Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself.
This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.
For many years, outside observers, including the editors of this magazine, have warned that the Democratic Party cannot win if it continues to hemorrhage the support of working-class Americans. The results of the November election should put an end to any debate about this.
The tragedy is that as president, Joe Biden did a lot to try to bring back these voters. He openly supported unions and was the first sitting president to walk a picket line. He pushed through major legislation to fund infrastructure and manufacturing projects that would produce, he said again and again, good-paying jobs that you don’t need a college degree to get—and by design these projects were disproportionately located in red areas. He signed other bills that put cash in the pockets of average Americans, including a short-lived but successful child tax credit. He began a revolution in competition policy that took on corporate power and greed in favor of small businesses and employees. When he dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris picked a running mate with working-class rural roots and proposed to help ordinary Americans buy a first home, start a new business, and secure protection from corporate price gouging.
Yet despite all of this, Donald Trump not only won the election but also gained ground with working-class Americans of every race and gender and in every part of the country.
There are ongoing debates about why this happened. The most obvious culprit is inflation, which hit working-class Americans hardest and led to electoral drubbings of every incumbent party in every major country that held elections in 2024. But there are other reasons, too. Chief among them is that the coalition that makes up the Democratic Party includes many groups and demographics whose demands over the past four years have been different from, and in many ways counter to, those of rural and working-class Americans. Younger college-educated progressives insisted that Democrats focus on trans rights, DEI, student debt relief, police brutality, and the plight of undocumented migrants. Older, wealthier liberals, especially those working in the upper echelons of the tech and financial sectors, warned party leaders against going “too far” with its populist economic agenda.
Biden and Harris tried to accommodate all these voices, which often took the form of blunting their own. The result was a party that took half measures toward true economic reform, made early mistakes in areas like border enforcement that it couldn’t overcome, and had a brand that was toxic to too many working-class voters—especially after Trump’s propaganda machine was done with them. Instead, a majority of those voters wound up supporting a candidate many of them knew to be a criminal and a liar but who at least promised radical actions to shake up a status quo that has not benefited them in decades.
This package of essays is not an exercise in political “messaging.” It is an effort to provide the policy scaffolding of a new liberalism that addresses, not in word but in deed, the long-neglected interests of working-class Americans.
If Democrats hope to take back power again, they are going to need to do more than wait for Trump’s policies to create chaos and failure. Even if that happens—and, yes, it will—working-class voters who are clearly in revolt against existing institutions and arrangements are unlikely to shift their support to a party they see as representing that failed establishment. Instead, Democrats are going to have to take to heart, more seriously than they have, the true conditions, opinions, and interests of rural and working-class voters—and convince members of their coalition to do the same. And they’re going to have to offer plans for more thoroughgoing change than they have up until now considered.
If you think those voters are permanently in the GOP camp and forever lost to the Democrats, consider recent history. In 1980, after solidly supporting Democrats for decades, working-class voters swung hard for Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on ideas about shrinking government and massively expanding defense that had been considered extreme even within his party a few years before. In 1992, Bill Clinton won those voters back with a set of “New Democratic” ideas about welfare, trade, policing, and bureaucratic reform that scandalized traditional liberals and the left (and still do) but that led to (or at least coincided with) rising wages, falling crime, and increased public confidence in government. George W. Bush, with his “compassionate conservatism,” stole away many of those voters, but Barack Obama won them back with his “One America” politics. Trump and the GOP have them now, and in such numbers that it’s hard to imagine the situation changing. But it can if the right political talent meets the right set of ideas.
We offer 10 such ideas in the essays that follow. Some are drawn from the Monthly’s Old Testament of long-held policy positions, which have never been more relevant; others are New Testament additions fitted to emerging realities. The topics covered—immigration, health care, college costs, regulation, and so on—are wide ranging but far from exhaustive. We see this package as the beginning of a conversation with our readers and the broader public. Several of the ideas we offer are easy for average Americans to grasp and can be utilized immediately to challenge Trump’s agenda—and potentially attract some GOP allies and voters. Others will require time for liberals to absorb, debate, and coalesce around, and even longer—years, perhaps—to bring millions of misdirected voters, step by step, into the light. This package of essays is not, in other words, an exercise in political “messaging.” It is an effort to provide the policy scaffolding of a new liberalism that addresses, not in word but in deed, the long-neglected interests of working-class Americans.
Best,
Paul Glastris
Editor-in-Chief
FEATURES
Want a real raise? Slash health care costs by tying employer plans to Medicare rates.
By Phillip Longman
Make Employers Secure the Border
When Trump’s cruel treatment of immigration backfires—and it will—liberals need a more humane alternative. Here’s one: tough restraints on companies that hire undocumented migrants combined with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal.
By Bill Scher
Open a New Front for Racial Justice
The decades-long effort to push elite colleges to be more diverse has failed. Here’s a better strategy: demand more support for the underfunded colleges that already graduate most Black and Hispanic students, and plenty of white students as well.
By Paul Glastris
Gig workers, contractors, and micro business owners are America’s fastest-growing workforce. Both parties have ignored their plight. Democrats need to offer them portable benefits and protections from monopoly corporations that crush them.
By Will Norris
Make Transportation Fair Again
From cramped seats to captive shippers to stranded cities, re-regulating airlines, rail, and trucking could revive America’s heartland.
By Phillip Longman
Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But the Musk-Ramaswamy plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it.
By Donald F. Kettl
Free College for the Working Class
Higher education needs a systemic solution to its problems of access, affordability, and quality. We have a plan.
By Kevin Carey
Corporate-Proof the Care Economy
Before the next wave of federal investment in child and elder care, we need a plan to stop big corporations from capturing those nascent markets and turning their services into nightmares for working class families.
By Audrey Stienon
Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools
The coming GOP effort to privatize public education could be a golden political opportunity for Democrats if they fight it hard and propose a better plan to improve the nation’s schools—a plan that, as of now, they don’t have.
By Paul Glastris
Reconstruct the Administrative State
Trump’s plan to gut regulations and persecute his enemies will run into fierce resistance and roadblocks of his own making. But beyond fighting Trump, liberals need a much larger strategy to reenergize the movement for regulation in the public interest.
By Peter M. Shane
BOOKS
The hidden story of enslaved Georgians who, however briefly, seized freedom during the Union general’s famous march to the sea.
By Allen C. Guelzo
Mitch McConnell sought power for its own sake. His fall is bringing down the Republic.
By Jean Parvin Bordewich
Martin Van Buren, father of the Democrats, knew that the Founders were wrong about partisan politics.
By James Traub
Caring for my aging father taught me about the massive holes in America’s safety net for the elderly.
By Anita Jain
Robert McNamara’s subservience to Lyndon Johnson led America to disaster in Vietnam.
By Jeff Stein
A look back at the audacious, rule-breaking women of ’90s alt-rock and the forces that erased their moment of glory.
By Clara Bingham
The blood-soaked history of Scotch-Irish settlers on the early American frontier—and its echoes in today’s politics.
By Sara Bhatia
The post Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. appeared first on Washington Monthly.