The Return of Class Politics

Across the populist-progressive left, a new political language has been struggling into view. From Bernie Sanders railing against oligarchy, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reframing politics around working people rather than donors, to Zohran Mamdani insisting on the material realities of rent, transit, wages, and public goods, to Shawn Fain reviving a blunt labor-versus-capital rhetoric absent from national politics for decades, an emerging coalition has been attempting to redraw the political map of resistance itself. What increasingly binds these figures together is not simply opposition to Trumpism or corporate excess, but a growing recognition that the old coalition vocabularies no longer adequately describe either the structure of economic power or the broad democratic majority now living under it. Those old songs have just lost their sing.

This matters because the political language that dominated Democratic politics for a generation has exhausted itself. Your grandfather may have been a machinist, your father a company bookkeeper, your mother a middle-management bureaucrat; you are a degreed Uber driver and contract remote content creator for hire.  The managerial liberalism that came to define the party after the neoliberal turn proved highly competent at administering markets, calibrating demographic messaging, and managing institutional decline while steadily losing the ability to explain why ordinary people should continue to trust the order it governed. The main stage might be on fire at the Panopticon Festival but the artisanal wagyu dumplings will be served on time nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the old symbolic image of the “working class” — industrial, male, white, blue collar — ceased long ago to describe the actual terrain of economic vulnerability in contemporary America. Today, precarity cuts across culture-war identities and professional categories alike. The indebted software engineer, the adjunct professor, the warehouse worker, the nurse, the Dasher delivery driver, the rural mechanic, the home health aide, and the owner of the local hardware store increasingly confront different versions of the same narrowing horizon: rising costs, declining security, hollowed-out public institutions, and an economy in which staggering concentrations of wealth coexist with a broad and growing sense that ordinary people work harder each year merely to tread water.

An Expansive Redefinition: Graham Platner

It is in this context that Graham Platner offered what may be the clearest articulation yet of the politics this emerging coalition has been reaching toward. “You are working class if you work and you make your money from work and wages,” Platner recently argued in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, before explaining why such an expansive definition has become necessary. Wealth disparity, he contends, has become so extreme that there are now people “sitting on so much money they do not work, they make money off their wealth.” And so, Platner argues, “you need to have an expansive definition of working class when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country.”

This is more than a semantic adjustment. An expansive conception strips “working class” of its decades of narrowing cultural baggage and restores it to its proper structural meaning—not who we are but how we live (or how we cope). The working class is not a subculture. It is not an aesthetic. Nor is it reducible to industrial labor, educational credentials, or whether one punches a clock rather than owns a struggling small business. It is the broad majority whose lives depend on work, wages, and the institutions that stand between ordinary people and the concentrated power of wealth. “If the hospital closes and that impacts you,” Platner observed, “you’re probably a working class person.” In one sentence, he shifts the political question from cultural identity to material vulnerability, from lifestyle signaling to political economy. And in doing so, he may also have supplied the missing tent pole for a democratic coalition broad enough to govern, substantive enough to deserve to govern, and disciplined enough to resist recapture by the same managerial and corporate order whose failures produced the present crisis in the first place.

“Working Class” and Old Baggage

The tragedy of late twentieth-century class politics was not that class ceased to matter. It was that “working class” gradually stopped functioning as a broad structural category and hardened instead into a culturally specific identity. A term that once pointed toward a democratic majority organized around labor and material interests increasingly evoked a narrowing social archetype: industrial, blue collar, non-college educated, implicitly white, culturally traditional, heroically sweat-stained and frozen in amber somewhere around 1978. That archetype reflected a real and historically important segment of the old New Deal coalition. But over time it ceased to describe the actual structure of economic vulnerability in American life while continuing to dominate the symbolic imagination of class politics itself.

