Renewing the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won white working-class (noncollege) voters but lost white college graduates by two to one. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost white working-class voters by over two to one (67 percent to 31 percent) while winning white college graduates solidly.¹

The self-flattering story Democrats have told themselves is that rising white racism explains the defection of white working-class voters. But that simple story was always undercut by data showing white racism has declined, not increased, in recent decades.² And the fable was further undermined in the 2024 election by the defection of many Hispanic, Asian, and black working-class voters as well. The Democratic advantage among nonwhite working-class voters has declined sharply by 37 points since 2012.³ In 2024, the only net increase for Democrats compared to 2020 was among whites.⁴

The party has sunk so low that it cannot beat the man who infamously inspired his followers to attack the U.S. Capitol, sat by while they created mayhem, and would, once back in office, pardon the attackers. Republicans have had a higher identification rate among voters than Democrats for the last three years, something that hasn’t been true for almost a century.⁵ Only 29 percent of Americans view the Democrats favorably according to CNN, the lowest rate since CNN began asking the question more than thirty years ago.⁶

What went wrong for the Democrats, and what can be done about it? There are many answers to the first question, but fundamentally, much of it boils down to this: at a time when the life prospects of Americans are increasingly shaped by economic class, not skin color or gender, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction and time and time again prioritized racial and gender identity. Restoring the primacy of working-class priorities, on issues of culture as well as economics, provides the central path forward for a Democratic Party that wants to build a durable majority and restore its identity as the party of working people.

Race and class both matter in American society and both need addressing in our public policies. But their relative salience has shifted over time. In the 1930s and 1940s, Democrats could accurately be accused of ignoring, and even perpetuating, racial inequality at a time when shameful and naked racial discrimination flourished. After the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, however, Democrats committed the opposite mistake. As outlined below, studies show that racial gaps have narrowed in a variety of arenas, and class divides have mostly widened. And yet Democrats have doubled down on framing challenges primarily in terms of racial and ethnic identity, rather than economic status.

I’ve seen this phenomenon play out in my own work over three decades—in arenas like affirmative action, housing, and the way Ameri­can history is taught in public schools. You can also see the pattern in a wide variety of other hot-button topics as well, from immigration and crime to student loan forgiveness.

Because the Democrats’ shift toward race and away from class since the 1970s contradicts the way most Americans experience everyday life, the move has been enormously unpopular. In a wide variety of contexts, social science research has found that racial framings reduce a policy’s popularity.⁷ Working-class Americans of all races, including black working-class voters, increasingly experience the world primarily in economic terms.⁸

So why do Democrats engage in this self-defeating behavior? Two factors stand out. The first involves changes in the power of different interest groups within the Democratic Party coalition. Organized labor, with its broad-based concerns about economic inequality, used to dominate. But as union membership began its long decline in the 1960s, labor’s influence fell. Simultaneously, as the racial and ethnic demographics of the country shifted—and the nonwhite population grew from 17 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2024—identity-based interest groups increased their influence within the Democratic Party.⁹ These identity-based groups (for people of color, women, and the LGBT community) often gave priority to their politically active, upper-middle-class membership over those from working-class backgrounds.

The second driving factor has been the rise of highly educated affluent white liberals, often referred to as “the Brahmin Left,” who play an outsized role in Democratic politics. Polls have found wealthy white liberals are to the left of people of color on issues of race.¹⁰ While some are surprised by this result, affluent liberals have a strong self-interest in defining issues of inequality in racial rather than in economic terms. When issues are described in narrow racial terms, they are far less expensive to address and minimize the personal sacrifice required of upper-middle-class white liberals.

The Bobby Kennedy Route

Is there a path out for Democrats? History suggests a compelling example of an avenue that rejects both FDR’s deeply troubling neglect of racial challenges and the modern Left’s obsession with race: the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

I’ve been studying RFK since the mid-1980s, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and watched with dismay as Ronald Reagan dominated the political landscape, in large measure because of his success with “Reagan Democrats,” many of them the kind of blue-collar whites who had gone for Bobby Kennedy in the late 1960s.

