. Recent surveys from Emerson College, which has been unreliable in the state in the past, and Morning Consult/Bloomberg both had Trump up three points among likely voters. The Times/Siena polling outfit has a good reputation, but shortly before the 2020 election, it found Biden ahead of Trump in Nevada by six percentage points, more than double Biden’s eventual margin of victory.
Nevada is difficult to poll for a variety of reasons. Here as much as anywhere else, pollsters tend to underestimate the number of people they need to survey by cellphone to get a representative sample, and they generally don’t do enough bilingual polling in Nevada, where nearly a third of the population is Hispanic. Nevada also has a transient population, lots of residents working 24/7 shifts, and an electorate that’s less educated than most other states’. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses in 2016.) The polling challenge has become only more acute, because nonpartisan voters now outnumber Democrats and Republicans in Nevada, making it harder for pollsters to accurately capture the Democratic or Republican vote. (Since 2020, a state law has allowed voters to register at the DMV, and if they fail to do so, their party affiliation is defaulted to independent.)
Nevada matters in presidential elections, but we are also, let’s face it, a tad weird.
Still, Democrats have reasons to worry. Nevada was clobbered by COVID disproportionately to the rest of the country, because our economy is so narrowly focused on the casino industry. The aftereffects—unemployment, inflation—are still very much being felt here. Nevada’s jobless rate is the highest in the country, at 5.4 percent. That’s down dramatically from an astonishing 28.2 percent in April 2020, when the governor closed casinos for a few months. Although the situation has clearly improved, many casino workers still haven’t been rehired.
Democrat Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in his party to lose in 2022, and his defeat was due at least partly to the fallout from COVID. Fairly or not, President Biden wears a lot of that too, as all presidents do when voters are unhappy with the economy. The Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll illuminated the bleak pessimism of Nevada voters, 76 percent of whom think the U.S. economy is going in the wrong direction.
Here, as elsewhere, voters are also concerned about Biden’s age, and that informs their broader views of him. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans disapprove of Biden’s performance, according to the Times, and only 40 percent have a favorable impression of him. Trump’s numbers, although awful—44 percent see him favorably—are better than Biden’s here, as well as in some blue or bluish states.
In Nevada, and in general, Biden is losing support among key groups—young and nonwhite voters. The Times/Siena poll found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanics in the state, despite the fact that Latinos have been a bedrock of the Democratic base here for a decade and a half. In the 2022 midterms, polls taken early in the race showed Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, losing Hispanic support, though her campaign managed to reverse that trend enough to win by a very slim margin.
Democratic presidential nominees have won Nevada in every election since 2008. Democrats also hold the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and three of the four House seats, and the party dominates both houses of the legislature. But the state has been slowly shifting to the right—not just in polling but in Election Day results. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state that saw worse Democratic performance compared with 2016, unless you include the more solidly red Florida. Nevada’s new Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, is building a formidable political machine. Republicans have made inroads with working-class white voters here, leaving Democrats with an ever-diminishing margin of error.
Abortion, an issue that was crucial to Cortez Masto’s narrow victory, could help Biden in Nevada. The Times/Siena poll showed that only a quarter of Nevadans think abortion should be always or mostly illegal. A 1990 referendum made abortion up to 24 weeks legal here, and the law can be changed only by another popular vote. Democrats in Nevada, though, want to take those protections a step further next year and are trying to qualify a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion. As the off-year elections last week showed, that issue, more than the choice between Biden and Trump, could be what saves the president a year from now. Nevada also has a nationally watched Senate race in 2024, in which the incumbent Democrat, Jacky Rosen, has already signaled that she will mimic her colleague Cortez Masto and put abortion front and center in her campaign.
So many events could intervene between now and next November, foreign and/or domestic, and we have yet to see how effective the Trump and Biden campaigns will be, assuming that each man is his party’s nominee. Democratic Senator Harry Reid was deeply unpopular here in 2009, then got reelected by almost six percentage points; Barack Obama was thought to be in trouble in 2011, then won Nevada and reelection.
Democrats clearly hope that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, many voters will see the election as a binary choice and will back Biden. But if the election instead becomes a referendum on Biden’s tenure, including the economy he has presided over, Trump could plausibly win Nevada—and the Electoral College.
For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.
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For the past 16 years, I have been on the faculty of the sociology department at Yale, and in 2018 I was granted a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic rank the university bestows. I say this not to boast, but to illustrate that I have made my way from the bottom of American society to the top, from a sharecropper’s cabin to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. One might think that, as a decorated professor at an Ivy League university, I would have escaped the various indignities that being Black in traditionally white spaces exposes you to. And to be sure, I enjoy many of the privileges my white professional-class peers do. But the Black ghetto—a destitute and fearsome place in the popular imagination, though in reality it is home to legions of decent, hardworking families—remains so powerful that it attaches to all Black Americans, no matter where and how they live. Regardless of their wealth or professional status or years of law-abiding bourgeois decency, Black people simply cannot escape what I call the “iconic ghetto.”
