Where Do Democrats Go from Here? Pt. 2: The Working Class Voter Puzzle
PLUS: A review of "Mahashmashana" by Father John Misty
There’s a concept in Marxist thought called “false consciousness” that liberals often turn to to explain why members of the working class sometimes vote against parties organized to represent the interests of the working class. The idea is that the wealthy capitalists who control the economy and government have the power to manipulate the political debate and the culture-at-large in a way that shifts political conflict away from the issue of class (which would pit the massive working class against the far outnumbered wealthy) to other issues concerned with matters such as religion, ethnicity, race, war, crime, personal morality, nationalism, etc. As Marxists see it, those other issues distract from the most-pressing of all political issues: Capitalism’s exploitation of the working class, which severely constrains the working class’s ability to feed, clothe, house, and take physical care of themselves. When the working class prioritizes those distractions over issues directly connected to their interests as the working class, support policies that run counter to their self-interest as an economic class, or simply fail to see themselves as members of the exploited working class, they are said to suffer from “false” (rather than “class”) consciousness.
False consciousness is a common left-wing lament. As a liberal, I do believe there is truth to that idea. It’s why Republicans in my lifetime have hammered away at issues like flag-burning, gun rights, school prayer, Ten Commandment displays, explicit musical lyrics, immigrant crime, soda pop regulation, pick-up truck regulations, gas stove regulations, “woke” books in school libraries, and the vanishingly small number of transgender athletes who want to compete on women’s athletic teams. Some of these issues are significant, some are trivial, but what they all have in common is that they are wedge issues that stir up passions among ordinary voters, poison Democrats’ reputations, and divert attention from issues like economic inequality, health care, worker’s rights, and corporate power that should be at the center of the national debate.
But leaning on false consciousness as an excuse is also dangerous for liberals. For starters, it is not only patronizing for liberal political junkies to assume they know how working-class voters ought to vote, but that they know better than the voters themselves. People have their own reasons for voting the way they do, and if we respect their autonomy and regard them as co-equal citizens, they’re entitled to those reasons even if those reasons are unconvincing to us. False consciousness is also what makes Marxism and a lot of related left-wing thought non-falsifiable: Once the terms of life in a capitalist society become apparent, the working-class revolution is supposedly inevitable, but the reason that revolution hasn’t happened yet even though Marx and every socialist/liberal out there have made the evils of capitalist society apparent is a result of false consciousness, so just wait, the inevitable will eventually happen once it becomes inevitable. Left unaccounted for: The possibility that the working class actually prefers capitalism and rejects Marxism, socialism, and left-wing liberalism. For those reasons, whenever false consciousness has come up in a classroom I’ve been a part of, most of those present admit that, yeah, it’s a thing, but it’s not everything.
I probably don’t have to tell you how much that irks Democrats. Democrats believe to their core that they are the party of the working class; the party that best represents the interests of the working American; the party that locks arms with unions and striking workers; the party that stands up for the marginalized, the poor, and the little guy. They are not the party of the wealthy or corporate America, of landlords and bosses. Their presidential nominees didn’t get rich in the oil industry or run private equity firms; nor do they call a penthouse in a Manhattan skyscraper, a New Jersey golf club, and a sprawling resort in Palm Beach home. No, the Democrats are the party of the New Deal and the Great Society, the party that built this country’s middle class by giving a hand-up to the working class.
Some will say that version of the Democratic Party hasn’t been around for decades. It was a Democrat, after all, who signed NAFTA into law, who chose to bail out General Motors rather than the homeowners who were the victims of subprime loans. Over the past half century, as deindustrialization, automation, offshoring, and foreign competition decimated unions, hollowed out once-proud manufacturing towns, and gutted the American working class, Democrats only stood by and watched it happen, offering only half-measures rather than a strident resistance while cozying up to the corporate interests that pad their campaign accounts. For many working-class Americans, the Democrats have consistently failed the Janet Jackson Test: What have you done for me lately?
