[…]
Will Marshall, president and founder of the centrist-Democratic Progressive Policy Institute, argued that the only plausible path toward expanding the universe of Democratic voters “is to build a cross-class coalition that includes a lot more noncollege voters, who constitute a majority of the electorate. That entails changing the party’s self-marginalizing stances on economic redistribution, energy and climate and identity politics.”
Marshall cited an essay published last summer by a colleague, Richard Kahlenberg, director of Housing Policy and the American Identity Project at the institute, “Renewing the Democratic Party.”
After pointing to data on the public’s view of the Democratic Party similar to the poll findings I mentioned at the start of this essay, Kahlenberg argued: “Restoring the primacy of working-class priorities, on issues of culture as well as economics, provides the central path forward for a Democratic Party that wants to build a durable majority and restore its identity as the party of working people.”
But, he continued, as “racial gaps have narrowed in a variety of arenas, and class divides have mostly widened,” Democrats “have doubled down on framing challenges primarily in terms of racial and ethnic identity, rather than economic status.”
So why, Kahlenberg asked, “do Democrats engage in this self-defeating behavior? Two factors stand out.”
One is the shift in power of major Democratic interest groups from “organized labor, with its broad-based concerns about economic inequality,” to identity-based interest groups “for people of color, women and the L.G.B.T. community.”
The second “has been the rise of highly educated affluent white liberals, often referred to as ‘the Brahmin Left,’” who “are to the left of people of color on issues of race.”
Kahlenberg noted, “When issues are described in narrow racial terms, they are far less expensive to address and minimize the personal sacrifice required of upper-middle-class white liberals.”
[…]
