Bernie Sanders often declared that his is “a campaign of the working class, by the working class, and for the working class,” calling for that class to rise up, vote for him, and make the democratic socialist revolution. He was sorely disappointed. At this writing, soon after the second “Super Tuesday” primaries, it is clear that Sanders mobilized hardly any of the black working class and not that many of the white working class either.
Sanders thus joins a long list of well-educated lefties (University of Chicago, 1964) whom the working class seems to have disappointed. Long ago William Jennings Bryan–who, in his 1896 “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” speech, asked “Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight; upon the side of ‘the idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of ‘the struggling masses’?”–lost repeatedly. Soon after, Eugene V. Debs, a hero to Sanders, ran several times for president–explicitly as a socialist on a Socialist ticket–and topped out, in 1912, at only six percent of the popular vote. Compare that to eccentric, conservative businessman Ross Perot who won 19% as a third-party candidate in 1992. Crushing disappointment.
The major exception to the working class’s spurning of the Left was, of course, Roosevelt’s successful 1932 campaign and then, his 1936 re-election. FDR’s New Deal created a couple of generations of working-class loyalty to the Democratic party. But it took the onset of the Great Depression to get that first win (much like it took the onset of the Great Recession to elect the first black president).
For the most part, the call of socialism, or of democratic socialism, or even of basic European-style welfare-state-ism has done surprisingly poorly with the American working class. Repeatedly, their passivity and even opposition has posed a frustrating puzzle for those of us on the Left: Cannot working-class Americans see where their interests lie? Repeatedly, as well, many of us had faith that, with just the right message or just the right messenger, the masses would rise up, vote the Wall Street bastards out, and vote social justice in. What’s gone wrong?
Hopes Dashed
After FDR, the white-shoe conservatism of the Eisenhower years frustrated many left-wing intellectuals’ hopes that the New Deal’s patchwork welfare state could be turned into real democratic socialism. Instead, the postwar industrial trade unions set aside political militancy, preferring to push owners into providing union members with family-supporting wages, health insurance, job security, and comfortable middle-class lives. While millions of Americans enjoyed no such deals, the left-out seemed more interested in getting into than in blowing up the system.
Political turmoil did come to America in late 1950s and the 1960s, but it came mainly in the form of black liberation and women’s liberation and resisting the Vietnam War, not much regarding workers. Sanders’s own 1960s activism largely involved fighting racial inequality and protesting the war. The ideological concerns of the “New Left” in that era focused on cultural matters–mass society, alienation, powerlessness, and so on–not lunch-bucket issues. When 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio declared that “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels” of the “odious” machine, he lumped organized labor together with industry, government, and the university as parts of that machine. The socialist roots of the New Left led activists to believe that, along the way, they were also helping working class. leaving many then frustrated by industrial workers, many of them union members, loudly and sometimes violently attacking war protesters and “hippies.”[1]
Many on the Left have felt that they had lost the battles of the 1960s (although many conservatives have felt that the Left won the cultural war, given the social, moral, and governmental residues of the 1960s, everything from feminism to sexual freedom to the EPA). Liberals may be too pessimistic once you consider the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, the War on Poverty, environmental protections, and other clearly progressive advances from the Johnson years. On the labor front specifically, however, the years since the 1960s largely involved a retreat for unions and a defensive posture for supporters of the old New Deal.
Then it got worse. White Americans who considered themselves working class moved away from the Democratic party, as shown in the graph below, with most of the defectors becoming Republicans.[2] Then came the “Reagan Revolution” and the rise of a shareholder economy.
How Come?
Historically, the connection between class and politics has been notably weaker in the U.S. than in other western democracies. The question of why working-class Americans have not flocked to the socialist, or even to the liberal, banner has frustrated left-wing intellectuals for several generations. (Right-wing intellectuals say that these Americans are perfectly rational; no explanation needed.) Several kinds of answers have been offered.
One is that for Americans uniquely there has been no need for a labor politics. In the golden land of opportunity, just about everyone was doing much better or could expect to do much better than in the old country. So why would workers need a revolution? The contrast between American affluence and the lower European standards of living a century ago made this a plausible argument then. However, that comparison works the other way these days, in favor of the working class in many European countries. So, why is there no revolution now?
Another set of explanations for why working-class Americans have not signed up for the revolution boil down to arguing that, for a variety of reasons, they don’t understand their real interests; they have “false consciousness.” Workers’ consciousness has been distorted by–pick your favorite opiate of the masses–religion, racism, consumerism, popular culture, corporate media, and so on. (Irony alert: Many of those on the Left have not themselves, being well-off academics and writers, voted their own economic interests, that is, Republican.)
A third line of argument is that working-class Americans indeed do know their interests but are blocked in their efforts to act on those interests by the power of elites in our economy and in our politics, a frustration that commonly generates apathy. Arguing that Sanders’s loss is due to the Establishment’s “rigged system” is a variant of this theme. Yet, one can question how “woke” to the class struggle the working class is. In the 2010s, self-described working-class Americans were only a little bit likelier than self-described middle-class Americans to agree that “the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor”; only about half endorsed that view.[3]
Solving the where-is-the-working-class puzzle is far beyond this essay. Like it or not, the American working class is not primed to revolt, or at least to revolt with the Left.
Lessons?
Sanders thus joins a long list of disheartened Left activists. It was clear that the real base of his movement was young people, but young people are fickle. They vote at much lower rates than do older Americans. Year after year, Democrats have promised that this year, under-30 voters will turn out and turn up for them. Year after year, Democrats have been disappointed (with a modest exception of 2018). In any case, a campaign based on the next generation is not the same as a campaign based on the working class. Sanders and Warren voters greatly outnumbered Biden’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts (think Harvard and MIT), but it was Biden who won in white, working-class Fall River.
Perhaps the answer to the working-class conundrum lies in the history of the New Deal. FDR won a strong victory in 1932 because Hoover failed to stem the deepening Depression. But FDR won an even stronger victory in 1936 after initiating a host of what were then revolutionary steps. The New Deal programs became entrenched and the Democratic party dominant for over 30 years until the civil and racial strife of the late 1960s. That is, FDR took office and then acted radically, bringing most Americans along with him. Later, Lyndon Johnson won election in 1964 on a campaign void of serious program promises, announcing The Great Society agenda the next year. Similarly, Reagan unleashed his reactionary revolution and its tenets became popular only after he took office in 1981. Perhaps the lesson is: First win and then revolt and then the working class will join.
– – – – – NOTES – – – –
[1] In a well-known 1960 essay, radical sociologist C. Wright Mills expressed skepticism about the faith in the working class: “[W]hat I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to ‘the working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency . . . in the face of the really historical evidence that now stands against this expectation. Such a labor metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.”
[2] This graph includes only whites and non-southerners because the story of race and region is such a distinctive and special one, deserving of separate treatment. Class is based on how the respondents described themselves.
[3] Using the GSS again, answers to the question EQWLTH, for non-southern whites only, show that about 49 percent of self-described working-class respondents versus 43 percent of self-described middle-class respondents endorsed the complaint. (In the 1980s, the gap was wider, about 54 versus 40 percent.)
MADE IN AMERICA 