Is This How Democrats Win Back The Working Class?

A week after Donald Trump won the presidency again, I sat across from Chris Murphy in his minimalist but well-appointed D.C. office. The Connecticut senator sounded like a man who had done a speedrun through all five stages of grief and was ready to talk about what comes next: how his party could learn from its loss and win over—or win back—voters in 2026 and 2028. “I have thought for a long time that there’s a race between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party,” Murphy told me. “And the question is: Does the Republican Party become more economically populist in a genuine way before the Democratic Party opens itself up to people who don’t agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues?”

Murphy is onto something. The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave  (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent). Yet large majorities of this same American public also take conservative positions on social issues: They think the Supreme Court was right to overturn affirmative action (68 percent), agree that trans athletes should compete only on teams that match their gender assigned at birth (69 percent), believe that third-trimester abortions should be illegal in most circumstances (70 percent), and are at least somewhat concerned about the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country (79 percent).

These facts are not especially convenient for either Democrats or Republicans, which is no doubt why both sides have failed to put forward platforms that represent these views. But lately, more political insiders from both parties have been willing to acknowledge the problem and admit that it’s time to move on from neoliberalism, the political ideology that champions market solutions, deregulation, the privatization of public services, and a general laissez-faire approach to the economy.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

Substantial obstacles confront populists on both the left and right. Democrats must contend with a college-educated base and party establishment that embraces maximalist positions on social issues, while Republicans must contend with substantial libertarian cliques. But whichever party figures out how to advance a meaningful post-neoliberal platform could unlock a winning and durable political coalition.

Murphy is doing his best to make sure that his side of the aisle beats the Republicans, but he seems far from certain that it will. In an MSNBC interview after the election, the senator sketched out something of a road map for Democrats: “We should return to the party we were in the ’70s and ’80s, when we had economics as the tent pole and then we let in people who thought differently than us on other social and cultural issues.” Murphy was quick to add that this reinvention—or rather, reversion—will be challenging to pull off. “That’s a difficult thing for the Democratic Party to do, because we’ve applied a lot of litmus tests over the years,” he observed. “Those litmus tests have added up to a party that is pretty exclusionary and is shrinking, not growing.”

In the days and weeks after the election, I spoke with post-neoliberal economists, academics, and leaders of major political nonprofits on the left and the right. Almost all of those I interviewed shared Murphy’s view that America’s political parties are in an arms race to capture what the senator called, in a 2022 essay for The New Republic, the “silent majority of Americans who want more economic control, more social connection, and more moral markets.”

It is a race that some worry the Republicans are winning. Although few on the populist right view Trump as the genuine article—they tend to politely describe the president-elect as a “transitional figure”—he has nominated post-neoliberal and populist sympathizers to major positions in his second administration: Senator Marco Rubio, an industrial-policy aficionado, for secretary of state; the pro-union Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary; the Big Tech skeptic Gail Slater to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division; and, of course, J. D. Vance, whose rise to vice president–elect was greeted with trepidation by Wall Street despite his tech-venture-capital background. Still, most of those I interviewed shared the view that Trump will likely squander his populist goodwill with tax cuts for billionaires and other anti-populist agenda items during his term.

This should produce an opening for the populist left, but there remains a deeper and perhaps more intractable problem: The GOP appears to be locking into place a multiracial coalition of the non-college-educated. These are voters who may prove easier for liberals to lose than to win back. If the Democrats have any hope of once again being the party of the working class, Murphy and others believe, they need to recognize that Americans are desperate for meaning and community.

The language Murphy used in his New Republic essay—invoking morality, self-worth, and social connection—is omnipresent in post-neoliberal discourse. The movement’s chief exponents believe that neoliberalism has not only created an economic disaster, but its emphasis on ruthless individualism has also created a crisis of political and social meaning. In the view of Murphy and others, any post-neoliberal politics must cultivate a new social ethic rooted in dignified and fairly remunerated labor. Many of these prominent post-neoliberals, some of them affiliated with the same think tanks and nonprofits that once helped establish the neoliberal consensus, seem convinced that there’s a massive voting bloc waiting to be activated: Americans who are moderate or even small-c conservative on social issues, but who also favor a more aggressive, rabble-rousing attack on the country’s existing economic system.

“We have not convinced voters in this country that we are serious about redistributing power from people who have it to people who don’t have it,” Murphy lamented to me. “The solutions we’ve proposed are largely small-ball, largely adjustments to the existing market. We don’t talk about power in the way that Republicans talk about power.” Others agreed.

Although many observed that Joe Biden has been arguably the most pro-labor president in decades and has often broken with neoliberal orthodoxy in areas such as industrial policy, they also felt that he never quite captured the narrative or claimed credit for his substantial accomplishments. In other words: There was a widespread sense among the people I spoke with that Biden had working-class policies without working-class politics. “The Democratic Party didn’t show that it was really backing the concerns of ordinary people strongly enough, and wasn’t identifying well enough with how they saw the world,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and longtime critic of neoliberalism, told me.

[Jon Favreau: The conversation Democrats need to have]

For many (though not all) post-neoliberals, the heart of their economic vision is “pre-distribution,” a concept popularized by the political scientist Jacob Hacker. Whereas center-left neoliberals tend to favor redistributive tax-and-transfer policies—allowing an unchained market to generate robust growth, and then blunting resulting economic disparities by taking some of the gains from the system’s winners and redistributing them to the system’s working-class “losers,” reducing inequality after the fact—post-neoliberals generally believe that it is better to avoid generating such inequalities in the first place. “The moral of this story,” Hacker explains in a 2011 paper, “is that progressive reformers need to focus on market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of economic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.”

