The Identity Trap II
Part 2: Can Democrats Talk about Economic Inequality?
Post 23: 3 June 2025
Today’s essay continues the theme introduced last week about the risk that the left’s reliance on identity-based language can be counter-productive. Last week, I discussed how keeping the focus on identity can strengthen the conservatives’ hand. They are really good at this.1
Today, I wanted to explore how the use of identity-based language can inhibit the effort to respond to economic inequality and make it harder to establish the social rights of citizenship. This question turned out to be bigger than I thought, so today I offer only a partial response to the writing prompt: Why don’t “working people” think the Democratic party is the party of “working people”? My focus will be on the fact that the left has been unable to overcome the right’s ability to frame macro-political conflict in identity terms of their own choosing. Soon, perhaps next week, I will expand this analysis to consider how Democrat’s own use of identity themes contributes to the problem of building support among working class Americans.
Elsewhere I have discussed how Martin Luther King’s agenda substantially shifted toward economic issues in the years after the passage of the major civil rights laws of the 1960s. This shift responded to the real needs of his constituents and was aimed at completing the job of achieving full membership, which requires social as well as civil and political rights.2
The shift to economic justice ought to be politically savvy as well. There are more lower-wage White workers than Black, so a segue in this direction is a logical way to expand the coalition in favor of reform. The democratic goal is to build an electoral majority, after all.
Historically, however, it has been very difficult to create cross-racial coalitions among Americans of lower socioeconomic status. Working class racism has been a barrier to cooperation since the beginning—Black workers were excluded from almost all unions in their early days—and, when necessary, capitalists and conservatives did what they needed to do to activate this force. The class-race barrier is very much with us in 2025. The Catalist post-mortem of the 2024 election shows that there is a huge gap in Democratic support between college- and non-college-educated White voters, a gap that is non-existent among African Americans and much smaller (but growing) among Latino and Asian American voters. See their “Table 1”.
If we take “college” here to be a marker of social class, as Catalist obviously does, the even more serious takeaway from Table 1 is that Republicans have made stronger gains among lower-SES voters than among college-educated ones. This is especially true among White voters, where the trends for the two education groups diverge, but it also holds for Latinos and, apparently, Asian Americans as well.3 Since the Republican party is adamantly opposed to all forms of social rights, including the meager protections we have now, their ability to gain the support of a majority of Americans who stand to benefit most from these policies (and who benefit most from the inadequate elements now in place, like Medicaid and SNAP) should set off multiple alarms. This juxtaposition has caused left-leaning intellectuals to tear their hair out for years; it seems to say that lower-status White voters regularly vote against their own interest, objectively understood. See Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (Picador 2005) for an example.
I have described the Republican coalition as grounded in an uneasy mix of traditional liberal regulatory and tax policies, nowadays labeled neoliberalism, and traditional conservative themes, initially focusing on race or “urban crime” (from 1964), then adding abortion (in the 1970s) immigration (since 2000) and finally gender issues (in the last decade). These traditional conservative themes—all dealing with identity—layered one atop the other, have generally done more to expand Republican electoral support than contract it and, importantly, helped to obscure the neoliberal economic policy even more.
Especially since 2008, people have lost faith in the neoliberal paradigm.4 This ought to have been fatal to the GOP coalition I describe. Yet that coalition is growing. How can the primary advocates of neoliberalism thrive when neoliberalism is bankrupt? Let’s consider what the Republicans and Democrats have done since then.
The Republicans seek to advance their unpopular neoliberal agenda mainly through obfuscation, and Trump is especially adept at obscuring his neoliberal policies. In 2016, he mostly ran against “Wall Street”, our best personification of the neoliberal establishment. That’s what’s “populist” about that campaign. Of course, once in office, he pursued neoliberal policies aggressively. Indeed, his only legislative achievement was a big tax cut for the rich—that’s as neoliberal as it gets. In 2024, Trump brought ambiguity to a new level. He had nothing to do with Project 2025, hadn’t read it (well, that’s believable), didn’t agree with it. The economic platform was a mishmash of instant solutions, mainly for inflation. I would argue that his anti-establishment branding of 2016 was still in place, protected by this ambiguity and by all the attention placed on identity issues. The identity issues, while divisive, are attractive to voters with lower levels of education, and any time not spent talking about actual economic policies was time well spent from the campaign’s point of view. Back in office, Trump’s key (only?) legislative initiative is a new neoliberal tax cut and he is pursuing waves of neoliberal deregulation, following the Project 2025 recommendations closely. These efforts sit uneasily with his 19th century trade policy; I won’t even try to explain that.