I know I haven’t. Some years ago, I spent two weeks in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers and working-class white year-rounders. On my daily jog one morning, a white man in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, yelling and gesticulating. “Go home!” he shouted.
Who was this man? Did he assume, because of my Black skin, that I was from the ghetto? Is that where he wanted me to “go home” to?
This was not an isolated incident. When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.
I once accidentally ran a small social experiment about this. When I joined the Yale faculty in 2007, I bought about 20 university baseball caps to give to the young people at my family reunion that year. Later, my nieces and nephews reported to me that wearing the Yale insignia had transformed their casual interactions with white strangers: White people would now approach them to engage in friendly small talk.
But sometimes these signifiers of professional status and educated-class propriety are not enough. This can be true even in the most rarefied spaces. When I was hired at Yale, the chair of the sociology department invited me for dinner at the Yale Club of New York City. Clad in a blue blazer, I got to the club early and decided to go up to the fourth-floor library to read The New York Times. When the elevator arrived, a crush of people was waiting to get on it, so I entered and moved to the back to make room for others. Everyone except me was white.
As the car filled up, I politely asked a man of about 35, standing by the controls, to push the button for the library floor. He looked at me and—emboldened, I have to imagine, by drinks in the bar downstairs—said, “You can read?” The car fell silent. After a few tense moments, another man, seeking to defuse the tension, blurted, “I’ve never met a Yalie who couldn’t read.” All eyes turned to me. The car reached the fourth floor. I stepped off, held the door open, and turned back to the people in the elevator. “I’m not a Yalie,” I said. “I’m a new Yale professor.” And I went into the library to read the paper.
I tell these stories—and I’ve told them before—not to fault any particular institution (I’ve treasured my time at Yale), but to illustrate my personal experience of a recurring cultural phenomenon: Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash. After the Civil War, under the aegis of Reconstruction, Black people for a time became professionals and congressmen. But when federal troops left the former Confederate states in 1877, white politicians in the South tried to reconstitute slavery with the long rule of Jim Crow. Even the Black people who migrated north to escape this new servitude found themselves relegated to shantytowns on the edges of cities, precursors to the modern Black ghetto.
All of this reinforced what slavery had originally established: the Black body’s place at the bottom of the social order. This racist positioning became institutionalized in innumerable ways, and it persists today.
I want to emphasize that across the decades, many white Americans have encouraged racial equality, albeit sometimes under duress. In response to the riots of the 1960s, the federal government—led by the former segregationist Lyndon B. Johnson—passed far-reaching legislation that finally extended the full rights of citizenship to Black people, while targeting segregation. These legislative reforms—and, especially, affirmative action, which was implemented via LBJ’s executive order in 1965—combined with years of economic expansion to produce a long period of what I call “racial incorporation,” which substantially elevated the income of many Black people and brought them into previously white spaces. Yes, a lot of affirmative-action efforts stopped at mere tokenism. Even so, many of these “tokens” managed to succeed, and the result is the largest Black middle class in American history.
Over the past 50 years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black people who are low-income (less than $52,000 a year for a household of three) has fallen seven points, from 48 to 41 percent. The proportion who are middle-income ($52,000 to $156,000 a year) has risen by one point, to 47 percent. The proportion who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen the most dramatically, from 5 to 12 percent. Overall, Black poverty remains egregiously disproportionate to that of white and Asian Americans. But fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich. Substantial numbers now attend the best schools, pursue professions of their choosing, and occupy positions of power and prestige. Affirmative action worked.
But that very success has inflamed the inevitable white backlash. Notably, the only racial group more likely to be low-income now than 50 years ago is whites—and the only group less likely to be low-income is Blacks.
For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right?
In predominantly white professional spaces, this racial anxiety appears in subtler ways. Black people are all too familiar with a particular kind of interaction, in the guise of a casual watercooler conversation, the gist of which is a sort of interrogation: “Where did you come from?”; “How did you get here?”; and “Are you qualified to be here?” (The presumptive answer to the last question is clearly no; Black skin, evoking for white people the iconic ghetto, confers an automatic deficit of credibility.)
Black newcomers must signal quickly and clearly that they belong. Sometimes this requires something as simple as showing a company ID that white people are not asked for. Other times, a more elaborate dance is required, a performance in which the worker must demonstrate their propriety, their distance from the ghetto. This can involve dressing more formally than the job requires, speaking in a self-consciously educated way, and evincing a placid demeanor, especially in moments of disagreement.
As part of my ethnographic research, I once embedded in a major financial-services corporation in Philadelphia, where I spent six months observing and interviewing workers. One Black employee I spoke with, a senior vice president, said that people of color who wanted to climb the management ladder must wear the right “uniform” and work hard to perform respectability. “They’re never going to envision you as being a white male,” he told me, “but if you can dress the same and look a certain way and drive a conservative car and whatever else, they’ll say, ‘This guy has a similar attitude, similar values [to we white people]. He’s a team player.’ If you don’t dress with the uniform, obviously you’re on the wrong team.”
