This is our first experiment with a podcast conversation. The transcript below has been edited for clarity. Photo from NYC Municipal Archives.
Nick French: Today we’re trying out the Left Notes podcast, our inaugural episode. We’re going to be talking about the New York Times op-ed by David Paul Kuhn called “Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class.” This is one of many articles that have come out since the election about the Democrats’ struggles with working-class voters. What can and should they do to try to win them back? Neal, do you want to tell us more about the article and what you thought of it?
Neal Meyer: Sure. I thought this would be an interesting basis for us to talk more about strategy and politics today. This is based on a book that Kuhn wrote, and now he’s also producing a PBS documentary.
The premise is that the “hard hat riot” back in May 1970 — which was a fight between construction workers and antiwar protesters in Manhattan around the World Trade Center right after the Kent State shooting and the bombing of Cambodia — somehow exemplifies the problems that Democrats have with working-class voters. And it maybe even points to the origin moment or period when Democrats started to lose touch with working-class voters, starting first with white working-class voters. Then Kuhn also talks about how that problem extended to a lot of working-class people of color.
His argument is that the antiwar movement was driven by college-educated, liberal, left-leaning activists who were part of a counterculture in the United States. Some of that is true, of course: that they were in a kind of conflict or clash with a lot of working-class Americans who tended to be more supportive of the war or at least supportive of the US military. And that the antiwar New Left ended up being insensitive to the ideas and the traditions of these blue-collar workers; that they attacked positions that were once respected, like being a parent or a hard worker or a patriot or a soldier.
This is the tension that was coming to the surface in the early 1970s. Kuhn describes it as a fight between the “Old Left” constituency of the Democratic Party and the “New Left” constituency of the Democratic Party.
Nick: Like you said, there’s definitely some truth to this narrative. But there are a couple of things I think we want to take issue with in Kuhn’s argument.
This is used as part of a broader argument that Democrats’ issues with the working class are largely cultural. It’s that the Democrats have adopted, for the most part, the kind of cultural politics and attitudes of the college-educated or of the professional-managerial class, if you want to use that term. And this is really alienating working-class voters and has been since the time of this hard hat riot.
But before we get into that broader debate, we thought it’d be interesting to sort of question the precise shape of the narrative around this hard hat riot and Vietnam War politics. When Neal shared this article with me, we both remembered this OG Jacobin article from 2013 called “The Myth of the Hardhat Hawk” by Penny Lewis. Lewis points out that, actually, support for the Vietnam War was much higher among college-educated voters. And as you go down the education scale, to non-college-educated voters and then to voters without even a high school degree, opposition to the war rises. That’s an important corrective to what Kuhn is saying.
She also points out that most union workers did not actually support the NYC hard hat riot. A poll at the time found that 53 percent of union workers in New York City disapproved [of the workers attacking protesters] while only 30 percent approved. And also, these workers were actually encouraged by their conservative building trades union leadership — who were in a kind of war with the liberal mayor at the time — to go out and counter-demonstrate against the antiwar protesters.
That’s important historical context: that the Vietnam War politics that Kuhn is talking about wasn’t really just a case of lefty, antiwar, college-educated people versus the salt-of-the-earth working class who were behind the war effort. Actually, working-class voters tended to be even more against the war.
Neal: What’s funny — and Lewis points this out — if you go look at the picture in the New York Times article that they posted with it, and then the picture they posted with an additional series of letters that people wrote into the Times about the piece, you’ll notice there’s a lot of people in suits among these “rioters.” A lot of the people who joined in this riot were Wall Street types, executives and bankers who were around the World Trade Center when these fights were happening. They joined in and beat the shit out of these protesters.
It is a pretty interesting foreshadowing of some of the political coalitions that exist in the United States today. Definitely there is this managerial, very wealthy base of the Republican Party that is joining up with a lot of working-class voters. That’s undeniable now.
But again, the story of the 1970s and the antiwar movement is always presented as the little guy, the underdog against the big mean New Left —
Nick: Big College.
