A battle is raging among US progressives over how to understand the political attitudes and strategic significance of the working class in American politics. Have workers really abandoned the Democratic camp? If so, what implications does this dealignment have for progressive strategy, and what are the most promising strategies for checking or reversing it?
Though the outcome of this debate will likely set the terms of class struggle in the United States for the foreseeable future, there is little agreement on the basic facts on the ground or the terms of the debate. My objective in this essay is threefold: to present the best available evidence of the state of working-class dealignment from the Democratic Party, to detail the key debates about whether and how dealignment matters, and to lay out the most prominent progressive theories for how working-class dealignment can be fixed. Along the way, I will make the case that dealignment is indeed a central strategic question in contemporary progressive politics, and I will offer a set of tentative propositions, based on a wide-ranging review of the dealignment literature, for the most promising paths forward.
The Three Dealignment Camps
There are three broad camps in the current intraleft struggle to define the views and political importance of the US working class, which I characterize as (1) dealignment defense — dealignment may be happening, but it doesn’t matter, and may even be good, (2) dealignment denialism — dealignment isn’t happening, and the broad, multiracial working-class is more progressive than is commonly understood, and (3) dealignment denunciation — dealignment is happening, and it is a major problem.
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