This need to constantly perform respectability for white people is a psychological drain, leaving Black people spent and demoralized. They typically keep this demoralization hidden from their white co-workers because they feel that they need to show they are not whiners. Having to pay a “Black tax” as they move through white areas deepens this demoralization. This tax is levied on people of color in nice restaurants and other public places, or simply while driving, when the fear of a lethal encounter with the police must always be in mind. The existential danger this kind of encounter poses is what necessitates “The Talk” that Black parents—fearful every time their kids go out the door that they might not come back alive—give to their children. The psychological effects of all of this accumulate gradually, sapping the spirit and engendering cynicism.
Even the most exalted members of the Black elite must live in two worlds. They understand the white elite’s mores and values, and embody them to a substantial extent—but they typically remain keenly conscious of their Blackness. They socialize with both white and Black people of their own professional standing, but also members of the Black middle and working classes with whom they feel more kinship, meeting them at the barbershop, in church, or at gatherings of long-standing friendship groups. The two worlds seldom overlap. This calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”—a term he used for the first time in this publication, in 1897—referring to the dual cultural mindsets that successful African Americans must simultaneously inhabit.
For middle-class Black people, a certain fluidity—abetted by family connections—enables them to feel a connection with those at the lower reaches of society. But that connection comes with a risk of contagion; they fear that, meritocratic status notwithstanding, they may be dragged down by their association with the hood.
When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, some friends of mine and I mentored at-risk youth in West Philadelphia.
One of these kids, Kevin Robinson, who goes by KAYR (pronounced “K.R.”), grew up with six siblings in a single-parent household on public assistance. Two of his sisters got pregnant as teenagers, and for a while the whole family was homeless. But he did well in high school and was accepted to Bowdoin College, where he was one of five African Americans in a class of 440. He was then accepted to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he was one of 10 or so African Americans in an M.B.A. class of roughly 180. He got into the analyst-training program at Goldman Sachs, where his cohort of 300 had five African Americans. And from there he ended up at a hedge fund, where he was the lone Black employee.
What’s striking about Robinson’s accomplishments is not just the steepness of his rise or the scantness of Black peers as he climbed, but the extent of cultural assimilation he felt he needed to achieve in order to fit in. He trimmed his Afro. He did a pre-college program before starting Bowdoin, where he had sushi for the first time and learned how to play tennis and golf. “Let me look at how these people live; let me see how they operate,” he recalls saying to himself. He decided to start reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, as they did, and to watch 60 Minutes. “I wanted people to see me more as their peer versus … someone from the hood. I wanted them to see me as, like, ‘Hey, look, he’s just another middle-class Black kid.’ ” When he was about to start at Goldman Sachs, a Latina woman who was mentoring him there told him not to wear a silver watch or prominent jewelry: “ ‘KAYR, go get a Timex with a black leather band. Keep it very simple … Fit in.’ ” My friends and I had given him similar advice earlier on.
All of this worked; he thrived professionally. Yet even as he occupied elite precincts of wealth and achievement, he was continually getting pulled back to support family in the ghetto, where he felt the need to code-switch, speaking and eating the ways his family did so as not to insult them.
The year he entered Bowdoin, one of his younger brothers was sent to prison for attempted murder, and a sister who had four children was shot in the face and died. Over the years he would pay for school supplies for his nieces and nephews, and for multiple family funerals—all while keeping his family background a secret from his professional colleagues. Even so, he would get subjected to the standard indignities—being asked to show ID when his white peers were not; enduring the (sometimes obliviously) racist comments from colleagues (“You don’t act like a regular Black”). He would report egregious offenses to HR but would usually just let things go, for fear that developing a reputation as a “race guy” would restrict his professional advancement.
Robinson’s is a remarkable success story. He is 40 now; he owns a property-management company and is a multimillionaire. But his experience makes clear that no matter what professional or financial heights you ascend to, if you are Black, you can never escape the iconic ghetto, and sometimes not even the actual one.
The most egregious intrusion of a Black person into white space was the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama as president. A Black man in the White House! For some white people, this was intolerable. Birthers, led by Donald Trump, said he was ineligible for the presidency, claiming falsely that he had been born in Kenya. The white backlash intensified; Republicans opposed Obama with more than the standard amount of partisan vigor. In 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had protected the franchise for 50 years. Encouraged by this opening, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas moved forward with voter-suppression laws, setting a course that other states are now following. And this year, the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. I want to tell a story that illustrates the social gains this puts at risk.
Many years ago, when I was a professor at Penn, my father came to visit me. Walking around campus, we bumped into various colleagues and students of mine, most of them white, who greeted us warmly. He watched me interact with my secretary and other department administrators. Afterward, Dad and I went back to my house to drink beer and listen to Muddy Waters.
“So you’re teaching at that white school?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You work with white people. And you teach white students.”
“Yeah, but they actually come in all colors,” I responded. I got his point, though.
“Well, let me ask you one thing,” he said, furrowing his brow.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Do they respect you?”