Neal: Big College, who are all snobs and condescending. Like you were saying, Lewis does a great job of showing how broad the opposition to the Vietnam War was among working-class people in this country. And that actually, if there was a base of support for the war by the early 1970s — I mean, everyone in the country was basically against it — but the remainder that did support the war, it was disproportionately college educated.
Labor in the Vietnam War
Nick: There is one interesting nuance about this conflict that Lewis talks about and also that one of the letters to the New York Times brought out. It’s true that the institutional labor movement at the time, as represented by the AFL-CIO, was very supportive of the Vietnam War and a lot of other Cold War–era US interventions and anti-communist efforts abroad. So that is a truth of the situation, and probably the building trades unions involved in the hard hat riot would fall into that camp [of being] pro-US military policy as well.
But that shouldn’t be taken to be reflective of the broader working class.
Neal: Of where the membership was at.
Nick: Exactly. And as this commenter points out, the institutional labor support for the Vietnam War was in large part the result of the anti-communist purges of the McCarthy era and the Second Red Scare that got all the lefties and radicals out of the unions and really aligned them much more tightly with the foreign policy interests of the US government.
Neal: Definitely. And it’s important, too, to say that there were divisions in the labor movement at this time also.
Nick: Of course.
Neal: A lot of the more progressive unions at the time, in the public sector, and I think at least some of the United Auto Workers (UAW) locals and districts and others were actually in a struggle of their own with the AFL-CIO leadership, which they viewed as very conservative, precisely on these questions you’re discussing, but also on questions of organizing new workers. That was also something that the AFL-CIO was not really focused on at the time. So there was a conflict going on inside of the labor movement over these political questions as well.
But yeah, you’re absolutely right to say that the AFL leadership — George Meany, who was the president at the time — they’re not reflective of the American working class. These top officials are extremely well paid, very comfortable, relatively conservative people. Especially on these questions where they wanted to be in sync with the American policy elite, including the policy elite of the Democratic Party. Because even though this was still a period when the Democratic Party was to the left of where it ended up being in the late 1970s and ’80s on economic questions, on foreign policy, the Democratic Party sucked. They were just as bad back in the ’60s and ’70s as they were in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. And the AFL-CIO leadership [thought] this was an issue on which they felt they could be in alliance with the party and cooperate with them. This is why they were very supportive of US foreign policy, especially under Johnson in the ’60s.
The Long Road to Dealignment, 1980–2024
Nick: Let’s zoom back a little bit. Why does this matter? I think the reason we’re talking about this article today, and the reason the New York Times is publishing articles like this, is because of this somewhat perennial debate about “Where did the Democrats go wrong with the working class? How can they win them back?” So I wanted to ask, what’s the actual timeline with loss in working-class support for the Democrats? And as someone who’s studied this — you’re working on your dissertation on this [topic] and published a great article about it in Catalyst earlier this year — what’s the timeline, and what do you think are the actual reasons for working-class voters fleeing the Democratic Party?
Neal: It’s important first of all to distinguish between white working-class voters and black and Latino working-class voters in the late twentieth century. Because there are different timelines here.
There is a drop-off in turnout, especially in certain past elections, for Democrats among black and Latino working-class voters. But looking at those that vote, they remain relatively loyal to the Democratic Party through at least 2008, 2012. And I think the reasons they remain loyal are pretty obvious: for example, the Republican Party was the party that was more opposed to integration and civil rights by the ’70s and ’80s.
So we’re going to talk a little bit first about changes in the voting patterns of white working-class voters in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.
Now it’s true that in 1972, when Richard Nixon is running against George McGovern — this is two years after this hard hat rebellion that Kuhn talks about — there’s a big drop-off in support for the Democratic Party, basically among all white voters in that year. The exception being professional-class, college-educated, “knowledge economy” workers: this one group does continue to support McGovern, who’s quite left wing on basically every issue for a Democrat.
The rest of the country swings against McGovern. But at the subpresidential level, in Congress, the fight for the Senate, the fight for the House, Democrats retain their New Deal coalition. Which has white working-class voters very much at the core of its base of support. And a lot of affluent college-educated whites are still voting for Republicans at this time. A majority of them are.