As Hacker (perhaps accidentally) implies with his invocation of the story’s “moral,” pre-distribution advocates often justify this strategy in ethical or even spiritual terms: Empowering workers to secure better pay and working conditions—say, through unions and sectoral bargaining—is about restoring dignity and revitalizing labor-based forms of community.

“Most people don’t want a handout,” Chris Murphy recently posted on social media. “They want the rules unrigged so they can succeed on their own.” Although some on the left (not unreasonably) disliked the way the senator described certain redistributionist policies as “handouts,” these vocabulary complaints distract from Murphy’s deeper point. Honest labor is a source of pride, and populists should want an economy where most Americans are paid fairly for work they feel good about rather than suffering poverty wages and waiting for cash floats that keep them above water.

“Most people need opportunities for meaningful work and social recognition in order to feel that their goals in life are worthwhile,” the philosopher Daniel Chandler observed in his recent book Free and Equal, which received coverage in both mainstream liberal and left-wing media. “By focusing on increasing market incomes, especially from employment, predistribution helps to maintain the healthy connection between contribution and reward that might be lost if we relied too heavily on redistribution. At the same time, it takes seriously the importance of work for people’s sense of self-respect.” As Chandler and others see it, many Democrats’ inability to grasp the fact that it matters to people not only that they have financial resources but how they acquire them has left the party unable to understand why voters don’t reward them for their largesse. Larry Kramer, a former president of the Hewlett Foundation and the current president of the London School of Economics, echoed this view. He insisted to me that reaching the working class is about more than just material conditions: “It’s not economic. It’s political economy.” In his telling, liberals get so wrapped up debating how the economy should be organized that we forget to ask what moral and political ends—that is, what vision of the good life and what kinds of values—markets are supposed to secure in the first place.

Many Democratic insiders believe that post-neoliberal economic policies alone are not sufficient to win back American workers. Social issues will also need to be reconsidered. Stiglitz pointed to immigration as one place where Democrats may need to compromise, a view he shares with others in his post-neoliberal cohort. Murphy helped write a defeated bipartisan border-security bill that would have added Border Patrol officers and made asylum standards more stringent; some critics characterized it as “hard-right.” Last year, a hotly discussed book by the socialist journalist John B. Judis and the liberal political scientist Ruy Teixeira likewise packaged a withering critique of neoliberalism with a call to embrace more conservative positions on immigration. Chandler’s Free and Equal also quietly endorsed claims that increased immigration depresses wages for low earners and strains public resources. As Chandler argues, “High levels of immigration can make it more difficult to create a stable sense of political community and national identity.”

Gun control is another area where flexibility may be prudent in order to be competitive in certain parts of the country. Democrats will have to accommodate people like Dan Osborn, the independent who, though he lost his bid to represent Nebraska in the Senate, outperformed Kamala Harris while combining a vocal defense of the Second Amendment with proudly pro-union politics.

Teixeira and Judis flagged a third topic, gender identity, where Democrats ought to respond to the public’s concerns. That begins by making room for conversations that don’t involve accusations of bigotry, or insisting that the very act of asking questions about terms such as people with the capacity for pregnancy is tantamount to challenging the right of trans Americans to exist or exposing them to harm. For Judis and Teixeira, that requires making more granular distinctions between culture-war battles such as fairness in sports—where good-faith disagreement is possible—and important efforts to provide trans Americans the kind of universalist safeguards won in earlier civil-rights movements. LGBTQ groups’ effort to “protect transgender people from discrimination in housing, employment, and school admission falls well within America’s democratic tradition,” they write. But they also warn that activist demands outside this scope are “attempt[s] to impose a new social conformity based on a dubious notion of gender.”

More than anything, liberals need to understand that many Americans—especially those in the working class—feel unheard. Their trust will be won back not through quick fixes, but by treating those without a college education or with more conservative social views as equal participants in our national dialogue.

“The debate is still alive inside our party. But the post-neoliberals are clearly ascendant,” Murphy told me. He argued that his fellow Democrats need to be more open to dissenting viewpoints, and that expanding the tent will involve a fight: “I am not making an argument that the core Democratic Party do a left turn and reorient our position on choice, climate, or guns. I am arguing that we allow people into the tent … so that we have a little bit more robust conversation, and potentially a little bit more diversity on those issues inside the coalition.”

The soul-searching that is before the Democrats will require liberals to engage with views they find discomfiting, and to reckon with the fact that their social values are out of keeping with the working-class majorities they profess to represent. Democrats must figure out where there is room to compromise. And where compromise is not possible—or truly unjust—they must begin the slow-grinding work of persuasion.

[Read: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

“We cannot successfully engage with people whose inner lives we do not even try to understand,” a recent report from the stalwartly liberal think tank the Roosevelt Institute concludes. Whether left-wing liberals are open to doing this remains to be seen.

“It’s not clear that if we blow it in two or four years time that there’s another shot at this apple for Dems,” Jennifer Harris, a Hewlett Foundation director and former Biden-administration official, suggested when describing the Democratic Party’s need for a post-neoliberal makeover. In her view, the prize for such a transformation may prove to be not just a near-term political victory, but a Franklin D. Roosevelt–style stranglehold on the electorate: “There is potentially a lot of political spoils.”

Spoils indeed. Many on the left and right agree that the stakes are high, the reward prodigious, and the path forward obvious: Whichever party can credibly combine economic populism with moderate social positions will win elections. There is no mystery here. The problem is not the absence of a political solution but a deficit in political willpower. And the next election, and the elections to come, may well hinge on which party can muster the resolve to finally deliver real populism to the people.