All are factors, as they were in the U.S. election. But they’re reflective of something much bigger: A backlash rooted in a rejection of a managerialism favored by center-left parties which is impervious to their grievances and often patronizing.
The established left has little idea of how to talk anymore to their traditional supporters — showcasing Beyonce and Lady Gaga just doesn’t cut it. And not only that, when working-class voters have the temerity to raise their grievances, they’re disparaged. Like when U.S. President Joe Biden last week seemed to call Trump supporters garbage, or as Hillary Clinton did in 2016 with her “basket of deplorables” remark.
The cleavage between Democrats and the working class has long been in the making, stretching back to the late 1960s when Richard Nixon assembled a resentful populist coalition of working- and middle-class voters with a blue-collar strategy based, in his words, on “character and guts.” In 1980, 47 percent of all blue-collar voters supported Ronald Reagan (44 percent of those from labor union households backed him).
In the years since, the trend has been clear: The more progressive the Democrats become, the more blue-collar voters are turned off. This was highlighted also last year with studies from the Progressive Policy Institute, conducted in partnership with the pollster YouGov. The survey found that 45 percent of working-class voters believed the Democratic Party had moved “too far to the left,” and 40 percent disapproved of the party for being too heavily influenced by “special interests like public sector unions, environmental activists, and academics.”
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama managed to hold back the tide with triangulation and third-way politics, but only for a while. In the 2012 presidential election, Obama won 60 percent of the voters earning less than $50,000. Four years later, Hillary Clinton secured just more than 50 percent of lower-income voters. The swing to Trump by lower-income voters outweighed a swing to Clinton among those in higher-income brackets. Last year, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44 percent named Trump compared to just 12 percent for Biden.
Long-coming backlash
What’s remarkable is that this hasn’t prompted a reckoning. As right-wing political alternatives have attracted support from blue-collar voters on both sides of the Atlantic, the established left has just put its head in the sand. After electoral setbacks, center-left parties have muttered how they need to reexamine their policies, but they don’t actually carry out any post-mortem.