After thinking about his question a bit, I said, “Well, some do. And some don’t. But you know, Dad, it is hard to tell which is which sometimes.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
He didn’t disbelieve me; it was just that what he’d witnessed on campus was at odds with his experience of the typical Black-white interaction, where the subordinate status of the Black person was automatically assumed by the white one. Growing up in the South, my dad understood that white people simply did not respect Black people. Observing the respectful treatment I received from my students and colleagues, my father had a hard time believing his own eyes. Could race relations have changed so much, so fast?
They had—in large part because of what affirmative action, and the general processes of racial incorporation and Black economic improvement, had wrought. In the 1960s, the only Black people at the financial-services firm I studied would have been janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, or secretaries; 30 years later, affirmative action had helped populate the firm with Black executives. Each beneficiary of affirmative action, each member of the growing Black middle class, helped normalize the presence of Black people in professional and other historically white spaces. All of this diminished, in some incremental way, the power of the symbolic ghetto to hold back people of color.
Too many people forget, if ever they knew it, what a profound cultural shift affirmative action effected. And they overlook affirmative action’s crucial role in forestalling social unrest.
Some years ago, I was invited to the College of the Atlantic, a small school in Maine, to give the commencement address. As I stood at the sink in the men’s room before the event, checking the mirror to make sure all my academic regalia was properly arrayed, an older white man came up to me and said, with no preamble, “What do you think of affirmative action?”
“I think it’s a form of reparations,” I said.
“Well, I think they need to be educated first,” he said, and then walked out.
I was so provoked by this that I scrambled back to my hotel room and rewrote my speech. I’d already been planning to talk about the benefits of affirmative action, but I sharpened and expanded my case, explaining that it not only had lifted many Black people out of the ghetto, but had been a weapon in the Cold War, when unaligned countries and former colonies were trying to decide which superpower to follow. Back then, Democrats and some Republicans were united in believing that affirmative action, by demonstrating the country’s commitment to racial justice and equality, helped project American greatness to the world.
Beyond that, I said to this almost entirely white audience, affirmative action had helped keep the racial unrest of the ’60s from flaring up again. When the kin—the mothers, fathers, cousins, nephews, sons, daughters, baby mamas, uncles, aunts—of ghetto residents secure middle-class livelihoods, those ghetto relatives hear about it. This gives the young people who live there a modicum of hope that they might do the same. Hope takes the edge off distress and desperation; it lessens the incentives for people to loot and burn. What opponents of affirmative action fail to understand is that without a ladder of upward mobility for Black Americans, and a general sense that justice will prevail, a powerful nurturer of social concord gets lost.
Yes, continuing to expand the Black professional and middle classes will lead to more instances of “the dance,” and the loaded interrogations, and the other awkward moments and indignities that people of color experience in white spaces. But the greater the number of affluent, successful Black people in such places, the faster this awkwardness will diminish, and the less power the recurrent waves of white reaction will have to set people of color back. I would like to believe that future generations of Black Americans will someday find themselves as pleasantly surprised as my dad once was by the new levels of racial respect and equality they discover.
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Black Success, White Backlash.”
The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.
Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.
In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”
Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.
“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”
Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)
Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.
Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.
In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.
The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.
In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.
By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”
Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.
A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.
Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”
That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”
As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.
Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.
President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.
Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”
With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.
While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask “Who is on your side?”
The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.
But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.
“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”
But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)
“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”
My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.
More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”
Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.
The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”
When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”
To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”
Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.
Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.
The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.
To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”
In a 2005 episode of The Office, Michael Scott, the office manager, requires his employees to choose an upside-down index card from a tray and place it on their forehead. The cards bear a racial or ethnic label—Black, Jewish, Italian, and so on—and Michael tells the employees to treat one another according to the label listed on the card and to “stir the melting pot” by playing to racial stereotypes. The scene, which ends with Michael getting slapped in the face, mocks corporate America’s ham-handed approach to diversity training. Back in 2005, almost no one saw the C-suite or the human-resources office as an engine of progressive change. Indeed, the idea that workers would look to their employers for leadership on any delicate social or political matters seemed risible.
Yet, today, a new status quo has emerged.
I am a political scientist and am currently researching how business leaders and their companies shape American politics. But while interviewing dozens of executives from across the country, I could not help but notice the ways that American politics is also reshaping corporate life.
Donald Trump’s presidency led companies to start regularly issuing political statements on major developments in the news. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent protest movement, prompted companies not only to incorporate more diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives into the workplace, but also to adopt “anti-racism” messaging, for which merely showing tolerance wasn’t enough. Participants are urged to actively promote anti-racist policy goals—rendering these sessions far more overtly political than their predecessors of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Although political chitchat has always been part of office culture, the volume of the discourse and the extent to which it is coming from management are departures from the past. As a senior manager at a New York insurance firm recently told me, “I probably get just as many emails” from the company’s executives “about social-justice or environmental stuff as I do about how the company is doing. And that’s just not how it was … That’s a major shift that’s only happened in the last two or three years.” Bosses across the country, particularly in white-collar workplaces, are pumping out tweets and press releases about the midterm election, abortion rights, and the war in Ukraine. They are hosting mandatory trainings and workshops that come uncomfortably close to the TV parody.