RFK was a champion of civil rights and rejected the New Deal’s tolerance of racial discrimination. In the early ’60s, when RFK became attorney general under his brother John F. Kennedy, America was plagued by enormous inequalities of opportunity by race. Discrimination in employment, education, and housing was flagrant. Racial apartheid was a way of life in the American South, and the educational test score gap between black and white students was about twice as large as the gap between rich and poor.¹¹

As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy was the face of the Kennedy administration’s civil rights efforts. He provided crucial support to James Meredith’s effort to desegregate the University of Mississippi and clashed with Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama. Robert Kennedy also led the Kennedy administration’s effort to draft what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he testified on Capitol Hill in support of the legislation on fifteen different occasions. Later, as a senator from New York, RFK strongly supported the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

But Kennedy also recognized that with the passage of civil rights laws delegitimizing racial discrimination, America’s biggest remaining obstacle to equal opportunity would be rooted in class. During his 1968 presidential campaign, RFK told journalist David Halberstam that “it was pointless to talk about the real problem in America being black and white, it was really rich and poor, which was a much more complex subject.”¹²

During Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, black, Hispanic, and Native American voters turned out for him in droves. But what was truly extraordinary was Kennedy’s ability to appeal to the disaffected blue-collar white voters who were increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party over issues like the Vietnam War and urban rioting. RFK—the presidential candidate whom voters identified more closely with civil rights than any of his rivals— nevertheless managed to win support from many working-class white people who had previously voted for segregationist George Wallace in earlier presidential primaries.

How did he do it? In a new report I coauthored with the American Enterprise Institute’s Ruy Teixeira, entitled “Robert Kennedy: Liberal Patriot,” we demonstrate that Kennedy’s class-before-race approach was critical, not only on economic issues but on cultural issues as well. Kennedy spoke to bread-and-butter economic concerns, like fairness in taxation, as most Democrats do today. But he also understood the class dynamics associated with social issues, such as crime, patriotism, and racial preferences.¹³

Crime. Race riots were the central issue in the 1968 campaign in Indiana and other primary states. Kennedy sought to walk a line that was both sensitive to racial injustices, which gave cause to black anger, and also made clear that looting and violence would never be tolerated no matter how legitimate the underlying grievances.

Many white liberals, viewing the issue of crime through the lens of race, declined to embrace the idea of law and order. But as Chris Matthews notes, Kennedy “believed in law and order and didn’t hesitate to employ the phrase.”¹⁴ RFK aide Gerard Doherty recalled, “I said if he was going to win, he has to conduct a campaign for sheriff of Indiana. And he did.”¹⁵

Many liberals said Kennedy’s stance was racist. But RFK, seizing the class dynamic, emphasized what crime did to people in living in high-crime areas. In a speech in Indianapolis in April 1968, Kennedy argued, “The real threat of crime is what it does to ourselves and our communities. No nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its own fear.” He rejected the advice of wealthy white liberals who, reporter Jack Newfield noted, “usually lived in low-crime expensive suburbs or luxury apartment buildings with two doormen and elaborate surveillance systems.”¹⁶

The message got through to voters. At one point during the presidential campaign, Richard Nixon remarked to journalist Theodore White, “Do you know a lot of these people think Bobby is more a law-and-order man than I am!”¹⁷

Patriotism. American patriotism was central to Robert Kennedy’s worldview. His brother’s single most famous sentiment—“ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—was never far from RFK’s thinking. In a December 1967 address to the Citizens Union in New York City, RFK spoke of the central importance of American identity. “All of us, from the wealthiest to the young children I have seen in this country, in this year, bloated by starvation—we all share one precious possession, and that is the name American.”¹⁸

Kennedy became a vocal critic of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s execution of the Vietnam War, but in language likely to resonate with working-class people of all races who disproportionately sent their offspring to Vietnam. Kennedy actively confronted college students who received draft deferments; although the student draft deferments were supported by the public by a 54 percent to 31 percent margin, Kennedy attacked them as unfair.¹⁹ At the University of Notre Dame, Kennedy was booed for saying college draft deferments should be abolished. “You’re getting the unfair advantage while poor people are being drafted,” Kennedy said.²⁰ At Idaho State University, he told students, “What about the boy who simply wants to run a filling station, as opposed to one who wants to go on to college? Why should he have to drop his plans and go?”²¹

