This is a culture war, not a class war
I am not dismissing the class war, but I am arguing it is not the primary conflict
I used to work at a car dealership. I did not have much sustained success as a car salesperson, and the early days of my career in that field were rough. I started selling as the Great Recession was deepening, and the only thing I was good at doing at the time was working with customers who could not buy a car due to banks being unwilling to extend financing to them.
Nevertheless, I befriended another salesman, who I will simply refer to as The Salesman to not give his real name. The Salesman was an early middle-aged, working-class White man who was probably one of the most helpful people I’ve ever met in the 6 years I spent in the auto industry. He helped me with the first car I sold at the dealership, which was a brand-new 2008 Ford Mustang California Special. Nevertheless, like me, he struggled mightily, running into the same issues that I did with walk-up customers who had credit problems and could not get banks to lend money to them.
The Salesman was a conservative—a staunch conservative. And after Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he complained non-stop about Obama. His rhetoric was typical of conservatives at the time—that Obama would usher in a communist, socialist welfare state; that he was secretly a Muslim; that he was not who he said he was; and that he was a President who was willing to give money that was paid by hard-working (White) taxpayers to a bunch of people (Black and Brown) who didn’t deserve it. Oh, and that whole socialist health care thing.
I kept up with him on Facebook after I stopped selling cars. I would occasionally see his posts, which were typical conservative fodder. I lost touch with him after 2016, ostensibly after I did my first purge of Trump supporters out of my personal life (since then, aside from a couple of pragmatic exceptions, I’ve cut out the remainder of people in my personal life who support Trump). However, he did give me a lens into working-class cultural conservatism, especially as a man who made it very obvious he was struggling to get by.
That lens got even clearer a few years later. I used to collaborate with a man who I will refer to as The Writer. The Writer is a sharp, thoughtful middle-aged college-educated, working-class White man with largely libertarian social views and self-identifies as conservative. He is also a staunch Trump supporter, which made for interesting conversations about his then-roommate, who he described to be somewhat of a hippie liberal.
I have not spoken to him in a couple of years, but I do remember how avid of a consumer of conservative media he was—and I imagine, still is. He did not make a ton of money, but he always managed to get by and survive. In many ways, his conservatism is fueled by his self-resilience: if anything, he will probably be the first person to proselytize pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. He was not a fan of the welfare state, equated left progressivism to communism, and had other views about Democrats that gave me a proverbial migraine. He more or less regarded wealth as a testament to success. Based on his views, I am confident that he does not believe in the redistribution of wealth—after all, he was no Bernie Sanders fan. However, strangely, he bought into the narrative that Sanders was screwed out of the 2016 nomination—so take from that what you will.
While those two are indeed just examples, it should be enough of a microcosm to understand that working-class voters are by no means a monolith. Not every working-class voter blames rich, out-of-touch conservatives for their socioeconomic lot. There are many working-class voters out there just like The Salesman and The Writer who will more readily identify as being part of a culture that rejects government handouts and will vote against Democrats because they believe they advance the interests of those who don’t need or deserve the help.
We can consider the working class to be both a socioeconomic demographic and a sociocultural demographic. However, depending on where you land on the political spectrum, one view is going to get greater emphasis than the other.
For those of us who lean left, we are more likely to regard the working class as either strictly or mostly a socioeconomic demographic. We are going to be more interested in pursuing policies that help bolster the working class’ socioeconomic standing—obviously by way of a robust welfare state that helps provide essential human needs. We see this need through a moral lens because we morally reject the idea that socioeconomic hierarchy is desirable and reputable, and we vehemently dispute the idea that your ability to take care of yourself, let alone maintain a decent existence, should be predicated on how much wealth you have (or don’t have). We believe that government should act as the ultimate rampart against the unstable forces of capitalism.
However, the calculus is different on the right. Working-class voters on the right see themselves as part of a sociocultural demographic united by values of self-resilience, natural law conservatism, acceptance of hierarchy, and prioritization of their self-interest at both the macro and micro levels. They are believers in Social Darwinism; argue that people should be able to provide for themselves their basic needs, and are financially offended by the concept of social welfare because of their overall distrust and distaste of government. Yet, even with a dislike of government, they feel that government should bend to and assuage their id by crafting punitive policies that affect others, but not themselves, regardless of the collateral damage.
In my view, a class war requires some degree of self-awareness; that is, a working-class voter not only recognizes that they are being taken advantage of by the wealthy, but (a) they find it to be unacceptable and untenable, and (b) they recognize and support the need for public policy to increase socioeconomic equity. But as soon-to-be-former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio showed in his loss to right-wing Senator-elect Bernie Moreno, a socioeconomic pitch can and will fall on deaf working-class ears. In other words, a message rooted in selflessness got drowned out by a message that pushed selfishness because the electorate was highly motivated by their immediate self-interest.
A study conducted by Stephen Hawkins and Daniel Yudkin at More In Common illustrates this. In their guest op-ed in The Atlantic, Hawkins and Yudkin noted:
In a widely seen attack ad, a 2019 interview clip of Harris explaining her support for publicly funded sex-change surgeries for prisoners, including undocumented immigrants, was punctuated by a voiceover intoning that “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” In tests run by Harris’s main super PAC, 2.7 percent of voters shifted toward Trump after being shown the ad—a massive result.
That ad was incendiary, vicious, and lacked zero context. That context? Harris’ answer referred to the Constitutional right for prisoners to receive health care—as established by Estelle vs. Gamble (1976)—including medically necessary gender-affirmation surgeries to treat gender dysmorphia. However, that was not going to matter to the voters who didn’t think Democrats cared about their microeconomic woes.