“But wait,” Democrats proclaim, “we’ve turned that corner! We listened to Bernie Sanders and reconnected with our roots as a working-class party.” And that’s true, the Biden administration had a good working-class record: He made investments in clean-energy and manufacturing jobs, passed an infrastructure bill that will provide employment for thousands of construction workers, stepped up enforcement of labor and anti-trust laws, lowered prescription drug prices, expanded the child tax credit, and chose not to rollback Trump’s tariffs on China (despite their inflationary effects; oh, the irony.) Joe Biden was the first president ever to join a picket line and the first to endorse a workers organizing campaign. He supported the PRO Act, early childhood education programs, and paid family and sick leave.
Even if you insist, “That’s not enough,” it’s something, and it’s a record of achievement for working-class Americans that’s unrivaled since, what, the Johnson administration? It’s even more impressive when you consider how slim Democrats’ margins were in Congress. Two moderate Democratic senators (who eventually left the party) and a unified Republican Party kept Biden from enacting a more ambitious agenda, so it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In fact, Biden’s efforts won over Sanders, who had warned Democrats in 2020 while campaigning against Biden that Biden wouldn’t be progressive enough on economic issues and in 2016 condemned Hillary Clinton as a captive of corporate interests. If you’re a working-class American, that’s what Biden did for you lately.
And besides, elections are binary choices, right? The Democrats’ opponent in the 2024 presidential election was a guy whose only major legislative achievement during his first term in office was a tax cut that was basically a handout to corporations. A guy whose most prominent supporter (and apparently now his closest advisor) is the richest man in the world. A guy who bonded with the world’s richest man over his willingness to fire workers who threaten to go on strike. Whose most famous catchphrase after “Make America Great Again” is “You’re fired.” The choice should be pretty clear.
How did that election turn out? As Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News notes, while Barack Obama won 57% of voters earning between $39,000 and $50,000 in 2012, Trump won those voters 53%-45%. And while non-college-educated voters split their votes evenly between Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, this year, they went 2-1 for Trump over Harris. You can see why the idea of false consciousness resonates so much right now with Democrats.
While Democrats lost ground with many demographic group in 2024, election post-mortems are focusing hard on Democrats’ struggles with the working class. Some blame Democrats’ obsession with cultural issues and “wokeness”; a party elite whose priorities and worldview are out of touch with working-class attitudes; a failure to pursue a more progressive political agenda; a lack of moderation within the party; an unwillingness to get tough on immigration and trade; placing too great an emphasis on the threat Trump poses to democracy; or a party posture that is too accommodating of the establishment and the Washington status quo. It’s a lot for Democrats to digest. There’s agreement within the party that they need to solve the working-class voter puzzle. But what should Democrats do?
It’s tempting here to turn to false consciousness and simply blame voters for not understanding their true interests. I’ll say it again: That’s a thing, but it’s not everything. Furthermore, relying on false consciousness leads to resignation and the sense that there’s nothing Democrats can do to win over working-class voters. Democrats can’t simply assume that if they build a working-class platform that working-class voters will come to their party, though. They need to compete hard and deliver for those voters.
From an analytical standpoint, the first thing Democrats need to do is acknowledge that the category of “working-class voter” encompasses a large, diverse, and ultimately nebulous voting bloc. Social scientists use different criteria to define the category, including income level, occupation type, and educational attainment. According to those criteria, however, a working-class voter might be a factory worker, a teacher, a fast-food cook, the owner of a construction company, a truck driver, a nurse, a farmer, a hair stylist, a shelf-stocker at Walmart, a custodian, a car dealer, the mechanic who works for that car dealer, an accountant, etc., etc., etc. They may perform manual labor, sit behind a desk all day, work for the government, perform services for others, or own a small business. They may live paycheck-to-paycheck or take their family to Disneyworld every year. They may have a high school diploma or an advanced degree.
By some definitions, 70% of all Americans are “working-class” voters, a number so large it threatens to make the category meaningless. Complicating the matter even further, when polled, large numbers of Americans self-identify as “working class,” including some whom many of us wouldn’t consider working-class at all. Yet that sense of identification as a working-class American—someone who views work primarily as a way to provide for the material well-being of themselves and others rather than as a means of self-actualization and self-fulfillment—may be what this all comes down to.
