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Democrats are worrying about how badly they do with the working class. Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

Another way is to look at the newest information about the working-class itself, which shows just how badly they are doing. 

That is bitter food for thought for Democrats because Democrats lack the capacity to deal with these sad facts.

How are working class people doing? Here is the best and latest information. It’s based on the extraordinary work by economist Raj Chetty, his colleagues at and

They show why Dems have trouble with people who have troubles.

White working-class lives, especially white men from low-income backgrounds, have diminished as never before. Their lives, as Reeves puts it, have “cratered.”

Young Black Americans raised in lower-income families are more likely than similar whites to have a job.

The gap between the bottom and the top has gotten a little smaller among Black people. 

Among whites, though, it’s become bigger. Intergenerational mobility (moving on up, moving on down) has gotten harder.

Key culprits in sustaining this locked-in gap among white people are the very people who now make up the heart of the Democratic Party: well-off progressives.

Democrats don’t think about the working class, white people or social mobility this way.

Democrats have an empathy disparity problem. The conditions and interests of today’s Democratic Party don’t match the conditions and interests of today’s working class. Democrats focus too much on identity politics.

Democrats ignore the enemy within: how upper middle-class liberals stymie the working class.

The Empathy Disparity Problem

The Democratic Party has changed. So . The heart of the working class is no longer blue-collar factory workers making a living wage. Now, it’s people working in the mostly non-union service industry who are making much less than their parents did and can’t afford things that their parents took for granted, like housing.

The Democratic Party is no longer a blue collar-anchored party. Democrats’ heart and soul are what Reeves calls “liberal brahmins.” 

These brahmins are likely to be college-educated, relatively well-off and comfortable with focusing on race, gender and identity politics.

Divergent lives, divergent outlooks. What are distant abstractions for the heart of the new Democratic Party are the front-and-center, bread-and-butter realities of the new, fragile working class.

The Limits Of Identity Politics

Identity politics illustrates these differences. Identity politics looks like this: We all have a basic identity that protects us, deserves to be protected even more and makes us different from other identity groups. Except that when white people join the movement and see themselves in terms of their white identity, they are being racist.

Along with whiteness, class is not part of this identity politics family. 

It’s two different worlds. Identity politics, for all the good things it does, artificially limits ways of seeing the scope and seriousness and stubbornness of the problems that working class people face.

Class, in this framework, is not an identity, diminishing its importance.

Liberal brahmins do very important and mobility-crushing things that earn them that snooty name. 

Since 1978 things have gotten worse. There’s a good chance that young men and women growing up today will be worse off than their parents. 

In his book ,” Reeves shows how the U.S. class system “ruthlessly perpetuates privilege at the top”  through an extremely unfair education system, especially at the college level, as well as a housing market that perpetuates their wealth at the expense of those who cannot afford to enter.

They are key drivers of the birth-to-death inequality that now dominates American society.

These affluent, American Dream hoarders aren’t those super-rich 1-percenters. It takes only about $900,000 to make the super-rich category, which of course is shells of the tiniest peanuts compared to the really big shots who get their names in the paper. 

Rather, the biggest group of brahmins are the much larger number of upper middle class individuals who fall into the top 10%. In Hawaii that means a household income of about $300,000. That’s a tidy sum. I’d take it. But it’s more like Kahala or Kailua than Manhattan skyline or Silicon Valley.

How Much Will This Hurt Democrats In 2024

White working-class voters are a big share of Trump supporters, which makes it even harder for Democrats to narrow the empathy gap. The 2024 election, like every presidential election, is about many things. Mainly for the Democrats it is about beating Donald Trump. 

So, this kind of wonky, data-based concern is likely to remain on the extreme margins.

But I want to say something about post-2024 when, at least in theory, there is a chance that the failures regarding social mobility and economic opportunity will be taken seriously.

Thinking ahead first requires thinking behind. For the past half century at least, governments — no matter which political party had control — have failed the working class. Remember what the data show. 

Since 1978 things have gotten worse. There’s a good chance that young men and women growing up today will be worse off than their parents. 

And there’s a huge chance that the usual solutions that ether Republicans or Democrats rely on won’t work because they haven’t worked before.

As I have tried to show, today’s Democrats lack a frame of reference necessary to confront these realities about the working class.

Democrats should not take the Kool-Aid and assume that if they win the presidency and Congress, they will know just what to do alleviate the problems of the working class.

Bidenomics, tariffs, tax laws, debt relief and bringing companies back to the U.S. have helped some of the people some of the time but nowhere near what’s needed.

One final reminder that this has been a bipartisan failure.

The big picture question is how much or how little a political process can do to alleviate this. That’s for another time.

The small picture, though, is the new strategies based on Chetty’s evidence about the working class.  They are quite different from the usual “-omics.”

These strategies are unconventional enough to be outside the usual frames of reference. They’re a peek into the future challenge that Democrats face.