RFK’s oldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, recalled that her father “had no sympathy for those who would burn the flag.” She wrote, “One night, a number of us were in the TV room when one of us—it may have been me—expressed sympathy for the flag burners, and my father quickly cut me off. ‘The flag represents our country. We don’t make fun of it. It is sacred. We can disagree with the government but we don’t disrespect our flag.’ He was quite tough about it.”²²

Racial preferences. In the early 1960s, debates began to emerge about a difficult question: what—beyond passage of anti-discriminatory laws—should the United States government do to compensate African Americans for the country’s history of racial oppression? Some argued that black people should receive preferential treatment, at least for a limited time. For example, James Farmer from the Congress on Racial Equality championed a system of racial quotas in employment and organized boycotts of corporations in cities like Philadelphia to pressure companies to agree. Likewise, Whitney Young from the National Urban League called for “a decade of discrimination” in favor of black people.²³

Other civil rights leaders took a very different approach. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the need to address our nation’s egregious history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. But instead of advocating a “Bill of Rights for the Negro,” King suggested a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.” King wrote, “While Negroes form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit. . . . It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.”²⁴ King knew that race-based preferences would split the multiracial coalition he and other progressives were seeking to forge. King wrote, “It is my belief that many white workers whose economic condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his black brother, will find it difficult to accept a ‘Negro Bill of Rights’ which seeks to give special consideration to the Negro in the context of unemployment, joblessness etc. and does not take into sufficient account their plight (that of the white worker).”²⁵

Robert Kennedy’s position was consistent with King’s, rather than Young’s or Farmer’s. He believed in nondiscrimination across the board. He spoke of a “special obligation” owed to black Americans in light of American history, but he thought racially inclusive social mo­bility programs were the right answer. In 1963, for example, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, RFK rejected directives issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requiring that if a black applicant ranked among the top three candidates for a job, any decision not to select them had to be explained in writing. Kennedy replied, “I don’t think that they are wise regulations.”²⁶

Likewise, when, as attorney general, Kennedy saw there was a dearth of black lawyers at the Justice Department, he wanted to address the issue in a colorblind fashion. The affirmative action program he advocated was limited to improving outreach to law schools, not creating a lower standard. RFK wrote to law schools officials, “We’re not seeking to give Negroes preferences. But we’re not getting any applications, and we want these young people to know that they will not be excluded because of their race.”²⁷ When protestors gathered outside the Justice Department complaining about a lack of racial diversity, RFK responded, “Individuals will be hired according to their ability, not their color.”²⁸

Race and Class Since the 1960s

RFK’s insights about the rising significance of class over race in the daily lives of Americans were prescient. To begin with, racial tolerance has grown dramatically since the 1960s. In 1967, 27 percent of whites thought black and white people should go to separate schools, a figure that dropped to 4 percent by 1995, after which point the question stopped being asked. In 1967, about half (48 percent) of whites said they would not vote for a “generally well qualified” black candidate, a figure that declined to 5 percent by 1997. In 1968, a solid majority (56 percent) said there should be laws against intermarriage between black and white people, a figure that dropped to 10 percent by 2002. Fully 73 percent of whites in 1972 said they disapproved of interracial marriage: by 2011, the number had plummeted to 14 percent.²⁹ While some might discount the veracity of what white people tell pollsters, actual interracial marriage rates have also increased by more than five times since RFK’s day—from 3 percent of marriages in 1967 to 17 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.³⁰

Likewise, America has made large positive strides toward gender equality since RFK’s time. In the realm of education, for example, many Ivy League colleges still excluded women in 1968.³¹ Today, that era is over, and women ages 25–34 outpace men in bachelor’s degree attainment by 10 percentage points.³²

By contrast, inequalities by economic status have grown sharply since 1968.³³ The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, was at an all-time low in the United States in 1968. Since then, income inequality has skyrocketed.³⁴ America’s three wealthiest individuals now have more in assets than the bottom half of the country.³⁵ Working-class Americans of all races have been battered by globalization and technological change.³⁶ America has become, in the words of Matthew Des­mond, “one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world.” Our concentrations of wealth and poverty are unrivaled among the thirty-eight most developed countries.³⁷ Only 36 percent of Americans still believe the American dream is possible.³⁸