But if anything, the new normal likely hinders the cause of diversity and tolerance, while producing no other worthy social change. Mandatory workshops on anti-racism and LGBTQ rights are about as effective at eliminating bias as you’d expect if they were facilitated by someone from The Office. Political messages issued by corporations are intended to sound topical, progressive, and genuine, but come across to many listeners as tone-deaf, performative, and alienating. Companies, I think, should be politically and civically engaged, but they’re going about it all wrong.
At many white-collarjobs, workers have extra time on their hands. Social-media scrolling, gossip, needless group meetings, “quiet quitting”—the inefficiency of office culture is old news. But politicsappears to be sucking up more of that time now than in the past.
Three factors are at play. First, the white-collar workforce has undergone a partisan realignment. Workers with four-year degrees now vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Democratic voters now trust business more than Republicans do. Democratic workers are enthusiastic about businesses taking public stands on political priorities. CEOs themselves, who tended to be somewhat apolitical on social issues before Trump’s 2016 victory, have in some cases made headlines by becoming activists. And they have hired vice presidents and consultants who keep the company’s social mission high on the agenda. In short, white-collar businesses have become Democratic constituencies.
Second, the long-running decline of civic life in America, likely exacerbated by COVID, means that many Americans who are cognitively engaged in politics lack any social organization—other than the office—through which they can channel their political energy. Many people who consider themselves political junkies don’t volunteer for candidates’ campaigns or advocacy groups. They aren’t active members of unions or religious communities or neighborhood associations.
CEOs are complicit in turning the office into a venue for political discourse. A real-estate developer in Georgia recently told me about how he gathers his team, including maintenance personnel as well as data analysts. (Because I conducted these interviews in my capacity as a political scientist, I am not identifying my interviewees by name, in keeping with ethics standards in social-science research.) They meet on Zoom, pick an issue in the news, and talk it through. These conversations are an attempt to push back against political polarization. “I [want] all of us to talk to each other as Americans and fellow citizens and being part of the same team,” the developer said. He described these meetings as therapy sessions through which he, the boss, in his own small way, can try to heal America’s political wounds.
The third factor behind the politicization of the workplace is a cultural shift in corporate leadership and in employees’ expectations of their managers. If workers come to the office with low morale because of an election loss or Supreme Court decision, today’s bosses are not going to yell at them to buck up and get back to work. Bosses have learned to be empathetic leaders who need to care about what workers care about.
Since the GreatRecession, the conventional wisdom among corporate recruiters has been that workers, especially young workers, want bosses who have a sense of mission and whose political positions align with their own views. In this account, socially conscious people don’t want to work for a company that cares only about money or that contracts with nasty clients or that donates to members of Congress who support the wrong positions. Workers know that companies can exert pressure on politicians. The company can have a bigger impact than the workers can have alone through their personal Facebook posts.
And yet politicizing the workplace—either to meet employees’ demands or to satisfy the CEO’s political goals—has obvious pitfalls. Not every worker or boss is good at respectful dialogue about political matters. A conservative executive in Texas told me this summer that he had to buy out his even more conservative business partner because the partner had embraced COVID conspiracy theories and engaged the staff in politically aggressive, emotionally obtuse conversations.
More fundamentally, the boss-employee relationship makes the workplace a difficult setting for an open conversation about politics. An office is not a community of equals. When a boss injects politics into a conversation, many employees feel compelled to nod along, which gives the boss a false impression that everyone feels the same way.
Feigning agreement with the boss extends beyond explicit political conversations and into politics-adjacent subjects such as diversity, equity, and inclusion. One executive told me he sees diversity differently from how his employer sees it. “We just like diversity in the way people look,” he said of his company, “not diversity in the way people think.” The firm, he argued, hires people from across the racial and ethnic spectrum, but they come from a narrow set of universities and tend to hold the same liberal viewpoints.
This man, a Republican, tends to keep his opinions to himself, and for good reason. In a 2021 Knight Foundation survey that I helped design, 57 percent of Democrats (and a much higher proportion of Black and Latino Democrats) said private employers should prohibit workers from expressing “political views that are offensive to some.” Most Republicans disagreed. Speaking honestly at a DEI training or in a political discussion is difficult if most of your co-workers think your views not only are wrong but perhaps should be banned from the office.
Some forms of political engagement at the office have distinct and understandable goals. Workers want to have a say in how the firm does business; employers want to show that they care about the demands of customers and staff. But some of today’s political office culture does not even pretend to be strategic. Workers might gather around a TV screen to commiserate during major news events or fish for approval by sharing news articles in the employee Slack channel. Such activity functions as group therapy during political ups and downs. It does not change election results. It is pure political hobbyism—a performative form of civic engagement that has become the white-collar set’s preferred approach to public affairs.