The consequences were politically disastrous. As deindustrialization, financialization, debt expansion, and neoliberal restructuring spread insecurity far beyond the factory floor, millions of Americans whose lives depended entirely on work no longer heard themselves addressed by the rhetoric of “working class politics” at all. The teacher crushed by medical debt, the precarious office worker one layoff away from catastrophe, the immigrant entrepreneur operating a family restaurant on collapsing margins, the graduate drowning in student loans while patching together contract work, the care worker balancing multiple jobs without stability or benefits — all increasingly occupied different positions within the same political economy while lacking a common language through which to recognize themselves as part of a shared democratic majority. At some point, nearly everyone except the asset rich became precarious while the political language of class continued behaving as though only the factory floor counted.

This narrowing did more than weaken coalition politics. It made the language of class increasingly available for capture by reactionary vandals. Once “working class” ceased naming a broad relationship to labor and capital, it became easier for the right to recast it as the identity of a culturally aggrieved subgroup standing resentfully against pluralism, urbanism, higher education, feminism, immigration, and social change itself. A term once capable of organizing democratic majorities against concentrated wealth became increasingly detached from political economy altogether and repurposed as a culture-war gasoline bomb. At precisely the historical moment when concentrated wealth was tightening its grip over American life, the language once capable of naming that concentration was increasingly redirected toward scorn thy neighbor knife fights among people living under fundamentally similar forms of economic pressure and domination.

This is why an expansive understanding of the working class matters. It does not nostalgically attempt to resurrect an industrial social order that no longer exists. Nor does it reduce class to aesthetic performance, educational credentials, or whether one’s labor happens to involve steel, spreadsheets, or app notifications. What it restores is the possibility of class politics as a genuinely universal democratic language: not the politics of one culturally dominant subgroup, but the politics of the broad majority whose lives are shaped by work, precarity, debt, shrinking horizons, and dependence on institutions increasingly subordinated to concentrated wealth. The neoliberal era universalized working-class conditions while simultaneously destroying the political language capable of recognizing them as such. Recovering that language may prove to be the first precondition for building a coalition capable not merely of resisting authoritarianism, but of governing against the conditions that produced it.

Class-First Politics: An Unsatisfactory Framework

Marginalized groups did not reject class politics because they failed to understand economic power. They rejected the increasingly common implication that their own grievances would remain perpetually secondary to the restoration of someone else’s social order. Too often, appeals to class unity arrived wrapped in nostalgia for a world that had excluded many of the very people now being asked to subordinate their demands in the name of solidarity. The message was rarely stated so bluntly, but it hovered persistently beneath the rhetoric: first restore stable industrial employment, strong unions, and the old social compact; then perhaps the rest of your concerns can be addressed later.

And indeed, much class-first rhetoric of decades past treated racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of domination as distractions from the “real” struggle rather than as forces profoundly shaping how economic insecurity itself was distributed and experienced. For many Americans, “class-first” politics came to sound less like universal democratic struggle than like another contest over whose suffering would be taken seriously and whose would once again be deferred. The old coalition language asked too many people to recognize themselves through a culturally specific archetype that no longer described either their lives or the economy they inhabited.

The expansive understanding of the working class does not answer this objection by promising that every grievance will be addressed equally or that priority-setting will be frictionless. It answers the prior and more corrosive problem: it dissolves the structure in which marginalized groups were positioned as petitioners to a coalition whose core identity they did not share. The broad precariat has always included Black workers, immigrant workers, women workers, care workers, undocumented workers — people who experienced the sharpest edges of economic precarity long before precarity became a universal condition. An expansive working-class politics does not invite these groups in from outside. It recognizes that they were never outside. They are not constituencies to be managed or represented. They are co-authors of the agenda, alongside every other person whose life depends on labor rather than accumulated wealth. That is a genuinely different political relationship — not a guarantee of frictionless solidarity, but a less hierarchical and less missionary environment in which the hard work of building shared priorities can at least begin on more honest ground.

New Economy, Lowered Horizons

The economy that produced the old class categories has disappeared, yet they linger. America has not become classless under neoliberalism. Working-class conditions are now spread outward across nearly the entire society while the political language capable of naming those conditions remains stubbornly obscured. The old mythology survives alongside the old imagery: the belief that precarity belongs to somebody else, that instability marks personal failure rather than structural reality. That failure is the price of flaw. That professionalism can still guarantee security, that education will still reliably purchase upward mobility, that hard work, diligently undertaken and skillfully performed still produces a durable footing in American life. That virtue is merit. That merit determines reward. And wealth proves all. Some of this has never been true. Increasingly, none of it is. Not even the parts we want to be.

