The following article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you can subscribe to the print edition of Catalyst for just $20.
Right on schedule — and as they had done countless times before — pundits of the center left followed up the Democratic Party’s drubbing with autopsy reports, many of which tried to absolve the party of responsibility for its own defeat. Among the most unsavory of these attempts at absolution were those that blamed Democrats’ loss on the betrayal of the party by working-class voters.
Writing in the Washington Post, for example, Fareed Zakaria urged the party to accept the harsh lesson of the election: “Biden failed to win the working class. Democrats might want to stop trying.” It is past time, Zakaria argued, for Democrats to stop “pining for the working-class whites whom they lost decades ago” and to embrace their new “solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities.” Never mind that, as 2024 clearly indicated, the party’s problems now extend to working-class minorities. “Perhaps,” Zakaria mused, Democrats “should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them.” He asserted that “Biden’s presidency has been an important test of a powerful theory.” This theory was that “the party’s shift to more market-friendly economic policies was a mistake.” The solution, or so the Biden neo–New Deal Democrats hoped to show, was to bring working-class voters back with “economic policies infused with [a] new interventionist spirit.” But, Zakaria maintained, November’s election showed just how wrong these illusions were.
In a…
Auteur: Neal Meyer
