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THE REAL DEMOCRATIC CIVIL WAR  
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Harold Meyerson
June 16, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ It’s not so much about ‘abundance’ as it is about how to
reconnect with a justifiably angry working class. _

Low wage workers and supporters protest for a $15-an-hour minimum
wage on November 10, 2015 in New York, United States., Spencer
Platt/Getty Images

 

No American ever did more to create an abundant economy that benefited
the working class, or more to regulate the economy in ways that
constrained capital and benefited the working class, than Franklin
Roosevelt. So, forgive me if I think that the real divisions within
today’s Democratic Party aren’t fundamentally those separating the
“abundance” crowd and the pro-regulatory crowd. Those divisions
are real enough, but I think they are largely stand-ins for a more
fundamental set of differences about what the Democrats should do to
regain the support of the American working and middle classes.

The measure of a first-class mind, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,
is the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs and not be paralyzed by
the contradictions. In this instance, I don’t even think that the
tenets of abundance-ism and those of a critique of American capitalism
are necessarily or invariably counterposed. Jon Chait in _The
Atlantic_
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and Molly Ball in _The Wall Street Journal_
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have both written that these differences have led to an
intra-Democratic civil war. But that’s only because they’re
proxies for the real internecine conflict.

After all, it should be clear that it’s the economically
powerful—whether you call that homeowners associations opposed to
apartments in their neighborhoods or corporate giants opposed to the
emergence of new corporate rivals—that disproportionately invoke
regulations to stop the intruders, whoever they may be. An entrenched
economic power will often use whatever power it can access to thwart
the emergence of newcomers who may threaten its power.

Just because abundance advocates may attack restrictive zoning
regulations doesn’t mean they necessarily support repealing the laws
restricting what banks can do with depositors’ savings, or consumer
product safety standards. By the same token, a pro-regulation (or even
pro–public ownership) critic of capitalism doesn’t necessarily
support keeping every regulation in place, particularly in times when
the public interest requires public initiatives. As the Obama
administration struggled to generate job-producing projects during the
much-too-slow recovery from the 2008 crash, the regulatory obstacles
to getting those projects off the ground condemned millions of
Americans to unemployment or part-time gig work, as I documented
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_pieces. The contrast with FDR’s success at putting more than 10
percent of the nation’s workforce to work on public projects within
a mere two months was instructive, and sobering.

The anger that the male working class feels is most commonly expressed
in cultural and racial antagonisms, but its root cause is economic.

Still, the two sides of this conflict are having at each other these
days, though I think it really stems from their conflicting ideas as
to how the party can win back its onetime working-class base. Each
side begins with acknowledging the loss of that base, and the
acquisition of a new base among more affluent college-educated voters.
Centrists believe that Democrats need to distance themselves from some
of the beliefs and policies associated with this new, more educated
base: cultural norms, minority-oriented identity politics, and in some
cases, a more egalitarian economics. Leftists defend a number of those
cultural norms and identity politics, but not as audibly as they did
before last November, and want to double down on those more
egalitarian economics.

Both sides, I think, misunderstand the root causes of the working
class’s estrangement from center-left politics, which now defines
politics not just in the U.S. but throughout almost every nation with
an advanced economy. The anger that the male working class in
particular feels toward elites targets both cultural and economic
norm-setters, but even as it’s most commonly expressed in cultural
and racial antagonisms, its root cause is economic. At bottom, it’s
the recognition that manual labor is no longer compensated at levels
that can sustain a family or a stable work life, and the fear that
this will only grow worse.

The lives lived by these young men’s fathers or grandfathers are no
longer attainable. Manufacturing requires radically fewer workers than
it once did, while offshoring and deunionization have greatly reduced
the compensation for those still working in factories. Construction is
considerably more mechanized than it was 30 years ago, and robots loom
over the transportation and warehousing sectors. Jobs in retail,
health services, and education usually don’t pay very well, and
require different skill sets from those that many working-class men
possess. Even warfare no longer needs masses of soldiers; a single
drone operator can now wipe out Russian bomber squadrons while sitting
at a desk.

It would be astonishing if these changes _didn’t _produce a rage at
the established order, which has lost its capacity to provide the kind
of broad-based prosperity of the post–World War II economy. As the
reality and prospects of a sustainable, non-precarious working-class
life have vanished, it’s completely understandable that rage at
elites has soared. It’s characteristically been accompanied by a
disdain for the liberal orders that are both out of reach economically
and culturally alien to some working-class norms. It’s also been
accompanied by a cult of hypermasculinity (often faux
hypermasculinity, but the appearance can be all) as a form of
compensation for the decentering of, and diminished value placed on,
manual labor.

My friend Jim Lardner recently remarked that there’s an “anger
gap” between the two parties. Republicans come before voters fairly
drenched in anger; right-wing media have been exploiting and stoking
it for decades. During that time, Democrats have generally “gone
high” and appealed to the better angels of voters’ natures. The
differing tones of the Harris and Trump campaigns provided a kind of
_reductio ad absurdum_ to this gulf.

The two wings of the Democratic Party are now addressing that anger
gap in very different ways. The centrists want to reposition the
party’s social policies, to diminish or disown many of the younger
progressives’ cultural norms, in order to tamp down the working
class’s anti-Democratic cultural rage. At the same time, they deny
the economic fury that underlies that working-class anger, arguing
that economic populism provides no cure for the Democrats’
ailments—even though poll after poll shows that economic populist
positions like more progressive taxes, more government-funded health
coverage, more unionization, more worker rights, and higher minimum
wages are very popular with working-class voters. They conflate the
economic leftism of many younger Democrats with their cultural
leftism, though polls show that levels of popular support for those
two forms of progressivism couldn’t be more different. They rage at
the Democratic left for its support of both those species of leftism,
which only positions them as a target of the working class’s
economic fury.

Leftists want to direct that economic fury to the financial architects
of the working class’s instability; that’s why Bernie Sanders
connects not just with left populists but many right populists as
well. There’s no anger gap in the Bernie road shows; there’s an
acknowledgment of the anger, and a pellucid presentation that directs
it at the real authors of working-class distress. While Sanders’s
socialism is alien to most Americans, it also inoculates him from the
taint of being part of the establishment, which is a major plus to
populists of all descriptions, and many not-quite-populists as well.

Democrats may succeed in tamping down the prominence of some cultural
norms that repel potential voters, but they won’t win elections
until they are also in touch with working-class anger. Republicans
have working-class cultural rage covered; there’s no room for any
Democrats who seek to go there, even if it didn’t require
repudiating some norms that Democrats quite rightly defend. If the
anger gap is to be closed, it will be by someone in the mold of
Sanders: calling out the authors of our discontent and charting some
paths to viable working-class lives.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

* US Working Class; Democratic Party Politics;
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