That is especially true in the South, by the way, which is really interesting. There’s a story out there that the Democrats support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the middle of the 1960s, and then white working-class voters specifically have this massive backlash against integration, and that’s how the Democrats lose the South. But that story is wrong.
Nick: “It’s just racism.”
Neal: Yeah. This story is totally wrong. First, the Democrats remain the majority party in the South — it’s more contested than it had been — but they remain the majority party in the South until the early 1990s in congressional elections and also in the 1976 and 1992 presidential elections. They mostly retain that position because they put together a biracial coalition of white and black working-class voters. They lose a lot of the college-educated, affluent Southern whites first. Those are the southerners who most move against the Democrats in the late ’60s and ’70s.
In the North, there is this drop-off in support for the Democrats among classic parts of the New Deal coalition. But in 1976, four years later, Jimmy Carter, who’s the governor of Georgia, basically rebuilds the New Deal coalition quite easily and wins. It’s a relatively close election, but the reason he wins is because he’s able to put together a coalition that involves a lot of working-class people of color and a lot of white working-class voters all across the country.
Then even through the ’80s, you see this base of support hold up for the Democratic Party among working-class people of all racial backgrounds. And in 1992, when Bill Clinton wins the presidential election in 1992, the same thing is true. It’s the same kind of New Deal coalition at the core of the Democratic Party victory.
It’s after 1992 that we start to see real problems for the Democrats among white working-class voters specifically. There’s a lot of reasons for that. A big one has to do with the Democrats’ embrace of free trade.
The impact of NAFTA, the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, is exaggerated when it comes to explaining manufacturing job loss. But its political impact has not been exaggerated. People thought it meant the Democrats were abandoning industrial workers. And it was a very well-publicized and very controversial debate at the time. It was a huge struggle to get it passed through Congress too in ’93 and ’94. And then there’s a huge backlash against the Democrats in 1994 at the congressional level. Some people go to Republicans; some people stop voting.
From there, for about fifteen years, you have a new normal in the United States. Now there’s a lot less of the kind of clear class divide that you used to have, at least among white voters, for the ’90s and 2000s.
You get one brief restoration of the New Deal coalition in 2008, when Barack Obama really does get a lot of white working-class support in that election. But after 2008, we see this pretty dramatic collapse of support for Democrats among white working-class voters. That is the world we’re living in now.
And now, after 2008 — especially in 2016, 2020, 2024 — we are starting to see the same things happening among working-class people of color.
So it’s a long process. And this narrative that the 1970s are the key to the story, at least in terms of voter behavior, I think is just totally, totally wrong.
Nick: Even from what you’ve said already, it sounds like the idea that it’s the adoption of college-educated or “PMC” cultural politics that’s driving this process also seems highly dubious, right? If we really don’t start to see the working class drop off until the ’90s and the adoption of NAFTA.
Neal: Maybe we can talk at the end a little bit about the kind of cultural tensions that exist inside the Democratic Party, because I do think that’s the kind of valuable kernel inside of the Kuhn article that we’re talking about today. But yes, I think the idea that it’s this culture clash doing the main work driving class dealignment is wrong.
The place where I saw red in that Kuhn op-ed was at the very end when he says something like, “It’s the down-home pragmatists, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who were able to rebuild the Democratic Party’s coalition and win.” That drove me crazy, because it’s Carter and Clinton’s economic strategy in the late 1970s and then again in the 1990s that really wrecks the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition.
Carter’s embrace of austerity and his embrace of high interest rates to take down inflation — this caused a serious recession in 1980 and contributed to a loss of working-class support. I mean, people of all kinds of backgrounds turned against the Democrats in 1980 because of the bad economy. But there was a lot of loss of support among working-class voters that year, and it really did set the first real seeds of doubt among people about Democrats’ commitment to redistribution and the old New Deal economic program.