Outside white-collar office culture, different norms prevail. In my interviews with industrialists and retailers, a wildly different perspective is evident. “You are talking about a problem that is just utterly foreign to my little world,” an executive who oversees a chain of beauty salons told me recently. He describes his firm as a “working-class, southern, multicultural company” with an entirely female retail staff. He views political talk at work as a frivolous distraction.
Even so, this executive has a clear vision of his company’s civic mission: offering a path into the middle class for people without strong educational credentials. “I feel very good that there are 150 women, most of whom come from crappy backgrounds, who have a shot at owning a home, buying a car, going on vacation.” His retail employees—none of whom has a college degree, he says—earn up to $90,000 a year. He thinks they are “likely to become Republicans” because their foremost concern is about money and taxes. “Our workers are tied to their own productivity. And that clears away an awful lot of crap.”
Of course, I do not know whether his employees feel the way he feels. But I understand why this executive looks on bemused at his post-materialist big-city compatriots. How many management consultants, tech engineers, corporate attorneys, or investment bankers can argue so forthrightly that their own firms are making other people’s lives better?
I am deeply skeptical of what the current wave of white-collar political hobbyism will accomplish, especially when so many corporate pronouncements are clearly hot air. (Consider those companies that very briefly, and very loudly, swore off donations to politicians who voted against certifying the 2020 election, and then very quickly, and very quietly, went right back to contributing to them.) The shame is that businesses and their employees can involve themselves productively in politics. They can invest time in community organizations and business organizations that have concrete goals and strategies. Rather than playing to would-be activists on Slack, business leaders can get involved (and try to involve employees) in long-term engagement on education, housing, transit, and other issues central to a thriving economy. They can encourage diversity and mutual respect by inviting workers to collaborate on common goals, rather than through stilted training exercises better suited to The Office.
How has white-collar office culture become so political? Ultimately, through the good intentions of people who recognize that all is not well with America today. Channel those good intentions into strategic civic engagement, and a company can make a difference. But if, in the end, the goal is merely to cultivate a mild sense of political camaraderie so that a certain class of partisan employees can feel better about themselves, then the virtuous email from the CEO and a monthly guest speaker introduced by the VP for DEI will probably do the trick just fine.
Senator Ron Johnson has survived another hairy reelection bid to win a third term in Wisconsin. This time, however, no one should be surprised.
Six years ago, Johnson’s defeat seemed so likely that the national Republican Party pulled its money from Wisconsin, all but conceding his race. Johnson won anyway. This past August, a Marquette poll found him trailing his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, by seven points, 51 percent to 44 percent. This morning, when the race was called, Johnson was leading Barnes by about one percentage point.
In the end, Johnson’s race wasn’t much of a nail-biter. Polls swung in his favor beginning in September, seemingly the result of a ruthless, well-funded—and to many Barnes supporters, downright racist—ad campaign blaming the lieutenant governor for a rise in violent crime and picturing him alongside other progressive Democrats of color.
Yet to Democrats, no setback in the scramble for the Senate was likely more frustrating than their failure to oust Johnson. The former businessman’s turn toward the conspiratorial wing of the GOP over the past few years had made him one of the worst-polling senators in the country and easily the most vulnerable Republican incumbent up for reelection this fall. Johnson became a vocal critic of COVID-19 vaccines and a champion of what he called “the vaccine injured.” He was embroiled in both impeachments of former President Donald Trump and downplayed the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
In Barnes, many Democrats believed they had found a rising national star—a 35-year-old onetime community organizer from a union family who could excite Black voters in Milwaukee and progressives in Madison while winning over working-class white voters in the rest of the state. Barnes, a former state legislator who won election as lieutenant governor in 2018, led the Democratic Senate primary from the get-go and ultimately won in a walk after his opponents dropped out and endorsed him in the closing weeks of the campaign. Barnes courted labor unions aggressively and broadcast the sunniest of TV ads that showed him unpacking groceries and hitting baseballs off a tee.
But Barnes had emerged from the progressive left’s Working Families Party, an ally of Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Exploiting fears over rising crime, Johnson’s campaign resurfaced images and quotes linking Barnes to the “Defund the police” movement from the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020. Polls over the summer showed Barnes ahead of Johnson, but the Democrat’s standing dropped after weeks of crime-focused negative ads.
Wisconsin Democrats are left to wonder whether another one of their choices in the August primary—Alex Lasry, the son of a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks; Tom Nelson, a county executive; or Sarah Godlewski, the state treasurer—would have stood a better chance against Johnson. Perhaps Johnson has benefited from a bit of luck: The three years he has been on the ballot—2010, 2016, and now 2022—have all been relatively strong Republican years. (A few red-state Democratic senators, including Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have had the similar good fortune of running in favorable environments for their party.)