Shifting to the Democrats, the problem becomes clear. Voters simply do not see Democrats as credible opponents of neoliberal excesses. Republicans have not been electorally punished for their attachment to discredited neoliberal ideas not just because of their skill in keeping voters unsure about that attachment but also because the Democrats have not been able to create a clear contrast on economic issues. This is frustrating. The platforms of successive Democratic campaigns, and the actual policies of Democratic administrations, while far from perfect, have regularly and demonstrably advanced the interests of working people by increasing the level of social protection, consumer protection, real wages, and union power. I can almost hear the hair being torn out.
The Democrats have been unable to secure their brand as the party for working people. Why? I’ll close today with a few ideas about this.
First, to be fair, the Democratic Party has earned some of its neoliberal taint. It has not always and reliably been the advocate for the majority of Americans who face everyday economic struggles or insecurity. Wasn’t the administration of Bill Clinton neoliberal? He signed welfare “reform” and initiated the financial deregulation that was the proximate cause of the 2008 crash. Obama scores better, but he either did not want to or did not have the political capital to pursue financial reform in the wake of that crisis. To the voters who count here—anyone who is not a Democratic primary voter— the Democratic “establishment” seems exactly like, well, the “establishment.” This sort of branding is very deep, and it takes a very sustained effort, undertaken over years and even decades, to substantially alter it.
The saddest part of this story is that the Biden administration did in fact begin the process of undoing the legacy of Reagan’s destructive neoliberal policies. This was the first step toward building a new philosophical foundation for the Democratic Party. Several core elements of his economic agenda were constructive responses to the failures of neoliberalism, including an industrial policy aimed at reshoring and otherwise promoting strategic industries, reconnecting rust belt and rural America through better infrastructure, aggressively pursuing protections for consumers and investors, promoting unions—including being the only president ever to walk a picket line—and battling monopolies. Very few analysts recognized the importance of his shift, however.5 But he was either not able or not willing to explain the revolutionary elements of his approach. And Harris did not do any better. It turns out it is difficult to articulate the substance of this change, which may not have a solid theoretical grounding. In contrast, traditional liberalism rests on well understood principles. My own view is that the principles of social citizenship can provide the framework Democrats need, so I will return to this theme often in this space.
Finally, the mismanagement of identity-based themes contributes to the Democrat’s problems. As I made clear last week, the issue here is not exactly that the left talks about identity too much. The right does much more to continually inject identity into our political “discourse”. In response, progressives cannot retreat from their message of inclusion. The “mismanagement”, then, is the inability to frame political conflicts in appropriate economic terms. In particular, Democrats need to articulate an economic vision of what full and equal membership for everyone entails. Why is economic inequality important and what can be done about it?
At this moment, the Democratic Party as an organization cannot articulate an answer to that question. Our few real economic warriors, such as Senator Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are able to call out the destructiveness of extreme wealth and propose some responses to this aspect of inequality. They also support a broad set of social rights policies and at least some of the time, when they talk about health care for example, refer to these as “rights”. This is getting there, but overall, it is hard to extract a clear philosophical foundation underpinning these policies. Instead, sometimes the conflict around them feels like a simple clash of interests between rich and poor Americans. The “class war” framing is not optimal. It triggers deep liberal concerns about protecting personal economic liberty and property from governmental overreach. A better framing, the social citizenship framing, is to ask what we have to guarantee for one another to ensure that we can all participate equally in our society, economy, and polity.