Secondly, working-class voters are found in nearly every demographic category in the United States. That’s important to remember because we shouldn’t assume a working-class voter will automatically vote for candidates who support policies that presumably favor the economic interests of working-class voters. Other factors may exert a stronger pull come Election Day. To be clear, I’m not endorsing the idea of false consciousness here, just noting instead that voters are complex, cross-pressured individuals who have all kinds of reasons for voting the way they do.
Take White evangelical working-class voters as an example. In an article posted on the Brookings Institute’s website, John J. DiIulio, Jr., writes that the White working-class electorate is composed of two distinct blocs: Evangelicals without college degrees and non-evangelicals without college degrees. Trump cleans up among working-class White evangelicals without college degrees, winning 86% of that vote in 2024. But Trump actually lost working-class White non-evangelicals without college degrees 52%-45% to Harris. Granted, Trump did better with this group than he did in 2020, but only by four points. The point here is that evangelicals as a group are just not inclined to vote for Democrats for what are mostly cultural and ideological reasons. Even if Democrats strengthened their working-class credentials, nothing short of becoming the Republican Party would win evangelical voters over to their side (and even that might not do it.)
DiIulio argues that the good news for Democrats is that even though they lost ground with working-class voters in 2024, the swing that occurred is nothing out of the ordinary when you look back at the past fifty years of American presidential elections. (This is especially true if one controls for the evangelical vote.) Working-class voters’ decline in support for Democrats in 2024 could be attributed to voter frustration with inflation, a factor unique to the 2024 environment that does not signal a decisive break from the Democratic Party by working-class voters. DiIulio asserts Democrats could easily reverse their losses with working-class voters by emphasizing their standard pro-worker/pro-family agenda. The one group Democrats need to be concerned about, however, are working-class Latino voters, who went from supporting Biden in 2020 66%-31% to supporting Harris in 2024 51%-47%. That’s good to know, as it can focus Democrats’ outreach and messaging.
A major difficulty Democrats face when attempting to win over working-class voters is that working-class voters tend to be ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Working-class voters don’t like government. They assume government is not working on their behalf, but for either powerful and well-connected special interests or those who don’t deserve the benefits. Yet working-class voters do generally support the social safety net and programs they or those they know benefit from. Obamacare is a classic example of this paradox. A majority of Americans—including many working-class Americans—opposed Obamacare as an idea when it was being debated in 2009 and 2010. Yet once the program started and many people who needed health care began benefitting from it, a majority of Americans—including, again, many working-class Americans—came around to supporting it and opposed its repeal.
You can see the challenge. Liberals believe they can win over working-class voters by enacting policies that benefit the working class. But every policy begins as an idea, and ideas in politics for the most part are discussed ideologically. Because voters are ideologically conservative, they’ll view most new policy proposals that expand government activity with skepticism and potentially punish liberals for backing the idea.
You can also see how shifting ideologically to either the left or right wouldn’t necessarily help Democrats either. If Democrats shifted left and pushed for more progressive policies, the debate over those policies—likely waged on ideologically conservative grounds—could alienate them from the working-class voters those policies are intended to benefit. But if Democrats shifted right and pushed for more market-friendly policies that would be easier to defend on ideologically conservative grounds, they could end up paying the price down the road as voters complain Democrats once again went too easy on business interests while not doing enough to improve the living conditions of working-class voters. It’s difficult to capture the working class’s political attitudes on the standard left-right political continuum.
This is a tricky problem for Democrats to solve. Democrats want to get to the point where they’re not just competing for the working-class vote on an election-by-election basis, but winning them by durable margins. I can’t claim to know what to do, but I do have a couple ideas that might help. I think the strength of both ideas is that they foster the development of a class consciousness that would in turn make Democrats’ operational policy proposals more appealing in their own right.