Yet as I wrote last month, the polls that have pointed to Johnson’s unpopularity might not be capturing the full wellspring of his support in Wisconsin. To a person, the Republicans with whom I spoke said they viewed Johnson’s seemingly quixotic fight against conventional COVID treatments and vaccines not as a liability but as a strength, and that it was a big reason they supported him. During his first term, Johnson seemed to embody a traditional conservatism of low taxes and low spending, the small-government ethos of a fellow Wisconsite, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. He still champions those policies, but he has become far more closely linked to the establishment-toppling, media-fighting style of Trump. Johnson now inspires more passion on both sides, whether it’s hatred from his critics or sympathy from his supporters. “The news is just crucifying him constantly. They made him out to be a horrible person, and he’s not,” Ann Calvin, a 57-year-old who worked for years in an assisted-living facility, told me during my visit.
Like Trump, Johnson has also made a habit of defying expectations and foiling his critics. He did so again yesterday, completing his second comeback in six years to deprive Democrats of a seat that once seemed theirs to lose.
Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic “over” is like calling a fight “finished” because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face.
American leaders and pundits have been trying to call an end to the pandemic since its beginning, only to be faced with new surges or variants. This mindset not only compromises the nation’s ability to manage COVID, but also leaves it vulnerable to other outbreaks. Future pandemics aren’t hypothetical; they’re inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events. As rising temperatures force animals to relocate, species that have never coexisted will meet, allowing the viruses within them to find new hosts—humans included. Dealing with all of this again is a matter of when, not if.
In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. That diagnosis remains unchanged; if anything, I was too optimistic. America was ranked as the world’s most prepared country in 2019—and, bafflingly, again in 2021—but accounts for 16 percent of global COVID deaths despite having just 4 percent of the global population. It spends more on medical care than any other wealthy country, but its hospitalswerenonethelessoverwhelmed. It helped create vaccines in record time, but is 67th in the world in full vaccinations. (This trend cannot solely be attributed to political division; even the most heavily vaccinated blue state—Rhode Island—still lags behind 21 nations.) America experienced the largest life-expectancy decline of any wealthy country in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. If it had fared as well as just the average peer nation, 1.1 million people who died last year—a third of all American deaths—would still be alive.
America’s superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the country’s many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.
In furiously racing to rebuild on this same foundation, America sets itself up to collapse once more. Experience is reputedly the best teacher, and yet the U.S. repeated mistakes from the early pandemic when faced with the Delta and Omicron variants. It got early global access to vaccines, and nonetheless lost almost half a million people after all adults became eligible for the shots. It has struggled to control monkeypox—a slower-spreading virus for which there is already a vaccine. Its right-wing legislators have passed laws and rulings that curtail the possibility of important public-health measures like quarantines and vaccine mandates. It has made none of the broad changes that would protect its population against future pathogens, such as better ventilation or universal paid sick leave. Its choices virtually guarantee that everything that’s happened in the past three years will happen again.
The U.S. will continue to struggle against infectious diseases in part because some of its most deeply held values are antithetical to the task of besting a virus. Since its founding, the country has prized a strain of rugged individualism that prioritizes individual freedom and valorizes self-reliance. According to this ethos, people are responsible for their own well-being, physical and moral strength are equated, social vulnerability results from personal weakness rather than policy failure, and handouts or advice from the government are unwelcome. Such ideals are disastrous when handling a pandemic, for two major reasons.
First, diseases spread. Each person’s choices inextricably affect their community, and the threat to the collective always exceeds that to the individual. The original Omicron variant, for example, posed slightly less risk to each infected person than the variants that preceded it, but spread so quickly that it inundated hospitals, greatly magnifying COVID’s societal costs. To handle such threats, collective action is necessary. Governments need policies, such as vaccine requirements or, yes, mask mandates, that protect the health of entire populations, while individuals have to consider their contribution to everyone else’s risk alongside their own personal stakes. And yet, since the spring of 2021, pundits have mocked people who continue to think this way for being irrational and overcautious, and government officials have consistently framed COVID as a matter of personal responsibility.
Second, a person’s circumstances always constrain their choices. Low-income and minority groups find it harder to avoid infections or isolate when sick because they’re more likely to live in crowded homes and hold hourly-wage jobs without paid leave or the option to work remotely. Places such as prisons and nursing homes, whose residents have little autonomy, became hot spots for the worst outbreaks. Treating a pandemic as an individualist free-for-all ignores how difficult it is for many Americans to protect themselves. It also leaves people with vulnerabilities that last across successive pathogens: The groups that suffered most during the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 were the same ones that took the brunt of COVID, a decade later.
America’s individualist bent has also shaped its entire health-care system, which ties health to wealth and employment. That system is organized around treating sick people at great and wasteful expense, instead of preventing communities from falling sick in the first place. The latter is the remit of public health rather than medicine, and has long been underfunded and undervalued. Even the CDC—the nation’s top public-health agency—changed its guidelines in February to prioritize hospitalizations over cases, implicitly tolerating infections as long as hospitals are stable. But such a strategy practically ensures that emergency rooms will be overwhelmed by a fast-spreading virus; that, consequently, health-care workers will quit; and that waves of chronically ill long-haulers who are disabled by their infections will seek care and receive nothing. All of that has happened and will happen again. America’s pandemic individualism means that it’s your job to protect yourself from infection; if you get sick, your treatment may be unaffordable, and if you don’t get better, you will struggle to find help, or even anyone who believes you.