When I argued to consider this a culture war and not a class war a few days ago on social media, I did get (understandable) left-wing pushback. Their view was that the class war is the real war and the culture war is just a distraction. I disagree with this because, as this election showed, working-class voters are more apt to vote along their cultural interests (i.e., "vibes” and “perception”) than what would be in their best interest economically. Their vote was the result of their cultural worldview, which substantively shaped their understanding of economic issues.
To be honest, I do not feel that working-class voters truly ever voted based on economic interests. After all, I believe that microeconomic matters are more likely to be influenced by cultural views. Part of this culture is having limited bandwidth to fully comprehend economic and political issues. I remember once when I was told by a former Trump-backing friend that while he didn’t fully understand government, he understood “how to balance money” and went on to criticize Democrats for being fiscally irresponsible (which was hilarious, considering how much the Trump Tax Cuts he benefitted from added the federal deficit). That’s not economics; that’s culture.
In a live-interview study of 860 voters that was conducted back in 2023 by the Progressive Policy Institute in partnership with YouGov, swing-state working-class voters held anxieties that were more aligned with their cultural perceptions of the economy. This part, as explained in the summary written by William Galston, sums it up perfectly:
Overall, the PPI survey documents a pervasive sense of decline among working-class Americans. By a margin of 66% to 21%, they believe that people like them are worse off today than they were 40 years ago. Interestingly, they do not identify a single dominant cause for this decline: roughly equal numbers blame immigration, trade, automation, de-unionization, bad government programs, and cultural change. While they do not express great confidence in either political party to turn around this decline, they lean toward an “America First” stance on issues such as immigration and trade. But they do not accept Republicans’ hardline views on criminal justice and policing, and they are deeply concerned about social conservatives’ efforts to ban books from school libraries and restrict access to reproductive health services for women. Still, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44% named Donald Trump, compared to just 12% for Joe Biden.
This perception only exists because of how effective Republicans have been at fighting the culture war as it has had success in damaging the perception of the Democratic Party among working-class voters. And for those who believe that Sanders-style left-wing populism is the remedy here, there is evidence from the study that there may not be much of an appetite for it among working-class voters. Galston writes:
Progressive Democrats may be surprised to learn that working-class voters do not share their understanding of the proper role of government in the economy. Although 65% of working-class voters believe that the economy is controlled by the rich for their own benefit, just 19% of them want a large federal government focused on issues such as inequality and the distribution of wealth, compared to 34% who want a smaller federal government that spends and taxes less. A plurality of these voters—47%—opt for a middle course: a federal government that actively steers the economy, but mainly by promoting and protecting free markets.
As I said, this is a cultural matter, not an economic one.
However, there is the other side of this coin, if you will.
A couple of months earlier in August 2023, the HIT Strategies and Working Families Power conducted a study of the working class that offered a different view. In an online survey of 5,003 respondents across the United States, the study’s authors rejected the idea that there is a wide gulf between cultural and social views among the working class and that the conservatism of the working class is overrated.
Our poll and the analysis we performed do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle and upper class voters than it is among working class voters. But our study does strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.
…We simply do not observe a working class that is uniformly more conservative than the middle and upper classes, and to the extent that we do observe differences, those differences are not sufficient to explain the differences in partisan alignment that we do observe across classes.
The study found much more support among working-class Americans for progressive policies. In a summary published on CommonDreams.org:
The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a "public healthcare program like Medicare for All" (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them "overwhelmingly to the left" of higher-income segments of the population.
If I had to compare the two studies beyond being live interviews versus an online panel, the PPI study focused on worldview while the HIT Strategies/WFPower study focused on policy. I think the latter’s focus was ultimately somewhat detrimental because campaign messaging will invariably change what voters ultimately think about the issues and the policy prescriptions for them. I wouldn’t say neither study was wrong or flawed, and in many ways, you could consider them to be complements of each other. As the HIT Strategies/WFPower study acknowledged:
In between those three clusters that manifest a clear partisan sort, the remainder of the working class is made up of voters who are genuinely cross-pressured, in several distinct ways. Understanding who these cross-pressured voters are, and the nature of their ideological conflictedness, is essential groundwork for the project of building a progressive coalition anchored in the working class.
The authors of the study didn’t realize it, but those “cross-pressured” voters were going to be heavily influenced by messaging that catered to their immediate self-interest. Why? Because most voters have a low bandwidth for thinking about sociopolitical issues. They’re not going to “wake up” on their own volition; they have to be convinced to “wake up”—that is probably the one thing Republicans get better than Democrats.
So, where do we go from here?
The doomerism among Democrats about losing working-class voters is overblown. While there was a shift, I do think that shift was illuminated by who didn’t show up versus who did. But even beyond that, we have to get our asses in gear about developing a robust counter-offensive to the right in the culture war. The numerous arguments that we used to be able to rely on to sway voters are not as solid in previous years because the Republican Party’s bad faith viciousness on their side of the culture war did damage to the cultural perception of the Democratic Party, as illustrated by the 3 studies referenced in this piece.
As Democrats, our party has to communicate three simple values: that we fight for everyone to have a decent and sustainable life, that we fight for a system where you can take care of yourself and your family, and that we fight for a society that balances personal freedom and mutual responsibility. Everything that we aim for as a party has to be tied back to all three of these things.
This is primarily a culture war—the class war is secondary. Until we gain the upper hand in the culture war—which will require us to turn even the lowest information, lowest engaged, and lowest bandwidth voter against Republicans—we can’t even begin to address the class war. That requires power; and right now, we don’t have the power we need.