The Democratic party needs to do more than represent wealthy progressives | Dustin Guastella

Debates on the left are typically framed as a division between moderates and progressives, with the two sides wrestling over how best to form a governing coalition. Yet, in many ways, this divide obscures a much bigger fault line: the class divide. The fact is, many of the Democratic party’s ideological factions consist almost exclusively of college-educated professionals. As a result, the priorities of this class tend to dominate the party’s appeals. The priorities of working-class voters, meanwhile, are an afterthought.

A new report from Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working Class Politics, and Joan Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, looks at ways to bridge the yawning class divide that threatens the possibility of forming a winning coalition.

They developed an original survey to explore the various attitude “gaps” between the broad working class (defined as non-college educated, middle income workers) and the liberal upper middle class (Democratic-leaning college graduates with a household income in the top 25%).

The resulting report, titled The Left’s Coalition Crisis: Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge it, is, according to the authors, “the most comprehensive review available to date” of class-based political attitudes across a number of issue areas.

The first thing to note about the gaps between the educated upper middle class and the working class is that the latter overwhelmingly prioritize economic issues, while the former lean toward cultural ones.

Of the top 12 political priorities listed by working-class respondents, 11 are economic concerns. The only non-economic issue prized by the working class was a desire to lower the crime rate. Meanwhile, educated upper-income respondents rated cultural and symbolic issues over economic concerns. Of their top 12 priorities, only six were economic. They also rate abstract ideals over concrete, material ones. Educated voters prioritized “resisting authoritarianism” above “protecting social security” and “ending racism” above “protecting Medicaid”.

On an issue by issue basis, the largest gaps that Abbott and Williams found were along culture, climate, crime and immigration issues. That is, the very issues many college-educated liberals have built their political identities around. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a problem if these issues were largely downplayed by Democratic party leaders, in favor of shared economic grievances. But that’s hardly the case.

Not only do the cultural priorities of the privileged fail to speak to working-class voters’ economic frustrations, but, because Democratic party primaries are dominated by educated upper-income voters, these appeals have come to define liberalism itself.

No doubt, the surest way to get a huge cheer at a liberal political rally is to simply mention racism or authoritarianism. Bonus points if you bravely proclaim your unwillingness to “throw X group under the bus”. Such rhetorical gestures have the added benefit of committing candidates to nothing in particular, and thus never threaten potential rich donors.

You might say, so what? Who cares if candidates say some throwaway lines about the “marginalized” at a campaign rally; what’s the harm?

As Abbott and Williams demonstrate, signaling allegiance to such political priorities is far from costless. Embracing the values and slogans of the privileged tells working-class voters that you are either aloof to, or ignorant of, their priorities.

And worse, that you don’t respect working people as political actors. As the authors note, college graduates in Europe and the United States “are more biased against the less-educated than any other stigmatized group”, including racial, religious, and sexual minorities. Blue-collar workers can sense liberal condescension in smarmy injunctions to “be kind”, and they resent what they perceive as upper-class attempts to morally re-educate them.

It gets worse. Even if upper-income progressives steer clear of cultural condescension, their economic priorities are also class-bound. While working-class voters prioritize jobs, wages and economic growth, the educated knowledge workers are mainly concerned with high costs. This, too, is a function of the latter’s relatively privileged class position.

Despite recent wage erosion, the college-educated set still make much more than their non-college educated counterparts – between 60% and 80% more on average. This wage premium, combined with our K-shaped economy, means that the well-educated and well-heeled, those in the top 20% of the income hierarchy, now drive nearly 60% of all consumer spending.

For many educated, upper-income voters – especially those in corporate careers – the defining feature of their economic lives is consuming, not producing. As such, they are extremely sensitive to price increases.

Working-class voters are too, but for very different reasons. It’s the devaluing of work that drives their frustrations. As the authors point out, for the working class, and especially for blue-collar workers, it’s work, not consumption, that defines their lives.

But long-term wage stagnation, and the disappearance of good stable jobs, has meant that essential goods have become even more difficult to afford. Here, globalization plays a major role. And, on that issue, the data show yet another chasm between the popular classes.

While some liberal appeals to “affordability” emphasize the need to scrap tariffs and embrace more liberal immigration rules in order to broaden consumer demand (and lower the agricultural wage-bill), working-class voters are rightly skeptical of these solutions.

Restrictions on trade and immigration represent efforts to address the long neglected problems of wage stagnation. Free-trade has devastated the working class, shuttering thousands of factories and sinking many into drug-addiction and despair. At the same time, mass migration has eroded the wage packet for manual workers. For them, addressing affordability must mean policies that speak to the essentially place-bound character of blue-collar life.

While professional-class status is portable – effectively equivalent in London, New York, Paris or Washington DC – working-class status is not so liquid. Seniority in a job or trade is not typically a transferrable credential. For these reasons place-loyalty matters a great deal to working-class people.

On the other hand, globalization and the growth of “knowledge work” has supercharged select high-income metro areas, where many professionals live and where progressives thrive. Democrats now represent nine of the top 10 highest-income congressional districts in the country.

The truth is, educated upper-income voters, be they progressive or moderate, largely benefit from low-wage immigrant labor and cheap foreign goods. Contrary to the place-based loyalty of blue collar workers, they prize their status as global-citizens and cosmopolitan consumers.

Navigating these tensions isn’t easy, but Abbott and Williams did find a number of issues that could serve as a foundation for a progressive program of popular-class unity.

Getting it right means addressing both the wage and the price side of the affordability equation, downgrading the cultural priorities of the privileged (including on abortion and transgender issues), and grappling with the tension between globalist affinities and local loyalty.

By focusing only on those issues that win more than two-thirds of support from both working-class and educated upper-middle-class respondents, they propose a political program with the following planks: allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, protect and improve social security, spend $150bn on infrastructure, expand Medicaid, ratchet up education spending, and raise the minimum wage.

That’s a great start. But it could be improved by an even greater emphasis on working-class priorities. We need new trade rules, revitalized national industry and real pro-labor immigration reform that can help right the wrongs of globalism.

We ought to advocate expansive and generous policies that emphasize the importance of family life. Why not make giving birth entirely free, implement national paid-parental leave, and provide affordable childcare?

And finally, we need to make expanding and improving badly underfunded local police and fire departments a national priority in order to make every neighborhood and community safe. Such priorities speak directly to felt needs and they signal a genuine political attempt at reorganizing politics around working-class demands, rather than the preferences of the professionals.

Putting working-class priorities first will no doubt result in political tensions. Flashpoints around gender, immigration and even class itself, will break out. Getting through those fights will be necessary if progressives ever hope to expand their coalition by reaching into the working class.

Plus, who knows, maybe professional-class progressives could learn a thing or two from their working-class counterparts.

• Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623. He is a Guardian US columnist