Of Course Republicans Should Represent the Working Class! (Democrats Should Too!)

Our ambivalence towards working-class politics stems from our national confusion about what the working class really is.

The Republican Party wants to embrace the working class. Many people appear to think that’s a problem.

Whenever you read that Republicans increasingly represent working people, it always seems to come with a negative insinuation. This attitude comes from Republicans, or former Republicans, who seem to think it’s an abandonment of principle. It equally comes from Democrats, who appear to think it’s shameful. Why?

Aren’t working people, by definition those without much institutional power, the people who most need representation in a democracy? In fact, shouldn’t both major parties be fighting with all their might for the opportunity to represent the working class?

Our ambivalence towards working-class politics stems from our national confusion about what the working class really is. By creed, America is supposed to be a classless society. We’re social equals with full social mobility. The very idea that America has a working class conflicts with everything we claim to be. Out of this discomfort, we even stretch reality to pretend everyone who isn’t either in dire poverty or a billionaire is a member of one large American middle class.

The working class isn’t about income. Some do define working people as those who work to pay their bills, but have no discretionary income. That’s obviously untrue. To be broke isn’t the same as to be part of a permanent lower class. Your wealth is temporary. It’s possible to have no money but the means and connections to get it, just as it’s possible to have lots of money but through bad luck or improvidence lose it.

As anyone who reads nineteenth-century European novels knows, even in overtly class-based societies working class means more than wealth. One of the most common stories is the unconnected upstart with new money and the wrong accent showing up at the ball and getting snubbed. He may be rich, but he’s still working class. Another is the impoverished aristocrat who can still get an appointment at Horse Guards and an audience with the King. He’s poor, but upper class.

Perhaps it’s about the type of work you do? Some say manual labor or service work—blue or pink collar jobs—make you working class. Perhaps that was once true, but it clearly isn’t anymore. Working people today include a lot more than farmers, factory workers, and waitresses. They include Amazon warehouse workers, delivery drivers, gig workers, and Uber drivers. They include people working in cubicles in air-conditioned offices doing data entry or taking customer-service calls. They include graphic designers, teachers, police officers, nurses, IT workers, adjunct professors, and government employees. They include a fair number of paycheck-to-paycheck middle managers too.

In reality, an awful lot of Americans are working people these days. Most probably call themselves middle class. As a society, we go along in a mix of national pride and embarrassment. In reality, we know America has a large and growing working class.

Perhaps working class is about culture? There are doubtlessly cultural markers we associate with working people, and others with the rich, but those mostly have to do with money. Those aren’t permanent markers of social class but indicators of whether someone can consume expensive things, which change as soon as someone gets more money. Perhaps the working class has to do with where you live: North, South, urban, or rural? There are plenty of upper-class people across the South, and plenty of working people in Northern cities. If you think it has to do with race, you probably need to talk with people without white skin serving you coffee or ringing up your order.

What then actually makes you working class in America? Whether you have access to influence inside institutions. Social class means access to the people who run things.

There are communities and networks of families in America with the means to influence institutions through the backdoor. If your child wants to become an investment banker, there’s a friend who can get them an internship. When you run into trouble with the government, you can pick up the phone and call a guy you know inside the agency. When you need a job, there’s a friend of a friend from college who can get you in touch with someone well-placed inside the industry. When you have trouble with a company, there’s someone you went to school with on the board. When you need a meeting, you have the credentials to get in the door and be taken seriously.

There are also networks and communities of families with none of this. They don’t know someone already inside the fort to guide them. When they run into trouble with a big institution, they don’t have someone they can call. Unless they’re exceptionally talented or lucky enough to get picked out and raised up through education or the unexpected mentor, this is how their life is going to be. They don’t have access to the back door. They walk through the front, the one that’s usually closed. They can rise with time through social mobility, but it’s going to be the hard way.

The nice thing about America is we hate this. We truly do hate nepo babies. We despise people who say “don’t you know who I am?” We love it when entitled brats born on third base fall down. Wise people going through the back pathways are quiet about it because they know it isn’t right. This isn’t something that makes us proud, and it shouldn’t. We all know America is supposed to have a level playing field, and we aspire to make it so. Nonetheless, it’s simply a social fact and given this fact America’s major parties should of course fight to represent working people.

Working people need champions in a democracy because democracy is all they have. They can’t pick up the phone and call someone on the board. They didn’t go to college with the person making the decision. The only path they have to influence the power affecting their lives is democratic accountability. That means our system can only function if that channel works. Stability depends on it.

For most of history, both parties understood this perfectly. We always had at least one major party in America fighting to represent working people and often both. This remained true deep into the twentieth century, when America’s parties still offered not just bromides and policies but actual seats at the table to working people. Our highest offices were packed with union guys. Many leaders, like LBJ, pulled themselves up with grit from hardscrabble roots. Then something happened, and over the last few decades both parties more or less turned their backs.

The reasons they turned their backs are complicated. Neither really mentally appreciated that they did it. Both continued to give lip service to working people. They offered programs to “serve” them. At election time, they explained why their policies were better for them. What they didn’t do is take them seriously, include them at the table, or give them a real voice. This failure is a major contributor to how we got into our current mess.

Representation means more than giving people stuff—money, programs, or favorable policies. Nobody in a democracy wants your gifts or spoils while you rule them. Democracy means they get an actual seat for themselves. The dissident left and right both variously complain about out-of-touch elites, selfish corporations, unaccountable billionaires, distant experts, and unaccountable government leaders. We despair over the rise of populism, misinformation, public anger, institutional failure, and the national collapse in trust. All of this is really part of this same cause, a lack of faith in democratic accountability.

For many Americans, power in America increasingly feels unaccountable and inaccessible. When the dissident left or dissident right are complaining about elites, government, corporations, capitalism, or what have you, what they’re really saying is the people who have power over their lives don’t represent them, don’t seem to like them, and won’t listen to them. Elections don’t seem to work, they have no means to get into the rooms where things happen, and they don’t know how to get a seat at the table for themselves.

The other half of America has no idea what they’re talking about because they can just send a text to the right person or pick up the phone and make a call.

Why are America’s leaders so blind to this obvious threat to our democracy? The most uncharitable explanation is a lot of leaders just don’t think it’s a problem. Too many have convinced themselves they have the right to make these decisions. They know the better way and don’t want to share power with people they don’t respect, and who they believe are mostly wrong. They don’t want messy democracy getting in the way of what they want to do.

It is a problem. It’s destabilizing democracy.

Democracy requires trust. Democratic legitimacy requires participation and consent. It isn’t enough to get to the best policy answer. That answer must also be seen as democratically legitimate. The people running things must always appear transparent, responsive, and accountable to those who aren’t. The people who aren’t running things must always believe if they’re unhappy they can become the people running things tomorrow. The system only works if everybody believes they’re equal partners in America.

That’s what self-government means. We aren’t supposed to have rulers who make decisions and the ruled who obey. If a large portion of America believes they’re no longer in control of their destiny, democracy will fail. There are many things we can, and must, do to channel their desires into good policy, which is what the structure of the American republic is all about. A democracy that can’t deliver basic democratic legitimacy however will, no matter how great its policy outcomes, inevitably collapse and fall apart.

If we care about our republic, we want two parties battling over how they can make life for working Americans better, how they can represent them fairly, and how they can solve the problems they need solved.