The Left Needs More Working-Class Leaders

Two factions of the American left that ought to be allies remain estranged. In their new report entitled The Left’s Coalition Crisis, Joan C. Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, and Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working Class Politics, argue that a “massive divide” between working-class people and college-educated liberals is undermining the majority the Left needs to govern. And it’s playing out now across the country: as liberals double down on an obsession with defending democracy, Democratic candidates more attuned to the needs of working Americans are winning on a platform centered on day-to-day tangibles like rent, wages, and safety.

Williams and Abbott’s report, which can be real in full here, dissects the results of a poll the authors conducted earlier this year and lays out the contrasting political priorities of respondents based on their backgrounds. From there, they offer insight into how the language and moral posturing (“Do the Work,” “Check Your Privilege”) of the middle class repeatedly fails to strike a chord with working-class perspectives. One of their findings is that college-educated liberals lack what the authors call “class competence”: the ability to speak persuasively to working-class values. And with the class divide as sharp as it is today, it’s not a skill that can be faked. Williams and Abbott’s prescription is more practical: listen to what working-class people say they want, drop the moralizing vocabulary, and cede real influence over the progressive agenda to working people.

Paychecks, Prices, and Safety

So what do working-class voters actually want? According to the report’s data, their priorities center on paychecks, prices, and personal safety. These are the root issues that, if addressed, can drive social transformation from below: when people see results like higher wages, lower bills, and safer communities, they trust whoever delivered them — and they join up, organize, and win at an institutional level.

Since the first Trump administration, many progressives, taking on the identity of “the Resistance,” have focused their energy on one thing above all: democracy. But, the report argues, talking endlessly about the idea of democracy doesn’t garner working-class interest, support, or activity nearly as effectively as tackling economic and security concerns. It’s a simple equation that’s unfolded over and over since 2016: when liberal elites come across as out of touch, the Right cynically capitalizes on voters’ resentment and wins.

Two Sets of Priorities

Williams and Abbott divide their report into six sections, and together they hand the Left a diagnosis and a cure far more politically productive than a messaging makeover built out of poll-tested slogans.

Despite presumably being on the same team politically, working-class voters and college-educated liberals don’t share priorities when polled. Working-class voters care about wages, prices, and safety more than anything, while college-educated liberals prize abstractions like democracy, as mentioned, and abundance. Both can encompass material concerns, but in practice they work as blankets — a way to address the cost side of an affordability crisis without ever promising guaranteed jobs at good wages. Herein lies the gap the Right has used to pick off working-class voters who feel unheard.

The answer is what Williams and Abbott call “class competence,” an antidote based first on respect. They ask liberals to drop the jargon and frame even the most hot-button issues like abortion, public safety, and transgender rights in terms that reflect daily life, like security. This is an example of class-competent reframing, which they’ve found can quickly change minds on an array of issues. But reframing is only half the solution. The other half is the structure of power on the Left. If liberals want to build coalitions that last, they can’t simply convert their agenda into the language of the working class. Instead, they must allow working-class people to call the shots to begin with.

Even after reframing, the gaps can remain large. For instance, when a carbon tax is framed as falling on emitters rather than households, working-class support jumps to 65 percent — up from 40 percent when the same tax is described as costing households a dollar a month. But even after that jump, a 25 point class gap between working-class and liberal-elite sympathies remains. Fully closing these gaps will require long-term organizing around issues that align with working-class values.

Candidates From the Class Itself

This is where the current wave of populism can play a key role. Americans aren’t wrong to feel left behind, but when only upper-middle-class progressives run for office, the working-class base that vastly outnumbers them is left cold. If the Left cultivated a leadership as working-class as its base — one that plainly names the villains people recognize from daily life, like price gouging and corporate greed — it would have a much better shot at a durable majority.

Institutions like the New Jersey AFL-CIO Labor Candidates School and Alaska’s Arthur A. Allman Labor Candidate School are already producing a steady stream of such candidates. When those running for office come from union halls, community organizations, and safety committees rather than think tanks and consulting firms, working-class people finally see themselves on the ballot. Without these kinds of candidates, the working class and the professional class will remain divided.

Williams and Abbott make it clear that progressives can expand their base without abandoning their goals. But they must give up on the delusion that the priorities of the professional class are universal. Cross-class coalitions require policies that materially touch working-class lives and, in the process, speak from a place of solidarity, not scorn. If progressives want to win, they need to treat the working class not as a demographic to be captured but as genuine partners in a coalition for change.