May Day thoughts: The struggle to create a new working-class left | #194 – May 1, 2022

The connection between vote choice and identity is much stronger than the tie between partisan loyalty and economic preferences — and would take decades to unwind

Hi readers, and happy May Day (or International Workers Day, depending on your politics and/or continent).

I was going to take today off, given the holiday, but instead, I decided to write a couple of paragraphs about the labor movement in America. Specifically on how the politics of labor and values of working-class voters will shape the future of US politics.

A good starting point here is the above hyphenation: I wrote “working-class voters,” not “the working class.” One reason that psephologists and political journalists use the hyphenated form today is that it’s easy to lump voters who do and do not have college degrees into different groups, inferring that “working-class” voters vote that way because they don’t have degrees. But what this obscures is that the concept of a united “working class” does not apply to today’s economy or our politics. “Working-class” is not the same as “non-college-educated.” While workers across industries used to unite in solidarity with each other, bou…