A big part of the change is the dramatic decline in organized labor since 1968. The United States has moved from a union density of nearly 35 percent in the mid-1950s, to 27 percent when RFK ran for president, to less than 10 percent today.³⁹ As David Madland of the Center for American Progress has vividly demonstrated, the decline in the share of union membership rates, in turn, coincides almost perfectly with the decline in the share of income going to the American middle class.⁴⁰ As union membership declined, economic inequality increased.⁴¹

Taking the two trends together, rising racial tolerance and declining economic equality, Robert Putnam observed in 2015 that “The power of race, class, and gender to shape life chances in America has been substantially reconfigured.”⁴² More recent research confirms the trend. A 2024 study by Raj Chetty found that, in recent years, the economic mobility gap by race has been closing and the class gap has increased.⁴³

Logically, given the shifting salience of race and class to the life prospects of Americans, one might have expected Democrats to embrace the Bobby Kennedy pathway—a multiracial working-class coalition that writer Michael Lind has called “solidarity liberalism.” That has not happened. To the contrary, Democrats have increasingly embraced what Lind calls “charity liberalism,” which prioritizes race over class and relies on the noblesse oblige of affluent whites to demonstrate beneficence toward nonwhite Americans.⁴⁴

As discussed below, the race lens is applied in a variety of fields. I will focus on three areas I have studied—affirmative action, housing, and patriotism in education. But I will also discuss issues, such as crime, immigration, and student loan forgiveness, where the race-before-class lens shows up as well.

Affirmative Action and DEI

The issue of racial preferences and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs puts the race-versus-class question in very stark terms. In May 2007, reporter George Stephanopoulos asked presidential candidate Barack Obama a provocative question: “You’ve been a strong supporter of affirmative action. . . . Why should your daughters when they go to college get affirmative action?” Obama replied, “I think that my daughters should be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.” Then, he went further, “I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”

Obama’s answer recognized that class trumped race in defining educational opportunity. Indeed, while fifty years earlier, the average gap in standardized test scores between black and white students used to be about twice as large as the gap between rich and poor students, more recently the income gap (between those in the ninetieth percentile of income and the tenth percentile) has been about twice as large as the gap in test scores between white and black students.⁴⁵

As I note in my new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges (2025), I was elated by Obama’s comments at the time, having been a vocal advocate for affirmative action based on class rather than race for the previous decade or so. After the 2008 election, I approached a friend, Cassandra Butts, who was a close adviser to Obama and asked how I could help the administration advance the idea. She investigated and reported back the stark reality: there was absolutely no way the president-elect was going to go against organized interests in the Democratic Party on the issue of racial preferences.⁴⁶

The same dynamic played out more than a decade earlier during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Following the 1994 midterm elections, the House of Representatives was delivered to Republicans for the first time in forty years. Clinton, who had grown up in a working-class family, said he was exploring the idea of shifting from race-based to economic-based affirmative action. After I wrote a cover story in the New Republic about the idea, Joel Klein, a Clinton aide and future chancellor of New York City schools, immediately contacted me to find out more. It was a false start, though. Jesse Jackson threatened to run for president in 1996 if Clinton didn’t “stand firm” on affirmative action, and Clinton quickly backed down.

Later, I took to heart Butts’s point that Democrats would move toward class-based affirmative action only if the courts forced them to. I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admis­sions v. Harvard contesting the university’s use of race in admissions. I saw up close the ways in which racial preferences were used to advance the interests of the most economically advantaged black students—and, indirectly, rich white students. At Harvard, almost three quarters of the black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically advantaged fifth of the black and Hispanic populations nationally. And racial preferences also helped rich whites by providing cover for a regime of legacy preferences.

In fact, I had discovered the symbiotic relationship between legacy preferences and racial preferences during the Obama administration. I edited a book on legacy preferences called Affirmative Action for the Rich (2010) and tried to get civil rights groups to join a campaign to change those policies. I met with civil rights leaders to discuss how legacy preferences disproportionately hurt black and Hispanic students. They conceded the point but declined to get involved because eliminating blatant class discrimination in the form of legacy preferences might undermine racial preferences.