People weren’t wrong to think that, because the Democratic elite were also talking in the same way. They were saying, “We’ve got to get rid of the New Deal. We’ve got to turn our backs on the New Deal.” After Carter’s defeat and Reagan’s victory, they were talking quite explicitly about a need to turn to the right.
Then that impulse really gets turbocharged under Clinton, again through NAFTA, but also Clinton embraces the need to have a balanced budget. He drops his promises to reform health care. He drops his promises to the labor movement to try to make it easier to organize. This really drives down support for the Democrats among working-class voters.
So again, this idea that Carter and Clinton are somehow the saviors of the Democrats’ electoral coalition . . . it’s just wild. I guess the one grain of truth in this is that they did win the elections in 1976 and 1992, and they did win with relatively populist coalitions. But then they turned their backs on those coalitions!
The other funny thing is that, actually, of the three Democratic presidents between Carter, Clinton, and Obama, Obama was the one who won with the largest margin, not Carter or Clinton. I don’t know why Kuhn decides not to mention that. But if there’s someone who really put together a winning coalition, it was Obama, not Carter or Clinton.
But again, Obama also ran on the same formula. This is the recipe Democrats use to win: They run on a populist program after years of disappointment in Republicans. They get elected, and then they do not push their populist program through. They go back to neoliberal economics, and then they lose their base in the process.
Nick: Again, the title of this article is “Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class.” But looking at the history that you’ve laid out, Neal, it really does not feel as if history supports that case. If anything, it suggests the opposite, right? You have these successful Democratic presidential contenders who run on these populist programs, essentially. And then, as you say, when they get into office, they don’t follow through. And then, of course, people are disappointed, not because they refuse to be bought, but because they’re not being given anything . . .
Neal: A better title for the article might be “Democrats Cannot Swindle the Working Class.” You can’t promise people a bunch of things and then not deliver and expect to continue to win their support.
Nick: I do want to get into Kuhn’s sort of positive suggestions a bit more. But before we do that, I was wondering if you could talk about the most recent period where we see dramatic working-class defections, since 2016 essentially. What’s going on there, and what’s going on specifically with non-white working-class voters?
Neal: I think it’s the same process basically.
There’s a promise on the part of Joe Biden in 2020 that he’s going to bring a new New Deal. “We’re going to really break with the past.” “We’re going to bring back the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt.” Biden was really into that sort of rhetoric.
I think the tragedy is that of all of the Democratic presidents since Johnson — Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden — Biden was probably the one that actually most wanted to do that. And we could and ought to have a whole discussion in the future about what really happened in the Biden years.
But regardless of his intentions, it definitely didn’t work out that way. We had massive inflation. Democrats were not able to move their legislative agenda through in any permanent way. They got these temporary COVID relief measures, which you’ve written about in the past, through — but then they all expired. And then people’s main experience in the middle of the Biden years was losing these benefits or their friends or someone they know losing the benefits that they received under the COVID welfare state.
Nick: And being hit by inflation that was unprecedented in recent decades.
Neal: Absolutely. And then watching Biden support the genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration was a disaster. But maybe it is interesting in the sense that despite how disastrous it was in 2024, Biden and Democrats did retain the support of a lot of college-educated people, especially college-educated white people, actually.
There was a backlash against the party among everyone else. But Democrats retain that support among this professional layer of society who I think are most polarized against the Republican
Party. And that does tell you that politics now is a lot about this kind of culture war. And Republicans have succeeded in defining it that way.
But to some extent, Democrats have allowed it to be so; they have embraced defining it that way as well. I think that’s what the whole running against the evil Trump, the big orange Cheeto man, electoral strategy is all about. That is also a culture war strategy on the part of the Democrats.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Nick: Yeah. So Kuhn is one of many Democratic or liberal commentators who is making the case right now that in order to win and to win back working-class voters, the Democrats essentially need to moderate on cultural issues or social issues or whatever you want to call them — “noneconomic” issues. He seems sympathetic to or friendly to the idea that Democrats should also embrace economic populism. But he thinks moderating on the cultural stuff is really important as well.
