My favorite moment in the Kamala Harris campaign was when she gave a lengthy disquisition at Fordham University about how Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance can help the electorate better conceptualize the power of right-wing propaganda in a “post-truth” society. Even if Harris’s Derridean analysis represents the high-water mark of her electoral effort, it is hard to forget when her running mate, Tim Walz, convened a panel of Hannah Arendt scholars and Lacanian psychoanalysts to offer competing examinations of the MAGA mind. These events were true to the pair’s brilliant campaign slogan, “Make America Embrace Public-Reason Liberalism Again.”
If readers slept through the entirety of the previous year and woke only to read the postmortems from which we’ve had no rest since November 5, this is perhaps how they would imagine the Harris campaign. David Axelrod, the former campaign manager for Barack Obama and now a regular contributor on CNN, lamented that Democrats have become the “smarty pants, college-educated party.” The palace intrigue publication Politico wrote that the Democratic “tent is big enough only for the cultural elite.” And a headline from The Hill had it right there in the headline: “Democrats lost because we don’t know how to speak everyday American.”
Warning: I am about to demonstrate my failure to speak “everyday American” by doing something I learned in college. I am going to cite quantitative research to advance a claim.
The organization QRFY commissioned a linguistic study of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, analyzing their campaign rhetoric and debate responses, to determine the complexity of their respective communicative language. The results indicate that Donald Trump routinely speaks at the level of an eight-year-old. Kamala Harris, speaking in the vernacular of the “smarty pants” elite, communicated at the level of a thirteen-year-old.
The anti-elitism consortium will counter that the problem with Democrats is not the use of polysyllabic words, or sentences with subordinate clauses, but that those sentences are too often made up of lib-speak terminology unintelligible to the general public. The elites, we are told, use jargon such as “Latinx” or “cultural appropriation.” There is a teeny-tiny problem with this argument: No one in a position of leadership within the Democratic Party uses these terms — certainly not Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, or any Democratic governor with a national profile. Neither do the vast majority of Democratic senators or congressmen.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy, as well as several pollsters, faulted Harris and Democrats for “neglecting kitchen-table issues.” They would have us believe that instead of talking about the cost of living, health care, and housing, the current vice president spent endless hours lecturing the electorate about intersectional feminism. Except that she didn’t. Throughout her abridged campaign, Harris led with economic issues and policies, including subsidies for first-time home buyers, small-business startups, and those in the “sandwich generation” suffering the burden of caring for an ailing parent. Her “opportunity society” (two polysyllabic words — maybe that was the problem) agenda was the centerpiece of almost all of her major speeches. AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising, concluded in late October that the vast majority of Harris campaign commercials on television were about “the economy.” Conversely, only a small minority of Trump ads focused on the economy. 41 percent were about transgenderism, stoking fear and hatred.
All of the baseless propaganda insisting the United States has not changed since the 1970s (“kitchen-table issues,” “Joe Six Pack,” etc.) does not provide cover for Donald Trump as much as it applies deodorant to a pungent, foul electorate. In the rush to analyze the sacred working class, hardly anyone is willing to consider the possibility that the problem is the working class itself. Many studies show that the American people are more politically divided than at any other point in the country’s history since the Civil War. Despite the intensity and hostility of America’s political culture war, there is a universal, bipartisan devotion to a shared, relatively new, and unnamed ideology: Blue-Collar Populism.
Blue-Collar Populism is the belief that the “working class,” loosely defined as lower- to upper-income earners without college education, and, typically, men who earn their living through manual labor, is the most important constituency in the country. But the ideology does not preach only this — it also insists that this demographic is the most insightful and perceptive. Working-class biases, prejudices, whims, and impulses must be honored, and political campaigns must strive to understand and then cater to them. If the evidence contradicts the working-class consensus, there is something wrong with the evidence. Those who earn their living in the trades, or any other occupation that does not require a bachelor’s degree, are now sacred avatars of Americana. They are the “Real Americans” that Sarah Palin praised during her tenure as John McCain’s running mate in 2008. They are the Americans that Donald Trump promises, rather dubiously, to protect. They represent all that is good, pure, and “authentic.” When CNN sends an intrepid reporter to a diner in small-town Michigan to interview men in blue jeans and baseball caps, CNN is lifting that reporter atop the mount to interview the saints. The journalist is visiting to be enlightened, to learn from “lived experience” precious beyond the wildest dreams of intellectual rigor. Professionals, especially those with degrees from prestigious institutions of learning, are not “part of the real world.” They do not understand “the common man.” When the press speaks of Democrats as the party of “college graduates,” the term is derogatory. It is a stain to wash clean. Blue-Collar Populism, then, is an eccentric American update of Rousseau’s celebration of the “uncorrupted savage,” whose lack of learning and refinement confers nobility.