The focus in 2025 is necessarily on protecting what we have against the lawless onslaught of the current administration, but our goal cannot be to just reset to 2015. Instead, progressives must offer a comprehensive vision of what America can be. There are definitely leaders who can advocate effectively for key elements of this agenda, but I have not heard anyone articulate a coherent philosophical framework that would tie it all together. It is enough to invoke “democracy” when trying to respond to oligarchy, for example. We may hate the rich, but it is the damage that oligarchy does to self-government that makes it bad. We want to help ordinary Americans (i.e., not oligarchs) succeed, to participate in American life as full and equal members of our society, to have a set of life choices, opportunities, that are comparable to what everyone else enjoys. Upon what fundamental principle are these aspirations rooted? Sanders seems to say “fairness”. That is not wrong, but it also doesn’t seem to be working that well. The social citizenship project suggests that “freedom” is a better foundation, a contention I defend elsewhere (and will again).6 Today, my main point here is that the foundation has to be as basic as these one-word mantras: fairness, equality, democracy, freedom.
Next week: TBD (maybe more on this) (10 June 2025)
Notes
To recap last week’s entry: Civil rights leaders cannot avoid using identity-based language. Their exclusion is based on identity, after all. But this carries risks. The two I focused on last week were that identity references can inadvertently strengthen conservatives’ own use of identity—and they are very skilled at that. I also worried aloud that progressives sometimes used identity references in the same way that conservatives did—in us-vs-them hierarchical ways—which both strengthened the conservative effort and violated basic norms strongly held by these same progressives.
Everyone has to have the ability to participate in the community fully as an equal member. This takes resources. Our commitment to recognize everyone as equal members of the community creates our duty to guarantee some resources as social rights of citizenship. These rights sometimes include money, always an adequate education, sometimes other protections from the unfettered operation of markets. The exact set of resources needed is not fixed and must be determined through the democratic process. This publication has been exploring what they ought to be. But all social rights share a critical commonality: they guarantee resources that we need to be free. They ensure that we have a set of life choices comparable to others in our society and the ability to choose among them. Stated negatively, but equivalently, social rights give us the tools we need to resist systems of private domination. They fight inequality by placing people in the minimum acceptable socioeconomic position—the position from which they can fully exercise their civil and political rights and fully participate in the community as equal members. I have called this position status equality, but we can also just call it inclusion.
The Catalist report is fascinating, but it would be nice to get a big-grid version of Table 1 that adds gender and also shows the relative weight of each cell. Lots of that detail can be gleaned in the report, but it takes some digging.
“College” is a fair indicator of social class, but I would have liked more on this dimension. In 2024, 41% of the electorate had a 4-year college degree, up from only 34% in 2012.
I take longitudinal claims about AAPI voters with a grain of salt. I am not sure these voters are always identified in the same way over time or if, as an aggregate, it is truly comparable over time. Truthfully, that holds to a certain extent for Latinos. Both of these populations are growing over time, and these expansions generate some apples-to-oranges comparisons along other key dimensions, like national origin and nativity.
Democratic support among women, across all races, fell slightly between 2016 and 2024, but only slightly (the sequence is 57%, 56%, 55%). Democrats have a real man problem though, managing only 42% support in 2024, 45% in 2016, and 48% in the successful 2020 campaign. For some reason, no one wants to talk about misogyny in the 2024 election, but in my mind it is a significant factor. Indeed, in an overdetermined election (they are all overdetermined in a formal sense), it was the critical factor. That is, if Kamala Harris was the former male Black-Indian American AG of California, he would have won. Period. The big drop-off in Latino support for Democrats fits with this; that is the most socially conservative of these big groupings.
This is definitely worth its own deep dive. A 2022 Pew survey, for example, found that only 57% had positive views of capitalism (only 21% “very” positive). “Socialism”—whatever people think that is—had a 36% positive share.
On this point, I want to give a shout out to Heather Cox Richardson one of the few who understood the magnitude of the shift Biden was pursuing. Her substack is invaluable.
See note 2 and my separate entries on freedom: Real Freedom, Freedom and Social Citizenship, and LBJ's Forgotten Message on Freedom.
Egalitarian liberals, following John Rawls, tend to focus on “fairness” as the key principle. I have struggled with this. On the one hand, Rawlsian liberalism does appear to support a robust social rights regime, or at least is not hostile to it, which cannot be said of traditional liberalism. As a liberal theory, this approach inherits some of the liabilities of traditional liberalism, however, including a conception of liberty as noninterference and the absence of any real theory of what “membership” in society means. As a result, I am not sure if Rawlsian liberalism supports a truly adequate scheme of social rights. This is a tough question, one I struggle with, but I am committed to getting a post together on this topic this year.