In the late 19th century, many scholars realized that epidemics were social problems, whose spread and toll are influenced by poverty, inequality, overcrowding, hazardous working conditions, poor sanitation, and political negligence. But after the advent of germ theory, this social model was displaced by a biomedical and militaristic one, in which diseases were simple battles between hosts and pathogens, playing out within individual bodies. This paradigm conveniently allowed people to ignore the social context of disease. Instead of tackling intractable social problems, scientists focused on fighting microscopic enemies with drugs, vaccines, and other products of scientific research—an approach that sat easily with America’s abiding fixation on technology as a panacea.
The allure of biomedical panaceas is still strong. For more than a year, the Biden administration and its advisers have reassured Americans that, with vaccines and antivirals, “we have the tools” to control the pandemic. These tools are indeed effective, but their efficacy is limited if people can’t access them or don’t want to, and if the government doesn’t create policies that shift that dynamic. A profoundly unequal society was always going to struggle with access: People with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and no health insurance struggled to make or attend vaccine appointments, even after shots were widely available. A profoundly mistrustful society was always going to struggle with hesitancy, made worse by political polarization and rampantly spreading misinformation. The result is that just 72 percent of Americans have completed their initial course of shots and just half have gotten the first of the boosters necessary to protect against current variants. At the same time, almost all other protections have been stripped away, and COVID funding is evaporating. And yet the White House’s recent pandemic-preparedness strategy still focuses heavily on biomedical magic bullets, paying scant attention to the social conditions that could turn those bullets into duds.
Technological solutions also tend to rise into society’s penthouses, while epidemics seep into its cracks. Cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, and education, who then move on, leaving the communities most affected by diseases to continue shouldering their burden. This dynamic explains why the same health inequities linger across the decades even as pathogens come and go, and why the U.S. has now normalized an appalling level of COVID death and disability. Such suffering is concentrated among elderly, immunocompromised, working-class, and minoritycommunities—groups that are underrepresented among political decision makers and the media, who get to declare the pandemic over. Even when inequities are highlighted, knowledge seems to suppress action: In one study, white Americans felt less empathy for vulnerable communities and were less supportive of safety precautions after learning about COVID’s racial disparities. This attitude is self-destructive and limits the advantage that even the most privileged Americans enjoy. Measures that would flatten social inequities, such as universal health care and better ventilation, would benefit everyone—and their absence harms everyone, too. In 2021, young white Americans died at lower rates than Black and Indigenous Americans, but still at three times the rate of their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
By failing to address its social weaknesses, the U.S. accumulates more of them. An estimated 9 million Americans have lost close loved ones to COVID; about 10 percent will likely experience prolonged grief, which the country’s meager mental-health services will struggle to address. Because of brain fog, fatigue, and other debilitating symptoms, long COVID is keeping the equivalent of 2 million to 4 million Americansout of work; between lost earnings and increased medical costs, it could cost the economy $2.6 trillion a year. The exodus of health-care workers, especially experienced veterans, has left hospitals with a shortfall of staff and know-how. Levels of trust—one of the mostimportant predictors of a country’s success at controlling COVID—have fallen, making pandemic interventions harder to deploy, while creating fertile ground in which misinformation can germinate. This is the cost of accepting the unacceptable: an even weaker foundation that the next disease will assail.
In thespring of 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would last for years, and that the U.S. would need long-term strategies to control it. But America’s leaders consistently acted as if they were fighting a skirmish rather than a siege, lifting protective measures too early, and then reenacting them too slowly. They have skirted the responsibility of articulating what it would actually look like for the pandemic to be over, which has meant that whenever citizens managed to flatten the curve, the time they bought was wasted. Endemicity was equated with inaction rather than active management. This attitude removed any incentive or will to make the sort of long-term changes that would curtail the current disaster and prevent future ones. And so America has little chance of effectively countering the inevitable pandemics of the future; it cannot even focus on the one that’s ongoing.
If change happens, it will likely occur slowly and from the ground up. In the vein of ACT UP—the extraordinarily successful activist group that changed the world’s approach to AIDS—grassroots organizations of long–haulers, grievers, immunocompromised people, and others disproportionately harmed by the pandemic have formed, creating the kind of vocal constituency that public health has long lacked.
More pandemics will happen, and the U.S. has spectacularly failed to contain the current one. But it cannot afford the luxury of nihilism. It still has time to address its bedrocks of individualism and inequality, to create a health system that effectively prevents sickness instead of merely struggling to treat it, and to enact policies that rightfully prioritize the needs of disabled and vulnerable communities. Such changes seem unrealistic given the relentless disappointments of the past three years, but substantial social progress always seems unfeasible until it is actually achieved. Normal led to this. It is not too late to fashion a better normal.