First, I wonder if it might be wise for Democrats to downplay their rhetoric about economic “justice” and “fairness” and even “inequality” and focus instead on the problem of “greed.” Fairness is a noble yet oftentimes difficult principle to defend. First of all, many people think fairness amounts to getting and keeping what they want, and therefore aren’t eager to endorse policies that make society fairer in a way that they believe doesn’t advantage them. For example, it’s easy for a working-class American to conclude it isn’t fair that their taxes—which are drawn from income they worked hard to earn—are used to pay for services like nutritional benefits, public mass transit, educational grants, or health care assistance that they aren’t using or that they don’t see accruing to the benefit of their community. Even though those programs would certainly benefit many working-class Americans, the redistributive nature of those programs doesn’t feel fair.
Furthermore, the language of “justice,” “fairness,” and “equality” is often associated with the nation’s struggle for racial equality, which means deploying that language in debates about redistributive policies can trigger counter-productive racial resentments. Finally, the rhetoric of fairness is too easily hijacked by the wealthy to justify the exploitation of workers. For example: It’s only fair that a CEO who increases a corporation’s profits and stock value receives a multimillion dollar pay increase, right? And it wouldn’t be fair to tax that CEO’s unrealized capital gains, right? And it’s fair to pay an employee in that CEO’s company the minimum wage with few benefits and have them toil away in lousy working conditions because that’s what they agreed to when they signed their contract, right?
Highlighting the problem of “greed” may instead be a more potent attack line. Greed is obviously bad (it’s one of the seven deadly sins, after all) and not something you can easily accuse poor and working-class Americans of suffering from. Yet greed is definitely something that afflicts the wealthy. If the focus is on greed, the problem with economic inequality isn’t that the wealthy have more money than the average working-class American. It’s that the wealthy are hording money, which increases their wealth and power. The wealth they are hording isn’t recirculating (or “trickling-down”) into the economy to the benefit of the working class. In fact, their wealth—the product of greed—often comes at the expense of the working class in the form of layoffs and stagnant wage growth. By focusing on the problem of greed, it may even be possible to shift some of the emphasis of business away from private enterprise to social utility.
Secondly, I think Democrats need to banish from their minds the stereotype of the “working-class worker” as a white male wearing a hardhat on an assembly line in an automobile factory in Michigan. That’s not to say Democrats should be unconcerned with such an individual’s economic well-being. It’s that when we think of working-class Americans as industrial workers and manual laborers performing traditional working-class jobs, we overlook all sorts of people who qualify as working-class Americans. The largest employers of working-class Americans in this country are not industrial firms, but rather Walmart, Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and Home Depot. As a nation, we barely think about the low-wage workers who work for these massive corporations. Instead, we think of these companies as way stations, a place someone lands for a little while before they move on to another, better job. Yet for millions of Americans, working for these companies is how they make a living. What they earn there is often not enough.
Someone ought to stand up and alongside these retail and service industry workers, and I see no reason why the Democratic Party shouldn’t do that. People employed by these companies ought to have full-time jobs, earn a living wage, receive health care benefits, and work in decent conditions. Just as a job at an automobile factory can land a worker in the middle class, so should a job at Walmart or McDonald’s, especially since so many Americans depend on these employers to get by. What the workers at these big box stores, online retailers, fast-food restaurants, and shipping companies need is a union, and the government should tell these corporations that they either facilitate the organization process or the feds will step in and do it for them. Additionally, the advantage of focusing unionization efforts on these kinds of companies isn’t simply a matter of how many people it would affect, but the fact that these jobs can’t be shipped overseas. These are jobs found in communities in every corner of the country, and lifting up the prospects of workers at those companies should in turn lift up the prospects of all other workers in those communities. I can’t think of a better way to strengthen the hand of the working class in this country. If you want to rebuild the working-class, rebuild unions, and if you want to rebuild unions, you need to go to where the workers are.
Last October, Donald Trump made a campaign stop at a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s. He did so to mock Kamala Harris: Harris had said she had worked at a McDonald’s one summer while in college, but Trump didn’t believe her, so he visited a McDonald’s so he could claim to be the only candidate in the race who had ever really worked at the Golden Arches. Democrats mocked him for the stunt, and there were moments that were indeed mock-worthy, particularly when the People’s Billionaire was amazed employees did not use their hands to stuff containers full of french fries. (Any alert child who has ever visited a McDonald’s would know otherwise.)
