Tuesday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, the guys discussed the changing role of “working class” voters in our politics today, and Eric Levitz’s piece for Vox: “Who Counts As “Working Class”? “There has been a lot of new membership in the DSA since then. But in 2021, 80% of DSA members over 25 were college-educated. Twenty-eight percent earned more than $ 100,000 a year, which puts them in roughly the top 15% of America’s income distribution,” Andrew Walworth explains. “This is according to a DSA internal survey.” “What I thought was interesting was that he questioned this whole idea of the Marxist paradigm of the ‘working class’ being the underclass. It was a really thoughtful take on what it is to be working class today,” he said. “It has less to do with the proletariat, labor unions and all the things we traditionally use to define the working class. It made me rethink the whole Marxist paradigm again.” “They’re having trouble getting the people they claim to speak for to vote for them because they don’t relate to these people. They themselves aren’t working class, and they don’t have cultural attitudes like people who work with their hands in America. They’re separate from them,” Carl Cannon commented. “Maybe I wouldn’t even use that phrase. But people who find our government and our system wanting, who want change for whatever their reason is-I think that may explain partly why they’re having success at the ballot box,” he suggested. “Maybe both words in that are wrong. Maybe it has nothing to do with whether you work or not. And maybe it isn’t class in the way we think of class, as in, it’s not an economic division anymore. It’s a different division that they’re talking about and appealing to.” “It’s been a lifetime conundrum for me, why socialism keeps coming back,” Walworth added. “It may have something to do with redefining these terms over and over again-redefining who is a good socialist and who’s not.” Tom Bevan pointed to a related argument from Republican pollster Lee Carter: “Collapsing Trust, Not Ideology, Is Reshaping American Politics” “Her theory is that what’s going on these days politically is less about ideology and more about this failure of institutions-the lack of trust in institutions,” Bevan explained. “A lot of this movement on the left is not driven by hardcore ideological concerns. It is more that they feel abandoned by their political class, by what’s going on in Washington and by the institutions that are supposed to be helping them, protecting them or looking out for them.” “And it’s the same thing on the right, just from a different perspective,” he added. See the rest of the conversation on Tuesday’s episode of the RCP podcast:
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