Professional status no longer guarantees stability. Credentialing no longer guarantees upward mobility. Entire sectors of Americans raised to believe themselves safely outside class politics increasingly experience life as a prolonged negotiation with insecurity: layoffs arriving without warning, healthcare costs outpacing salaries, housing markets drifting into fantasy, retirement transformed from social expectation into speculative gamble, permanent connectivity dissolving the boundary between labor and life itself. Even many materially comfortable people increasingly experience prosperity less as durable security than as a temporary condition vulnerable to sudden reversal.

The side hustles. The permanent contingency masquerading as flexibility. The inability to plan more than a few years ahead without anxiety immediately swamping calculation. The strange experience of doing everything supposedly required for stability — earning credentials, remaining adaptable, staying “competitive,” working constantly — only to discover that the reward for successfully navigating one stage of insecurity is often merely the opportunity to continue navigating the next one. Entire generations have been taught to experience declining expectations as maturity itself.

Meanwhile, the people most insulated from these conditions increasingly derive their power not from labor at all, but from ownership: appreciating assets, inherited wealth, speculative finance, monopolized platforms, private equity extraction, and financial instruments detached almost entirely from the material realities governing ordinary life. We are dominated if not ruled outright by a class of rentier billionaires. This divide now cuts more cleanly through American society than many of the older cultural distinctions still dominating political discourse. The owner class understands perfectly well that class still exists. It is everyone else who has been encouraged to stop noticing.

The decaying neoliberal order continues to benefit spectacularly from this fragmentation. A population increasingly united by precarity, having learned to understand itself instead through demographic silos, professional identities, consumer branding, and mutually suspicious grievance categories, remains without a shared language through which to collectively challenge wealth that concentrates upward at historic and accelerating speed while coalition politics remains narrowed into the same old managerial balancing act: calibrated representation, procedural competence, symbolic inclusion, and periodic anti-Republican emergency mobilization, all while the underlying structure of concentrated economic power remains carefully insulated from democratic accountability. The old coalition can only administer decline. It cannot any longer muster resistance against it. Now, even when resistance matters fatefully.

And yet the broad majority of Americans increasingly live under the same political economy whether they recognize it or not. They work longer hours into more uncertain futures while wealth concentrates upward at levels unseen for generations. They navigate institutional erosion while being told the economy has never been stronger. They experience insecurity individually while living through conditions that are plainly collective. The culture war remains real. Difference remains real. But beneath those divisions, millions of Americans increasingly confront the same narrowing horizon: rising costs, declining security, shrinking public goods, permanent economic anxiety, and the growing recognition that the old promises no longer reliably function.

Sooner or later, a political language capable of naming this reality was going to reemerge. The only real question was whether it would be captured primarily by authoritarian resentment or democratic solidarity.

The New Coalition: Implications for Democratic Economic Populism

Once the working class is understood not as a culturally specific identity but as the broad majority of people whose lives depend on labor rather than accumulated wealth, the implications ripple outward quickly. The political map changes. The adversaries become clearer. The coalition stops looking like a fragile alliance of competing grievance constituencies and starts looking like something far more dangerous to the existing order: a democratic majority with shared material interests.

This is why the emerging language of “working people” matters so much. Not because it is semantically gentler than “working class,” but because it more accurately describes the world as it actually exists. The old coalition vocabularies sorted Americans into increasingly narrow demographic and cultural categories while material life grew harsher across nearly all of them. An expansive understanding of the working class cuts across those divisions not by pretending they are unreal, but by recognizing that the broad majority of people increasingly confront the same basic conditions: rising costs, permanent insecurity, shrinking public goods, institutional decay, and an economy increasingly governed by people who make money from ownership while everyone else works harder merely to remain afloat.

