Three Challenges and One Opportunity for the Left

A populism that can win must make the case for restoring economic sovereignty against the private power of the rich.

FDR warned against the growth of a private power that would undermine democratic sovereignty.

In the last election, the Democrats won voters with a college education by some 14 points. They won the majority of households that made more than $100,000 a year. And they handily won some of the richest counties in the country. But, they lost the working class.

Trump won the majority of voters who do not have a college degree. He won households that make less than $100k a year and he even won those that make less than $50k a year. Republicans now have a 6 point advantage with voters who don’t have a college degree.

Importantly, the problem isn’t confined to any one section of the working class. It’s not just rural voters, or white voters, or religiously conservative voters that have decamped—working-class black voters also shifted to Trump, and blue-collar Latino voters moved even more dramatically rightward. According to the New York Times, voters in core urban counties shifted the most toward Trump. The Left is losing the support of the working class across the board.

It wasn’t long ago that Chuck Schumer confidently dismissed “blue-collar voters in Western Pennsylvania.” Today, the attitude is different. Among Democrats there is a genuine, palpable sense that losing the blue-collar vote has been a disaster. Yet naming the problem is only the first step toward finding a solution, and none has yet been found.

Some, on the far-Left, argue that what’s needed is a new burst of progressivism: an unapologetically leftwing economic program that promises more government spending, novel welfare programs, a program to combat climate change, and a steadfast commitment to increasingly liberal views on social and cultural questions. Others, on the center-Left, argue that Democrats ought to pivot to the middle on all these issues instead. Centrists want a return to the status quo ante, the pre-Trump era of tax cuts, technocracy, free-trade, and cultural moderation.

Despite the bickering between these factions, there remains a profound malaise on the Left today. While Trump is making a mess of the economy, and while his popularity is slipping, no faction of the Left has been able to take advantage of the opening. Rank-and-file Democrats complain that their party seems listless. No one, it seems, has been able to provide a compelling vision capable of winning back the trust of working-class voters.

Part of solving that problem is to look squarely at the road ahead. There are three main challenges the political Left faces today. Overcoming them won’t be easy.

Thankfully, there is also one enduring opportunity that only the Left can seize.

Three Challenges

The first challenge is sociological. At any self-styled progressive event you will notice that most of the people present are highly-educated middle- or upper-middle-class liberal professionals. You’ll also notice that the issues they are most passionate about often have nothing to do with questions about jobs, manual work, wages, unions, social class, or the economy. As the Left has lost its working-class base, liberalism itself transformed to reflect the values, interests and tastes of an educated and high-income group. The Left, as it is, speaks differently, has different priorities, values, interests and aesthetics, than the broad working class. That makes it much harder for progressive leaders to connect with, and persuade, blue-collar voters.

To confront the sociological challenge, in the short term, we ought to invest in the kinds of candidates that have an organic social closeness to working-class voters. Working-class candidates like Dan Osborn are a great example. But so too are congressional representatives like Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, Chris Deluzio, and Greg Casar.

The second challenge is organizational. The long slow decline of the union movement (a process abetted by Democrats and Republicans), along with the decline in associational life more broadly, has meant that the Left has lost its democratic organizations. Today, the home for progressive politics is not in the union hall, the fraternal order, or the beer-league softball club, but instead it is on social media and in the non-profit organizations. Not long ago there was excitement that new organizational forms, and digital modes of communication, would result in a renewed democratic spirit. Experience has dampened those hopes. The new forums of the Left are, instead, democratically barren. Social media’s silos and echo-chambers serve to insulate most leftwing political conversations among self-selected partisans. Novelty and virality are prized over democratic deliberation. Worse, the rise of non-profits as a substitute for democratic associations has robbed the Left of fertile spaces where new leaders are formed. Climbing the organizational ranks of a union or voluntary association helps one develop sound judgement, teaches people how to persuade, and provides the means to develop, and showcase oratory skills. Neither the cruel, competitive one-upmanship of social media nor the incentives of salaried nonprofit careerism can serve as an adequate replacement.

We ought to invest in building up local organizations, associations, and social clubs—espeically in rural areas. We need to develop ways to work more closely with local unions where they exist—not just once an election cycle for a get-out-the-vote campaign, or to ask for a donation, but yearround to help recruit and develop candidates, train campaign volunteers, and ask advice on policy debates and messaging. But perhaps more importantly, a reinvigoration of the democratic grassroots implies a break with the foundation-funded nonprofit-political complex. Representatives of the Left ought to cut ties with niche professional advocacy groups in order to prioritize those people who aren’t paid to do politics.

