JACOB HACKER AND Paul Pierson convincingly describe a new Democratic Party—one with economic policy priorities that are more progressive than they’ve been in decades. Remarkably, the party has made this transition while hemorrhaging working-class voters and running up their margins among the highly educated, affluent suburbanites who once would have decried Bidenomics as creeping socialism.
Hacker and Pierson have a clever answer to those who worry that passing more ambitious redistributive reforms will be difficult without alienating their increasingly upscale base. The ironic silver lining of America’s extreme wealth inequality, they say, is that Democrats can count on all the money they need to fund expansive economic policies by taxing only the very rich. What’s more, they argue, Democrats are exhibiting remarkable message discipline—at least on social media— designed to play up their focus on “pocketbook” issues and avoid potentially polarizing divisions around race and other contentious issues.
This argument is among the most plausible I have read of how the Democrats might forge a durable majority in the medium term. At the same time, there are several areas where the analysis misses or understates the difficulty of the Democrats’ road ahead, particularly with respect to working-class voters. I will briefly address three: the gap between Democrats’ commitment to progressive economic policies and their messaging to voters on the campaign trail, the party’s general aversion to populist rhetoric, and the strategic dilemma that Democrats face in their communication around controversial cultural issues.