An earlier version of this essay was published in The Ideas Letter.
Can you build social democracy without workers? This question would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Today it captures a central challenge that left-of-center parties face around the world.
In the United States, even as the Democratic Party has moved leftward on domestic policy, it has less working-class support than ever. Both Center for Working-Class Politics surveys that use occupational data and CNN exit polls that use education as a proxy for class (an imprecise but helpful marker) show increasing distance between Democrats and workers. In 2020, Joe Biden lost non-college-educated voters by 4 points. This general election, Kamala Harris lost them by 14 points.
The shift in the party’s appeal is evident even among unionized workers. In 1992, they favored Bill Clinton by 30 points. Donald Trump got within 19 points in 2020 and whittled the gap to just 8 points this month.
Similar dynamics are in play across the advanced capitalist world, such as in Germany, where the left-wing party Die Linke went from receiving nearly one third of the vote in the country’s industrial eastern states in 2019 to barely registering as an electoral force there this year. Likewise, even though it is still in power, the Social Democratic Party has tended to fare poorly among workers, who are increasingly drawn to the far-right appeals of the Alternative for Germany: the AfD recently became the biggest group in Thuringia’s state parliament.
For decades, those still committed to a traditional social democratic program have responded to this crisis of support with some combination of downplaying the problem, looking for substitutes for lost…
Auteur: Bhaskar Sunkara