The third challenge is ideological. The contemporary Left is out of ideas. Most progressive narratives are stuck in the ‘60s: repeating the slogans of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and calls for more rights for sexual minorities. On economics, too, the Left is stuck: the government could spend a little more for new social programs, maybe increase taxation on the margins, while trusting the experts at the Federal Reserve to solve inflation, and unemployment. But there are few compelling grand narratives today, fewer novel theories of government or economics, and there is no unifying public philosophy on the Left. This is evident in the debate over the direction the Democratic Party should take; while centrists and progressives fight about policy priorities and messaging, they’re deeply united by a thoughtless reactivism. Tariffs? Trump embraced them so we oppose them. Immigration? Trump hates it, so the more the better.

Ironically, progressive reactivism is, in practice, conservative. It cedes the agency of government to the Right, it names conservatives as the motor of history and leaves the Left as defenders of the broken status quo.

That’s a problem because our populist age is all about big ideas to tear down the old world and build up something new. To persuade voters to join our cause or vote for our candidates we can’t just be the opposite of whatever Trump represents, instead we need to have a compelling explanation for what’s gone wrong in American society with a workable theory for how to fix it; a theory that doesn’t merely rely on the slogans and movements of the past.

One Big Opportunity

Despite these challenges, there is one very promising opportunity. And that has to do with the economy.

A half century of bipartisan economic policies have failed to produce a more productive, more equal, more solidaristic, and more democratic society. In fact, the very tools once used to jumpstart economic growth—breaking the back of organized labor, deregulating the big banks, unleashing global trade, and showering the rich with tax cuts—have now resulted in global economic stagnation and popular frustration.

In broad strokes the problem today is simple: the rich have too much. It’s not only that the bottom 2/3rds of the income distribution simply don’t have enough money to spend to grow the economy, it’s that the rich refuse to invest in productive endeavors. They prefer to hoard their gold, and thanks to globalization, they can hoard it in bank accounts anywhere in the world. When threatened with taxation, they move their companies offshore, anywhere they can secure a better deal. It’s up to the Left to provide a new solution to this age-old problem. And it’s where the Left has its strongest claim to democratic support.

Here is the Left’s great opportunity, as the Center for Working-Class Politics has shown, a populist narrative is popular. And policies designed to rebalance the economy in the interests of the working class have wide support. But a compelling economic case involves more than the promise of new social programs, and populism is not synonymous with liberal progressivism. Above all, a populism of the Left must call to restore economic sovereignty against forces that seek to further devolve our democratic powers: inequality, debt, and globalization.

Because the rich have become so fabulously rich, their interests are most often realized in economic policy and, as the Wall Street Journal triumphantly remarked, “The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People.” They have again become, in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a “private power […] stronger than the democratic state itself.” We, the masses of un-monied Americans, have no real say over the structure of our economy. And without a means to tax the very rich, our government has increasingly relied on borrowing to prop-up social programs.

But the mounting public debt-load now threatens even our famously thread-bare welfare state, as the billionaire Elon Musk hacks and slashes at spending while über-wealthy bond-vigilantes gobble up government debt to use as financial blackmail. So while economic growth remains stagnant, the meager means available to redistribute wealth and soften hard edges of the American economy are being dismantled by it’s richest and most comfortable citizens.

Finally, globalization has meant that the rich can hide their money all over the globe, free from any domestic duties or tax liabilities. It has resulted in the suppression of wages of domestic and foreign-born workers. Not to mention the off-shoring of countless jobs. When it comes to trade and immigration the libertarian experiment in hyper-globalization has resulted in a profound instability. And while many liberals are pleased that Trump’s tariff strategy is failing, one underlying lesson is that the most powerful elected leader in the world has seemingly little ability to direct the domestic strategy of the United States economy. When Wall Street says they don’t like something, they still get their way. It’s this loss of control that provides one of the chief motivations for populism, and it isn’t going away.

While the Left is accustomed to railing against inequality, and advocating for democracy, we are not practiced in making the case for sovereignty. Yet today’s crisis requires restoring a sense of plebeian control, not just at the national but also at the local, and individual level.

A populism that can win is one that can address the intertwined crises of inequality, debt, and globalization as threats to our sovereignty. It’s a populism that not only attacks the greed of the idle-rich but also praises the virtues of self-reliance and the dignity of work. It promises to restore democratic and economic power to workers, while rebuilding America’s capacity to build.

In this kind of populism lies the Left’s great opportunity should we choose to take it.

Adapted from a talk delivered at Ursinus College, on April 30, 2025

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