How can the US Democrats win working class voters? Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs tackles this question in a detailed and thought-provoking article on The Conversation. Here’s a big clue:

In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024 that gap reached 27 points – not because working-class voters lurched toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.

Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does. In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured.

Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand the system.

On support for expanding government – from healthcare to jobs to environmental programs – Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s. By 2024, there were approval gaps of between 20 and 30 points on providing government health insurance, environmental spending and a guaranteed jobs program.

This is an illustration of class divides that I’ve written about (here and here), specifically the divide between the working class and the professional managerial class.

Over the past 40 years, and especially since the 1990s from Clinton onwards, the US Democrats (and most centre-left, centrist-liberal parties across the world) have been taken over by the professional managerial class. This phenomenon is widely documented, with Thomas Piketty’s Brahmin Left/Merchant Right one of the best summaries of this class dealignment in my view.

The professional managerial class is made up of people who are highly educated, credentialed and have significant cultural capital. They do not own the means of production, but they instead derive their class power from their monopoly over administrative, educational, and bureaucratic systems, especially (but not only) state systems. For the professional managerial class, the state is a natural vehicle for career advancement and social change. As Dan Evans (author of A Nation of Shopkeepers) points out, their cultural capital acts as a mobilising resource, as well as being signifiers of their social standing.

This means that it is in their class interest to have “more government spending”. They advocate for programs that require expanded state machinery which they will run and populate, and also aid the capitalist class in navigating. (This last bit is why the likes of Peter Theil and Elon Musk hate corporate middle managers and bureaucrats so much.)

Conversely, for the American working class, the distrust of government is a rational, material response to decades of state-enforced austerity, deregulation, and industrial decline.

The neoliberal state constantly intervenes, often violently, to discipline labour. The state aids capitalists to crush strikes, cut wages, close down factories, and divert public funds to bail out banks.

Jacobs’ article highlights that the US working-class has a “bootstraps” ideology, what Dan Evans characterised as believing in the implicit social contract: if I work hard, I should be safe. If I follow the rules, I should be respected. Jacobs links to an essay by Joan C. Williams that makes the point that:

Above all, the working class wants to work. Sure, they may be on unemployment and disability now, but they qualify for those programs only because they were workers in the past—unlike the poor, who violate cherished norms of hard work and self-discipline. They resent Democrats for providing social assistance to these “shiftless” poor—handouts that the white working class wouldn’t stoop to accept (and for which their incomes are probably too high to qualify anyway, despite their financial insecurity). And they resent progressives for mandating sympathy for the poor, for women, and for minorities, while heaping scorn on them.

Is this a psychological coping mechanism for a brutal economic reality where collective solidarity has been systematically dismantled by the state? Having a world-view where you rely on your own hard work, without relying on government support, is in my view a rational response from the US working class.

This worldview is a key part of the demobilised class society. Working class people are angry, but because of economic precarity and the destruction of unions, lack collective agency. They often retreat into a defensive position, railing against both the “higher-ups” and the “takers” below us. Their moral economy is based on individualism, thrift, and hard work, which they view as violated by people perceived as not hardworking like them.

According to Jacobs, only 5 percent of people in US who identify as working class are private-sector union members. In Australia, things aren’t so dire, and many workers here have a different worldview, where individual effort under capitalism does not guarantee prosperity because the workplace is an arena of exploitation. I put this down to the Australian union movement being structurally larger and more influential, as well as stronger social democratic institutions, here compared to the US.

However, the worldview identified by Jacobs is a good example of how people can treat “hard work” as a real, tangible, objective thing. This is the ideology that supports capitalism. Workers, especially in the US, absorb this and then behave like working harder — grinding away — genuinely does result in economic freedom rather than just more exploitation.

What the left, in the US and in Australia, should seriously grapple with is workers’ distrust of government.

This is a rational distrust. In Australia, as I wrote in my piece about class and the far-right, “over 61 percent of Australians believe the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”.

This is a view that is based on reality. The neoliberal state really does protect capital accumulation and capitalists — using the tools of monetary policy, fiscal policy and industrial policy. (More here about how the state uses austerity.)

When centrist-liberals and the professional managerial class talk about “more government”, workers hear that as state intervention which will ultimately enforce austerity and economic discipline on them while shielding the ultra-wealthy. The state really is an active tool of economic coercion on behalf of capital; it is not neutral.

What’s more, the professional managerial class — the US centrists and liberals — have their own form of false consciousness by believing that more government will solve all of society’s ills. Capital cannot be civilised by social democracy because the state itself is a result of the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Managing those contradictions is one of the key roles that the professional managerial class undertakes.

Without strong unions, individual hard work is the most rational response from the US working class. Without this worldview and behaviour, workers would not survive in the US. They would risk being further immiserated and thrown into abject poverty. This fear is obviously a critical tool used by capital to maintain power — the existence of a permanent, stigmatised underclass is vital under capitalism.

Centrist-liberal, social democratic policies in the US to expand healthcare and education also do not fundamentally challenge who owns the factories, banks, logistics hubs, electricity networks and land. The Democrats policies — even the more radical ones like Bernie Sanders — ultimately leave the core structure of capitalist exploitation untouched.

The corporate-state connection is also, I believe, why so many working class people responded strongly to Trump’s promise of “no new wars”. The US state spends an incomprehensible amount on maintaining the infrastructure of global empire and domestic surveillance in order to secure global markets, resources, and supply chains — almost US$1 trillion in 2025. Workers can see this massive government spending does not go toward their well-being.

In this way, working-class distrust of the state, at its root, could be seen as an unarticulated, inherent anti-imperialist, anti-corporate sentiment. A large number of the Trump voters of 2024 are not ideological adherents to racist, Christofascist white-supremacy — they are just rejecting the status quo.

What should a reader take away from Nicholas Jacobs’ article?

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

His conclusion is that US Democrats need to listen to what working class people are saying and take that seriously, and that on “every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.”

My conclusion from his article is not that Democrats should be less left, but rather that the left must build working-class counter-power outside the state apparatus before attempting to use state power.

Specifically, that means that the left in the US (and in Australia, UK, etc) must genuinely work to re-build active, powerful, democratically run unions.

The Left must not rely primarily on the legislative arena but instead focus resources on organising workers across key parts of the economy (e.g., logistics, care, utilities, transport and tech). Class consciousness is built through experience of exploitation in the real world, and collective resistance in the workplace. Electoral campaigns are important but not sufficient.

Beyond unions, the left must also look at other collective, mutual aid institutions. Cooperative housing, and community-run services that demonstrate the power of collective action without relying on the capitalist state’s bureaucracy. Stronger unions and more mutual aid will show that solidarity and hard work ensures survival.

Finally, the left needs to recognise that calling for technocratic solutions — like “independent” central banks — where services are run by experts takes those services out of democratic control. We need the reverse — more democracy! Instead of advocating for standard government expansion of social programs, the left should demand that public funds and services (such as banking, healthcare, housing, energy, water and infrastructure) be placed under the direct democratic control of workers and communities. We cannot bypass the state, but we cannot expect the state to be a something it is not. “Better” candidates, as Nicholas Jacobs writes, are not enough.