Corporate America also prioritized racial liberalism over economic liberalism. The Starbucks coffee chain was emblematic. After the murder of George Floyd, officials announced their virtue on issues of race by saying they would tie executive compensation to meeting the goal of a “30% bipoc work-force,” even while fiercely resisting efforts of their employees—bipoc or white—to unionize.

The Biden-Harris team had a much more liberal record on labor unions than Starbucks, but on the issue of affirmative action, the administration prioritized the interests of upper-middle-class black and Hispanic families over working Americans of all races. Large class cleavages had long existed within the black community. Decades earlier, Michael Lind recognized that working-class black people view issues of race and class very differently than more advantaged black people. In one poll he cited, 60 percent of middle-class black people identified more closely by their race than their class—a worldview civil rights groups embraced—while only 5 percent of poor and working-class black people felt the same way.⁴⁷ But on racial preferences, Biden and Harris sided with affluent minorities. Before the Supreme Court, the administration provided a full-throated defense of Harvard’s system of admissions—which resulted in a student body that was majority minority but also had twenty-two times as many rich students as poor students.

Biden and Harris also encouraged corporate American to embrace DEI trainings, even though they typically constituted what Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle calls “trickle-down social justice.” She asks, “If you’re a Black food-service worker living in a high-crime neighborhood . . . how much did you benefit from such programs?”⁴⁸

Housing Policy

I’ve seen the same alliance of wealthy whites and civil rights groups representing upper-middle-class black people appear in housing policy as well. In 2023, I published a book entitled Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, in which I described the shifting roles of race and class in housing.

Throughout much of American history, race was the leading cause of exclusion. In the early twentieth century, racial zoning laws prevented black people from buying in predominantly white neighborhoods. The biggest impact was on upper-middle-class black homebuyers who had the wherewithal to purchase homes in white neighborhoods.

That shifted over time, though, as the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning laws in 1917 and communities adopted economic zoning, which banned duplexes, triplexes, and apartment buildings, and imposed minimum lot sizes. Passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 also enabled middle-class black people to move to suburbs.

Economic zoning, however, continues to impact working-class people of all races and sometimes now works within racial groups: it is used by wealthy whites in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to exclude low-income whites; and it is used by wealthy black people in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to exclude less affluent blacks. The overall result is declining racial segregation and increasing class segregation. Since 1970, racial residential segregation has declined 30 percent while class segrega­tion has doubled.⁴⁹

Yet many Democrats and interest groups still frame the issue of housing primarily in terms of race. Representative Maxine Waters, for example, has proposed providing $25,000 in down payment assistance to first generation homebuyers but excludes low-income white people from the program. Likewise, some civil rights leaders objected when I proposed creating an Economic Fair Housing Act as a supplement to the Fair Housing Act to make it illegal for municipalities to erect unjustified zoning laws that discriminate against working people. Black and Hispanic working-class Americans would be key beneficiaries of an Economic Fair Housing Act, but some civil rights groups insisted that fair housing laws must stay tightly focused on identity.

The racial framing advances the interests of wealthy whites. If discrimination is thought of in racial terms, many upper-middle-class white liberals can correctly claim that they wouldn’t dream of excluding a black lawyer or doctor from living in the neighborhood. Indeed, they would celebrate that diversity in their neighborhoods. Yet exclusionary zoning laws effectively bar working people of all races. As political scientist Omar Wasow noted, “There are people in the town of Princeton who will have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign saying ‘We Love Our Muslim neighbors’ but oppose changing zoning policies that say you have to have an acre and a half per home.” He continued: “That means, ‘We love our Muslim neighbors, as long as they’re millionaires.”⁵⁰

Exclusionary zoning, which is most pronounced in wealthy and politically liberal parts of America, also limits the overall supply of housing in a region and artificially drives up housing prices, inflicting real harm on working Americans. Nevertheless, some housing advocates question whether Democrats should stand up to exclusion through an Economic Fair Housing Act given the party’s increasing reliance on the votes of affluent white liberals living in exclusionary suburbs.⁵¹ Others are pushing back on this logic. As Ezra Klein notes, “You cannot be the party of working America when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live.”⁵²