Why Democrats didn’t turn that French fry episode into a “Dukakis in a tank” moment is a topic for another article, but after watching coverage of Trump’s visit to McDonald’s, I texted friends worried that Trump had just won the election. Yeah, maybe Trump is a jackass, but by going behind the counter, Trump acknowledged that he saw millions of working-class Americans who are mostly invisible to their fellow countrymen. There’s no way to know how much of a difference a single campaign stop makes, but I suspect that particular stop had a lot of symbolic power and at least solidified his standing with many working-class voters. And Trump did that just by showing up. Now imagine what Democrats could do if they made an actual material difference in the lives of those workers.
Signals and Noise will return soon.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Mahashmashana by Father John Misty
I’ve long been fascinated by albums about the End of the 1960s. I’m thinking primarily of records like Déjà vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970), After the Gold Rush by Neil Young (1970), American Beauty by the Grateful Dead (1970), Blue by Joni Mitchell (1971), Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne (1974), Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon (1975), and Hotel California by the Eagles (1976), although harder rocking albums like Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones (1969) and Who’s Next by the Who (1971) touch on similar themes. While some of these albums aren’t intended as social commentary, they all take an elegiac view of the recent past and bear witness to the passing of an era during which peace and love seemed poised to wash over the world. Those hopes were not only dashed in the jungles of Vietnam and by assassins here at home, but by the adherents of the countercultural movement itself, whose pursuit of personal liberation proved at times exhausting, unrealistic, self-indulgent, or self-destructive. Unsurprisingly, many of these albums originated in California, which simultaneously seemed to represent everything utopian and facile about America.
Joshua Tillman, who records under the stage name of Father John Misty, is a throwback to those 70s-era artists who probed the psyche of a shallow and jaded post-60s America with the eye of a literate singer-songwriter. Like some of those aforementioned artists, Tillman has resided in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. And also like some of those artists, his polished, high-minded critique of America as a debauched, materialistic, and soulless nation can come across as too easy. Yet maybe that’s exactly the kind of music this country needs right now.
Tillman played drums for the critically-acclaimed indie folk band Fleet Foxes for three years before leaving that group in 2012 to embark on a solo career. Over the past twelve years, he’s released six well-received albums (which have included songs like “Bored in the USA” and “Total Entertainment Forever”) as Father John Misty. The stage name casts Tillman as something like a backwoods prophet or tent-revival preacher who travels from town to town to save the souls of the spiritually stranded. Yet the nom de plume is also ironic, as Tillman—who was raised in what he has called a “culturally oppressive” Christian evangelical household and takes the stage looking like a louche Levon Helm—is often critical of American Christianity and organized religion.
That sense of irony and sarcasm is central to Tillman’s work. While Tillman certainly scans as a melancholic 70s-era singer-songwriter (and his music on this album draws on all sorts of 70s-era touchstones) the artist from that decade that most often comes to mind when I listen to him is Randy Newman, who unsettled audiences with his sardonic, keenly observed songs. Newman drew more from New Orleans R&B and pop, but both he and Tillman compose records that are cinematic in scope. And while Newman would often sneak up and punch his listeners in the gut with a satirical twist that landed uncomfortably hard in the chorus, Tillman’s snarkiness permeates his music.
Tillman’s latest album is titled Mahashmashana (derived from a Sanskrit word for a Hindu “great cremation ground”) and you could almost call it peak Father John Misty if it also didn’t feel like a grand finale. The record begins with a drum roll and an orchestral swell, something we might expect to hear playing over the triumphant final shot of a Hollywood epic. It’s like getting to the theater just in time for the fade out and the end credits.
Tillman is a cultural critic whose music drags Nietzsche into the 2020s. As Tillman sees it, the problem is that there are nihilists everywhere, people who profess faith in whatever sort of belief system they find themselves in but don’t really believe what they claim to believe; in other words, Christians who have never internalized what it means to be a Christian, or democrats who have no idea what democracy demands of them. That leaves people detached from ethical systems designed to guide their actions and provide their lives with meaning. It also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by those who pick up the banner of those faiths for their own ends.
