Why Workers Deserted a Neoliberal Democratic Party

Herewith, a union leader’s suggestions on why they left and how to win them back.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON DECEMBER 9, 2024
 
When much of America’s working class is downwardly mobile, and when 40 years of neoliberal policies have only made it harder for those workers to amass the power they’d need to better their lot, is it any surprise that those workers vote for a strongman who vows to circumvent the government that’s failed them and champion their interests through brute force?
 
That was the starting point of the analysis that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten laid out in an address last week to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. And that was the starting point of the challenge that Weingarten posed to American liberals: Either empower American workers or face the prospect not just of the coming Trump second term, but of subsequent MAGA-esque regimes.
 
Weingarten’s speech stands as the clearest description and prescription that a labor leader has offered to the broad liberal community in the wake of Trump’s victory. It is, of course, filtered through the lens of a teachers union leader, but her proposals also address issues that resonate well beyond the classroom.
 
She begins, as any serious liberal must, with the economic plight of key segments of working-class America—and not only with their current struggles to afford food and housing. “Men with [no more than] a high school degree,” she said, “make 22 percent less than they did 45 years ago.” Is it any wonder, she continued, that “the party of working people lost working people” in November’s presidential election.
 
The immediate way to begin winning those workers back, she posited, will come “if Trump does the bidding of Big Tech, Big Oil and the billionaires who bankrolled his campaign” to betray those “who voted for him seeking lower costs and a better living standard.” To do that successfully, though, means that “Americans who care about our democracy have to recognize the needs of, and respect the agency of, low-income and middle-class Americans. This means breaking with decades of neoliberal, trickle-down economic policies.”
 
To that end, Weingarten called not only for legislation like the PRO Act, which would remove many of the hurdles that keep workers from joining or forming unions. She also called for making schools a place that enables working-class kids who choose not to go to college to access the skills that will enable them to live successful working-class lives.
 
“High school must be more than college prep,” she said. “Every student deserves opportunity, whether they are immediately college-bound, eventually college-bound, or among the more than 60 percent of high school graduates who don’t go to college. Whether the next stop is a university, a microchip fabrication plant or a small business, young people need to be adept in four skill sets: critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience and relationships.”
 
“The high school experience must be transformed,” she continued, to include “career and technical education [CTE] … in everything from healthcare to advanced manufacturing to automotive repair.” Weingarten cited programs in which her union had linked up high schools that offer such courses with employers: “Here in New York, we’re working with Micron Technology, a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, to train middle school and high school students for high-tech careers. And with Microsoft, we are helping educators from communities as varied as New York City; Wichita, Kansas; and San Antonio, building students’ artificial intelligence literacy.”
 
“These experiences,” she concluded, should be the norm.” But, she added, “all of this takes resources, which is why Trump doubling down on his pledge to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and expand school vouchers is dead wrong.”
 
Weingarten didn’t specifically address issues of cultural leftism and identitarian politics, though she did affirm that the AFT’s free book program, which has given away ten million new books to children, includes books with “characters who, kids exclaim, ‘look like me,’” and that the union is devoted to defending the civil rights of all students. But the larger point she made was that absent the kind of working-class advocacy and engagement that she laid out, liberals would likely fall short of re-engaging and winning support from working-class Americans.
 
To that end, she noted that her union was not only endeavoring to make schools more working-class friendly, but also to increase literacy rates. No working class can be empowered, she made clear, in the absence of widespread literacy and widespread unions. Coming from a teachers union president, of course, that’s a truism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also very true.
 
That turned her to the vexing issue—and not just in the U.S.—of angry and alienated young men. “Nearly 90 percent of Americans under age 30 support unions—a group that swung toward Trump in this year’s election,” she noted. “Yet only 1 in 10 workers in America is in a union … No wonder so many working people feel hopeless. Feelings of loneliness, hopelessness and lack of agency are especially acute for young men.”
 
To those of us who believe that addressing that lack of agency isn’t solved by freeing those young men from the norms of the cultural elites, Weingarten’s diagnosis and cure appear on the mark, and emblematic of the labor movement at its best. “The downward mobility and anxiety facing working people today,” she said, “are the result of a trickle-down economy enabled by our political leaders. Over the last 40 years, a new set of economic rules have prioritized wealth over work, corporate profits over worker pay, shareholder returns over societal value, and the bogus claim that, in a plutocracy, economic benefits somehow will trickle down to the rest of us … It’s no coincidence that as worker power has diminished, wealth has been consolidated at the top, inequality has grown and public confidence in democracy has weakened.”
 
Saving democracy from the appeal that would-be, scapegoating tin-pots exert over angry young men requires something well beyond cultural readjustments. It requires genuine worker empowerment and a level of economic security that is beyond the grasp of many—make that “most”—American workers. That’s why unions are indispensable in the fight not just to win the working class’s political support, but to preserve and strengthen American democracy.