Teaching America’s Story in Schools

The conflicting pull of race and class also emerges in a third area of my professional work—the question of how we educate young people about America’s story. RFK offered a powerful way to balance the recognition of racial inequality with a towering sense of patriotism—a sentiment which polls find is felt especially strongly by working Americans. But today, as I outline in a report for the Progressive Policy Institute, “Teaching Students What It Means to Be an American,” many highly educated Democrats have chosen instead to emphasize a deep sense of racial pessimism, which working people of all races tend to reject.⁵³

America’s story has many dark chapters, from slavery to segregation to redlining and the internment of Japanese Americans. The history is troubling enough when told faithfully, but in recent years, writers on the left have often felt the need to exaggerate the nation’s racial sins and tell a distorted story. In 2019, the New York Times published the 1619 Project (in magazine form and later as a book), which falsely claimed that importation of enslaved people rather than the Declaration of Independence represented America’s “true founding,” because 1619 provided “the seed of so much of what has made us unique.” The 1619 Project unleashed one egregious error after another. The project was widely debunked by mainstream historians and by numerous critics. Many on the right called out the exaggerations, but so did liberal outlets such as the Washington Post, and the New York Times itself.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, the 1619 Project was embraced by the highest echelons of liberal culture. Astonishingly, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. And it was endorsed by the Biden administration’s Education Department in 2021, until the Department was forced to back down under political pressure.⁵⁵

The embrace of this widely discredited history that places race (not freedom or democracy) at the center of the American story is emblematic not only of the Left’s overreach on race but also its rejection of working-class sensibilities. Polls reveal a patriotism gap between progressive elites and working Americans of all races. While 69 percent of working-class voters said that America is the greatest country in the world, among progressive activists, only 28 percent agreed.⁵⁶

Racial minorities, who presumably have an acute cognizance of racial injustice, are very likely to express patriotic feelings. Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of black Americans, and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.⁵⁷ RFK forged the right path on this issue—an acknowledgement of America’s sins coupled with an abiding patriotism rooted in the country’s redemption story. Too many Democrats have rejected his synthesis in recent years.

Crime, Immigration, and Student Loan Forgiveness

On many other hot-button political issues in recent years, Democrats have also rejected the Bobby Kennedy pathway and prioritized race over class. While RFK embraced law and order, today, many on the left instead view crime through a racial lens. They have called for reducing or “defunding” the police, releasing shoplifters without bail, and reducing tough sentencing for crime where it has a disparate impact on black offenders.

These Democrats miss RFK’s insights about the negative disparate impact on poor and working-class people who are the primary victims of crime. Polling bears out the wisdom of RFK’s views. In Detroit, a heavily black and working-class city, a 2021 poll found, “Amid a jump in violent crime in this and other cities nationwide, Detroit residents report being much more worried about public safety than about police misconduct. . . . By an overwhelming 9-1, they would feel safer with more cops on the street, not fewer.”⁵⁸

Likewise, a 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that black and Hispanic Democrats—who are far more likely than white Democrats to live in urban areas and belong to the working class—are significantly more likely than white Democrats to favor more police funding in their area.⁵⁹ And a 2023 American Enterprise Institute survey found that non-white working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.⁶⁰

Immigration represents another issue on which many Democrats view the world primarily in terms of race and ethnicity rather than economic terms—putting themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. For many liberal Democrats, illegal immigration is an issue of racial and ethnic justice. They seem to view dark-skinned migrants seeking to enter the country illegally as deserving of special exemptions from the law. When Joe Biden took office, he loosened many rules around illegal immigration, and illegal immigration surged.