Tillman claims we are the prisoners of empty, meaningless conventions. At the beginning of “Mental Health”, Tillman draws on the idea of a panopticon—a kind of prison in which a guard tower is situated at the center of a ring of cells so that the guards can constantly surveil the inmates to better condition their behavior—to drive home the point that we imprison ourselves:
In the panopticon
They never turn the cameras on
The guards and the narcs went home
They do a fine enough job on their own
Those lyrics imply that the forces that shape our beliefs and allegiances only exercise a form of soft power over us: If we only had the will, we could walk out of the intellectual cells we’ve imprisoned ourselves in. Yet we haven’t taken the time (or perhaps lack the courage) to figure out what we really believe in, and that’s a recipe for cultural catastrophe. If people just go along with an idea without first interrogating, understanding, and accepting that idea, they could find themselves falling in line behind something truly monstrous, as Tillman suggests during “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”:
A publicist and a celibate
Started talking politics
By a small degree, she got him to admit
They’re tacit fascists without knowing it
You can read the “celibate” as someone who accepts the teachings of a religious faith (perhaps the evangelical faith of Tillman’s youth) without questioning it, which leads them to lend their “tacit” support to an abhorrent political system “without knowing it”. Since their understanding of their faith is vacuous, all it takes is for someone to connect that faith to a fascist cause for the so-called “believer” to get on board with that, too.
But don’t overlook the role the “publicist” plays here as well. Tillman’s theory is that we have become so adept at deceiving ourselves that we now prefer our delusions. Channeling Bob Dylan’s delivery, he sings, “A perfect lie can live forever/ The truth don’t fare as well” on the title track. Later, during “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” (see Exit Music) a slow-burning disco-funk number that sounds like a group of grifters riding into Vegas to pull a con on the Devil, Tillman describes how so-called love endures in the twenty-first century:
The groom is a liar
And the bride is a shill
The priest says, “If these two don’t make it
Who among us ever will?”
“The truth don’t fare as well” these days (if it ever fared well at all) because the truth is often hard to bear. The truth may rock us to our core. It may be disappointing; it may be devastating. Here Tillman is again on the title track, surveying the ruins of his childhood faith after taking a long, hard look at it:
Like there’s no baby in the king cake
Like there’s no figure on the cross
They have gone the way of all flesh
And what was found is lost
That last line is an inversion of “Amazing Grace”, with Tillman implying that the revelations of faith can’t withstand the scrutiny. Some may argue that by turning his back on religion, it is Tillman who has severed himself from the sources of moral meaning and embraced instead a form of moral relativism that could lead him down some dark paths. I’m sure Tillman would disagree; what he would seek instead is some honest to God truth-telling, a real reckoning with our values and what those values demand of us. Mahashmashana argues most of us aren’t even scratching that surface. As for Tillman himself, his greatest personal fear is that he isn’t bold enough to see his own journey to its end. “The one regret that’s really pretty tough”, he sings on “Mental Health”, “Is knowing I didn’t go nearly far enough.” Spoken like a true Nietzschean.
In his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson (not exactly a systematic thinker, but a writer who in a few scattered paragraphs sketched out one of the most insightful and enduring modern theories of American thought) wrote about the peace and love generation and the end of the 1960s:
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
All those singer-songwriters I mentioned at the beginning of this review were singing about the same thing: The aftermath of that great countercultural wave, a dream deferred and how those caught in its wake carried on. Tillman taps into a similar sentiment. He also sings about our cultural milieu, that sense of being adrift and slip sliding away from what we as a society ought to value. But Tillman’s work is concerned with a different kind of wave, not one that swells with hope but that builds and builds behind us, powered by denial and crushing in its strength. It is a looming disaster we refuse to come to terms with. We can pretend it’s not there, take comfort in the myths that soothe and delight us, but inevitably the truth—no matter how inconvenient or devastating—will win out. As Tillman sings, “time just makes fools of us all.”