This changes what political language can do. “Normalcy” no longer inspires because too many people experienced the old normal as exhaustion, precarity, and managed decline. “Restore democracy” remains necessary but incomplete because democracy that cannot materially improve ordinary life eventually loses legitimacy no matter how many procedural norms it successfully defends. Even “abundance,” for all its rhetorical energy, risks collapsing back into managerial liberalism if abundance remains detached from questions of power, ownership, labor, and democratic accountability. Abundance for whom? Produced by whom? Controlled by whom? Shared how? An economy can produce astonishing abundance while still leaving ordinary people unable to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, or time itself.

What begins emerging instead is a politics organized less around administering scarcity than around investing in human beings and the worlds they inhabit together. This is one of the most important shifts in the entire framework. The exhausted liberal language of “helping people in need” too often carries the scent of managed charity: temporary assistance delivered downward from institutions that otherwise leave the underlying structure of life untouched. But investing in lifting people up points toward something much larger and more democratic. It asks what ordinary people might build, create, repair, invent, care for, and contribute if they were no longer trapped in permanent economic contingency. It imagines government not merely as a mechanism for mitigating suffering, but as an instrument through which a democratic society deliberately expands the capacity of ordinary people to flourish.

That orientation changes coalition politics fundamentally. A coalition held together primarily by fear of authoritarianism remains permanently defensive and vulnerable to exhaustion. A coalition organized around materially improving life for everyone who works for a living can become self-reinforcing because governance itself begins generating democratic legitimacy. Affordable housing is not merely a policy plank. It is the difference between permanent transience and the ability to build a life rooted in place. Universal healthcare is not merely social spending. It is freedom from the constant fear that illness will become financial ruin. Strong labor protections are not abstractions. They are the difference between bargaining and pleading. Public transportation, childcare, wages, retirement security, anti-monopoly enforcement, public education, functioning infrastructure — these are not isolated technocratic fixes. They are the material architecture of a livable democratic society.

And this is precisely why the decaying neoliberal order struggles so desperately to contain politics within the language of procedure, branding, and symbolic management. Once people begin recognizing themselves as participants in a shared political economy rather than as isolated demographic fragments, different questions emerge almost immediately. Why is so much wealth flowing upward while ordinary life becomes steadily more expensive and unstable? Why are public institutions allowed to decay while private fortunes swell to monarchical proportions? Why are millions of people working harder than ever while feeling less secure each year? Why does every social problem somehow arrive accompanied by another lecture about inevitability, market discipline, or fiscal restraint? The moment these questions become politically central, the old managerial vocabulary begins collapsing under the weight of its own evasions.

This is also why democratic economic populism — awkward phrase though it may be — cannot merely be understood as a campaign strategy or messaging adjustment. It represents an attempt to rebuild the material foundations of democratic legitimacy itself. A society dominated by rentier billionaires while broad majorities drift through increasingly precarious lives cannot indefinitely sustain democratic stability through proceduralism alone. Eventually people demand either democratic solidarity or authoritarian vengeance. Those are the real poles now emerging beneath the noise of contemporary politics.

The choice, then, is not between class politics and coalition politics. The choice is whether coalition politics will finally become materially coherent enough to govern against concentrated wealth rather than merely manage the social consequences of its continued rule. The broadest and most durable democratic coalition available in contemporary America is not waiting to be invented from scratch. It already exists in fragmented form all around us. It is composed of the overwhelming majority of people whose lives depend on work, whose futures remain vulnerable to forces they do not meaningfully control, and whose aspirations extend beyond merely surviving the next round of decline. The task now is to give that majority a political language capable of recognizing itself.

A Governing Majority of Everyone Who Works for a Living

The fight now unfolding inside Democratic coalition politics is not ultimately a fight over whether there should be a “big tent.” Of course there must be a coalition. In a country this large, diverse, unequal, fragmented, and politically exhausted, there was never going to be any other path back toward democratic legitimacy except through coalition politics. The real struggle is over what kind of coalition can actually govern a society organized around this level of unspeakably concentrated wealth without collapsing into permanent crisis management, procedural exhaustion, and managed decline.