This lenient approach also happens to comport with the self-interest of the Brahmin Left, which benefits from an influx of low-wage workers who can provide lawn and day care services at a reduced price. By contrast, many working Americans are strongly opposed to illegal immigration, in part because they see it as an issue of law and order, and partly because they believe large numbers of new workers will hold down working-class wages.⁶¹

The Democratic Party’s focus on student loan forgiveness also exemplifies the priority on race over class. When Democrats justified forgiving hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, they often framed the issue in terms of racial justice. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, for example, argued, “The $1.7 trillion student loan crisis is crushing individuals, families, and our economy, and the weight of this burden is disproportionately borne by women and Black and Latino borrowers.”⁶²

But many working Americans, including those who are black and Hispanic, saw the issue differently. For working-class families whose children did not go to college, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute noted, the disproportionate focus on student loan forgiveness over funding for apprenticeship programs sent “an insulting message: Your government thinks investing in college students has higher social value than investing in your kids.”⁶³

Reviving Solidarity Liberalism

Having hit rock bottom, it is time for Democrats to move beyond charity liberalism and back to the solidarity liberalism of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The path is clear. Democrats should ditch DEI and racial preferences in favor of economic affirmative action.⁶⁴ They should get behind an Economic Fair Housing Act, which would give working people the same rights to sue municipalities whose laws unjustifiably exclude them as racial minorities have to sue cities for racial discrimination.⁶⁵ They should endorse an education policy to teach students a reflective patriotism, which embraces the best of American values while paying attention to progress that still needs to be made.⁶⁶ They should validate the views of working-class Americans by taking tough positions on crime and on border security, and devote as much attention to apprenticeships and community colleges as to four-year colleges.

There is good evidence, coming from the states, that these types of approaches can draw support from a multiracial coalition of working people. Whereas racial preferences in college admissions divide voters by race, Texas’s policy of admitting students from the top 10 percent of every high school to UT Austin fostered a robust political coalition of legislators representing working-class white and working-class black and Hispanic districts.⁶⁷

In the housing arena, in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Texas, working-class voters and their representatives have coalesced across racial lines to end snob zoning in wealthy residential areas. It turns out that working-class white voters, just like working-class black and Hispanic voters, don’t like exclusionary zoning laws that tell teachers, firefighters, lawn care workers, and childcare providers that they are welcome to work, but not to live, in exclusive communities.⁶⁸

Changing the Democratic Party will be difficult. Interests are deeply entrenched, and embracing solidarity liberalism will require fights with powerful interest groups. But that’s what successful Democrats have always done. Bill Clinton distanced himself from Jesse Jackson when he denounced Sister Souljah in his 1992 presidential campaign. Barack Obama distanced himself from Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his anti-American views in the 2008 campaign. Just as the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute worked with local, state, and federal leaders to create the New Democrat movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so today the Democrats must reinvent themselves to restore the confidence of working-class Americans.

Positive signs are emerging. Today, Democrats such as Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Representative Ritchie Torres of New York are pushing back against left-wing interest groups on a variety of issues, from the Middle East to immigration. Maryland Democratic Governor Wes Moore is unabashedly embracing American patriotism through a service year option for young people that Moore likens to his service in the Army, in which people of very different backgrounds worked on a common mission.⁶⁹ Even liberal Democratic California  governor Gavin Newsom recognized that when only 18 percent of Americans want transgender female athletes playing in women’s sports, it is time for Democrats to move to the center on the issue.⁷⁰

On the highly symbolic issue of affirmative action, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down racial preferences in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard has given Democrats a lifeline. Politicians can explain that because such preferences are no longer legal, it is time to get behind economic affirmative action for working-class Americans of all races.

On housing policy, the affordability crisis is beginning to lead Democrats to embrace the “Yes in My Backyard” (yimby) movement, as efforts to legalize more types of housing that were unimaginable a decade ago are now sweeping across major cities and states, from California and Oregon to Montana and Massachusetts.

Likewise, the rising threat of private school vouchers may spur teacher unions and other Democratic Party interest groups to embrace the Bobby Kennedy pathway of liberal patriotic education and national service. Research suggests the voucher movement, which was dormant for decades, has flourished in part because many Americans do not believe public schools are teaching their values. Party interest groups will need to move to the center on patriotism in order to preserve public education for the next generation.

Republican gains among the working class and the daily consequences of losing to Donald Trump could, with some luck, jolt enough Democrats into embracing a solidarity liberalism that can win the confidence of the millions of Americans who lack a college degree. Winning, after all, is the best form of resistance.⁷¹

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 2 (Summer 2025): 181–96.

Notes