Working- and middle-class Americans take pride in their work. If Democrats want to win their votes, they need to acknowledge and appeal to that pride, not dismiss or patronize it.
Workers installing plastic conduit for Internet fiber optic cable underground in rural Utah.(Jon G. Fuller / VWPics via AP Images)
While door-knocking for Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2019, I got an earful of a worldview rarely heard in liberal circles: Working-class Americans see hard work as a virtue, and are wary of welfare programs that rob people of the pride that comes from supporting themselves and their families.
I had a long conversation with a white guy in his 60s about Medicaid expansion, which the incumbent Republican governor was trying to roll back. “I think we should cut back on Medicaid,” the man told me. As a small-business owner just over the Obamacare subsidy cutoff, no one was helping him pay for his insurance. Meanwhile, “stoned slackers” got free Medicaid. Perhaps reading my mind, he was quick to add, “And I’m not talking about Black people. I’m talking about my nephew, who I offered a job, but he just wants to play video games all day.”
The man had made his own way and wanted the same for his nephew. Though I didn’t share his opposition to Medicaid, what he said made an impression on this lifelong socialist: His worry that free stuff poses a moral hazard is not unreasonable.
Progressives tend to see welfare aversion as a Pavlovian response to racist dog whistles. The assumption is that white conservatives oppose welfare programs out of racist spite toward the people of color they (wrongly) believe will be the primary beneficiaries. Racial resentment undoubtedly clouds the reasoning of some Americans, but it is not the only source of ambivalence toward welfare.
For ordinary working people, especially rural folks and Latinos, the work ethic is a widely cherished value. If someone can work, they should, because shirking is bad for their families, their communities and themselves. Work not only pays the bills; it is the foundation for a good life. And the disappearance of many blue-collar jobs is something rural voters of all stripes very much want to reverse.
Across the board, working- and middle-class Americans take pride in their work. They want more jobs and better jobs—not welfare—and appreciate having their hard work recognized. An astounding 85 percent of Republican voters think that tight labor markets are a good thing because they put pressure on employers to offer better jobs and higher pay, according to one recent survey.
The value Americans place on good jobs cannot be overstated. According to the Center for Working-Class Politics, majorities of Democratic, independent, and Republican working-class voters favor a federal jobs guarantee. The jobs guarantee is especially popular with rural Republicans, a segment of the electorate Democrats are desperate to make inroads with.
In addition to a jobs guarantee, most working-class Democrats—plus about half of swing voters and a good number of Republicans—want to boost the minimum wage; ballot measures raising it to $15 an hour passed in Florida and Nebraska in 2020 and 2022.
A jobs guarantee and minimum-wage hikes are what economists call “predistribution” policies that spread wealth and opportunity around before the government engages in “redistribution” (collecting taxes and paying out benefits). To put it more colloquially, predistribution is a hand up, and redistribution is a handout.
Working people of all races and ideologies prefer a hand up. As one man said during a November 2021 HIT Strategies Black voter focus group:
Folks don’t actually want handouts. They want a hand up. They want to be able to say “look what I was able to provide for my kids.”
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According to a trio of Princeton and Columbia University economists, non-college-educated voters prefer New Deal–style candidates with predistribution platforms, whereas college graduates favor Clintonian neoliberal candidates who defend redistribution programs but have weak commitments to pro-worker industrial policies.
A 2019 Cato Institute survey found the vast majority of Americans, including welfare recipients, saying that it’s better for government to tackle the root causes of poverty rather than give money to poor people. (Cato is a libertarian think tank, but its content has been rated “reliable” by a reputable media bias ratings company).
This doesn’t mean Americans are cold-hearted. My Kentucky story notwithstanding, strong majorities support Medicaid expansion and oppose cuts to food stamps. At the same time, they favor work requirements for these programs. Compassion coexists alongside a stoic commitment to the virtue of hard work. There is honor in self-reliance, plain and simple.
What the majority of working Americans want are the tools and opportunities they need to make a good life for themselves and their families. The Biden-Harris administration got the memo, and has revived industrial policy and anti-trust enforcement after decades of neglect. But, too often, media personalities and rank-and-file college-educated Democrats disdain labor as the boring province of unskilled, uneducated, and presumptively racist, sexist, white dudes. Sure, we’ll keep them on life support when their factory or mine closes, but that’s about it.
That let-them-eat-food-stamps disdain is grating. Brandon Dennison, founder of Coalfield Development, which we profiled in our last column, explains: “There’s a sense in southern West Virginia and probably other rural places that they—whoever “they” are, probably meaning decision-makers in cities—don’t like us. They just don’t like us. They don’t appreciate what we contribute, and they don’t think we’re very smart, and they just sort of feel we’re a problem to be mitigated. And a lot of liberals propose program after program…. And being promised a new government program deepens that sense of, ‘Well, you’re no longer valuable to our country but at least we’ll give you a little cash so you can feed your family.’ That doesn’t honor a person’s agency.”
Dennison’s perception of rejection and denigration is echoed by blue-collar workers in western Pennsylvania interviewed by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol in their new ethnography, Rust Belt Union Blues. Long on the losing end of deindustrialization, these workers mourn “losing the life they know.” Instead of empathizing with that loss, politicians like Hillary Clinton and popular books like White Rural Rage portray them as the left-behinds of flyover country whose deplorable, revanchist wrongthink imperils democracy.
If Democrats are to reverse the working-class dealignment that has imperiled every election since 2016 (if not earlier), they will have to respect the value working people place on hard work as unequivocally as they do more familiar liberal values like equality and inclusion. They will also have to prioritize workers over corporate profits, and make it clear that they honor workers’ role as providers and engines of the economy. Most of all, they will have to mean it.
Erica EtelsonErica Etelson is a cofounder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.