We could talk about this for hours probably, but I wanted to get into it a little bit and get your sense of this idea: to what extent cultural issues are really driving what’s happening now, and how should the Left think about it — as people who actually at the end of the day are interested in building working-class political power, not necessarily just helping Democrats win elections.
Neal: I think two things, or at least two things.
One is that when parties win elections, they usually do it on economic questions. So if you’re able to put together a compelling story or a compelling program around economic reforms that people buy into, especially when the other party is currently in power and there’s dissatisfaction — and in the US in the neoliberal era there always is dissatisfaction with the current party in power, basically, because neither party can deliver a good economy for working-class people. So when a party can present a compelling economic program and they’re running against an incumbent who’s got a shitty economic situation, they win.
I think even Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 are versions of this. I don’t really buy the argument — I don’t think you do either — that Trump won primarily because of his appeal to reactionary cultural politics.
His economic strategies had a reactionary component to them. The idea that we’re going to get jobs back by kicking out a bunch of immigrants — there’s absolutely a racist, xenophobic element to that. But the main electoral appeal is that it is an economic explanation about how he’s going to improve people’s lives.
We don’t think it’s right. We don’t think it’s actually a solution for people’s problems. But it is an economic argument. I think that’s the way that Trump won. Democrats won in 2008 and 2020 on similar economic questions.
But I do think that Kuhn is right that there’s a tension or a problem that exists in balancing economic and cultural issues. And it’s especially a problem in the US political system where we only have two political parties. If you really want to be crude about how issues break down, there is a left-wing and a right-wing position on economic issues, and there’s a left-wing and a right-wing position on cultural issues.
If you make a two-by-two chart showing the four possible combinations of those positions, a majority of the country doesn’t fit into any one of those four possible boxes. A majority of the country is not right-wing on both economic and cultural issues. We know that for sure. A majority of the country is not left wing on both sets of issues. And a majority of the country is not right-wing on cultural issues and left-wing on economic issues, or vice versa.
That is a challenge in a two-party system for any political party that wants to run on both sets of issues. If you emphasize both, you’re going to run into this problem where a majority of the country is going to be upset with one half of what you’re offering.
I want to be a part of, and I think you want to be part of, a political party that’s left on cultural issues and left on economic issues and doesn’t apologize on either question. I think that works in a large part of the country.
But I think we also have to be realistic that there are parts of this country where Republicans take their power for granted where they probably could be taken down. It doesn’t even have to be by a candidate that’s right[-wing] on cultural issues. I would hope it wouldn’t be. But it might be a candidate that mostly focuses on left-wing economic issues, someone like Dan Osborne in Nebraska. And we need people like that out there challenging the Republicans in these sort of currently safe red districts, where maybe a more left-wing cultural argument won’t yet play.
Nick: Yeah, I definitely agree with all of that. I mean, the Dan Osborne case is really interesting. It does seem on certain issues, such as immigration, he’s definitely not using the sort of rhetoric that we would endorse.
Neal: Yeah, I think it goes too far on immigration. It doesn’t seem necessary.
Nick: But he had a solid economic pitch. We should point out also, he was not running as a Democrat, which gets to a different issue that the Center for Working-Class Politics has recently done some really interesting research on. This question of whether in some places — like these red states or red districts — the Democratic brand is toxic somewhat independently of particular issues: the party brand itself is just something that is in really bad shape and can’t be salvaged, at least in the near term. But I think even in blue states and blue districts, that maybe a version of what you’re saying still applies. That we want to lead with the economics and really focus on the economic issues, as opposed to cultural issues that are perhaps more divisive among a working-class electorate.
Bernie Sanders is for the most part very progressive on social issues and always has been, yet he has always done a really good job of bringing the conversation back to class struggle, “class war” essentially, and economic issues. And Zohran Mamdani, in his own way, in the particular context of New York City, has done something similar, where he has really hammered on the affordability crisis, constantly bringing the conversation back to that. He takes very brave, principled stances on Gaza. And he is pushing, I think, a very progressive reform message around policing and public safety. But he hasn’t allowed divisive cultural issues to frame the campaign. It’s really the economics at the heart of it.