For years now, the party’s consultant class, donor networks, institutional caretakers, and resistance centrists have insisted that the path forward lies in defending the “big tent” against the supposed dangers of ideological purity. But too often this has functioned less as an argument for democratic breadth than as a warning against allowing the coalition’s center of gravity to move too far toward the material interests of ordinary people. Fiscal hawks, donor comfort, managerial moderation, and carefully calibrated symbolic inclusion remain perpetually welcome inside the tent. But any politics that too directly challenges concentrated wealth, or too explicitly centers the lives of working people, is immediately treated as destabilizing, divisive, unrealistic, impolite, or electorally dangerous.

And yet the old arrangement is visibly failing in real time. The coalition assembled around procedural anti-authoritarianism, institutional defense, and opposition to Republican extremism, predictably left the floor open for anything that offered recognition of a state of fear, anger, isolation. This is where nationalism, nativism, authoritarianism, a politics of extreme control always rushes to fill the space. Obviously resistance to this rising of the authoritarian menace remains necessary. But necessity is not the same thing as vitality. A coalition held together primarily by fear eventually exhausts itself if it cannot also offer people a materially believable future. Democracy cannot survive indefinitely as a moral lecture delivered to people whose lives grow steadily more precarious while wealth concentrates upward into fewer and fewer hands. Sooner or later, people demand not merely protection from catastrophe, but a reason to believe society can still be organized around human flourishing rather than permanent insecurity.

This is why the return of class language matters so profoundly. For decades, Americans were encouraged to speak about nearly every form of power except economic power. We learned to sort ourselves endlessly by lifestyle, education, geography, consumption habits, professional identity, and culture-war affiliation while class itself , always a prically subject for Americans to talk about, became almost explicitly verboten in respectable political discourse, treated like some embarrassing relative at the family reunion who had perhaps spent too much time at the punchbowl and was no longer fit for polite company. Meanwhile, wealth concentrated upward at staggering speed while broad sectors of American life became more expensive, more unstable, more exhausting, and more atomized for nearly everyone dependent on work to live. That silence was never going to hold forever.

And now, at last, the language is returning. Not the old narrowed caricature of “working class” politics, frozen nostalgically around one cultural archetype, but something larger, broader, and far more democratic: the recognition that the overwhelming majority of Americans increasingly share a common material interest in building a society organized around the needs of human beings rather than the appetites of concentrated capital. Not because all Americans are culturally identical. Not because racism, sexism, xenophobia, or other forms of domination magically disappear beneath economic analysis. But because the broad majority of people increasingly confront the same narrowing horizon while living under an economic order dominated by a class of rentier billionaires and institutional priorities fundamentally detached from ordinary life.

The answer to a fragile coalition is not a smaller tent. It is a sturdier tent pole.

And a politics centered on the broad majority of people who work for a living is not a threat to coalition politics. It is the only plausible foundation upon which a truly durable democratic coalition can now be built. Not a coalition organized merely to administer decline more competently. Not a coalition assembled only to preserve procedural norms while ordinary life deteriorates underneath them. But a coalition ambitious enough to invest in lifting people up, to rebuild public life, to make democratic institutions materially worthy of public trust again, and to fight openly for a society in which ordinary people can build stable, meaningful, fully human lives.

The coalition capable of doing this does not need to be invented from scratch. It already exists in fragmented form all around us. It is the teacher drowning in medical debt, the warehouse worker monitored by algorithm, the exhausted nurse, the indebted graduate, the precarious office worker, the family business owner crushed by healthcare costs and rent, the rideshare driver piecing together survival one shift at a time, the software engineer quietly terrified of the next layoff, the home health aide, the mechanic, the contractor, the adjunct professor, the parent staring at daycare costs in disbelief, the young couple unable to imagine affording a home, the older worker realizing retirement has become a market gamble instead of a social guarantee. It is, increasingly, nearly everyone whose life depends on work.

The broad majority is already here. It always has been. The task now is encouraging it to recognize itself.