Consider this episode: On September 18, the Teamsters Union announced that it would not endorse a candidate for president. “Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” Teamsters President Sean M. O’Brien said in an explanation of the unprecedented refusal to endorse. Media coverage was breathless. All of the major newspapers and networks devoted ink and hours to parsing the meaning of the Teamsters statement. Popular podcasts and social-media accounts across the political spectrum clamored to argue that the position of neutrality was a victory for their side. Trump voters asserted that it was good news because the union endorsed Biden in 2020, and Harris supporters found consolation in the Democratic endorsements from many of the Teamsters’ state offices. The Teamsters Union, clearly, is very important.
Merely two days before the Teamsters announced their non-endorsement, the Scientific American published an endorsement of Kamala Harris. The editorial argued that Donald Trump “endangers public health and safety,” while Harris “offers us a way forward lit by rationality and respect for all.”
The mainstream press mostly ignored the Scientific American and gave the statement slim to no coverage, while the alternative media also reacted with a collective shrug. There were exceptions. The Wall Street Journal insisted that the statement was proof positive that Americans should “not trust scientific elites.” This dismissal was complemented in the pages of the Atlantic, wherein appeared a reaction from the otherwise-thoughtful Tom Nichols on how the “Scientific American didn’t need to endorse anybody,” and that doing so will help to “undermine trust in expertise.” Well, whose fault is that?
The then–editor-in-chief of the Scientific American was Laura Helmuth, a former neuroscientist and president of the National Association of Science Writers. Jeanna Bryner, the managing editor, has a master’s degree in biogeochemistry and an impressive oeuvre of published scientific writing. The masthead is made up of reporters and editors with a similar blend of scientific expertise and journalistic credentials.
I confess that I think the staff of Scientific American has a better line on how America should tackle climate change, general environmental policy, and healthcare than truck drivers do. Forget for a moment that the Teamsters is one of the most corrupt organizations in the history of the United States (but permit me to point out that, as recently as March, fourteen Teamster officials in California were suspended on corruption charges). Even if the moral record of the Teamsters were spotless, it would remain absurd that American culture dismisses the counsel of an organization dedicated to fighting climate change and ecological disaster and celebrates the advocacy of an organization contributing to it. The Teamsters versus Scientific American dichotomy broadens to encompass the entire electorate. When the press and many politicians elevate the perspective of blue-collar laborers as oracular, they simultaneously dismiss or ignore doctors, engineers, teachers, and even those whose incomes are rarely greater than tradesmen, such as social workers.
To understand how Blue-Collar Populism and faith in the sanctity of the working class conquered America, one must study both politics and culture. Richard Hofstadter wrote his classic work of social criticism, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in 1963. In it he deftly demonstrates that Americans are an intelligent people, but they overwhelmingly believe that intelligence should only serve a practical purpose with tangible benefits. The plumber uses his intellect to unclog your shower drain. The philosopher sits around reading and speculating all day with no unplugged drains to show for it. Thus philosophy is a dubious, even wasteful enterprise.
Hoftstadter defines anti-intellectualism not as stupidity or ignorance but as, “Resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Anti-intellectualism bitters naturally into hostility — a hostility fostered by the Blue-Collar Populism under which we all live, that same Blue-Collar Populism that Hofstadter forecasted decades ago. It hectors: “Intellectuals are . . . snobbish; and very likely immoral . . . The plain sense of the common man . . . is an altogether adequate substitute for . . . formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools.”
When Hofstadter put pen to paper, Blue-Collar Populism had not yet suffocated eloquence and expertise out of national politics. John F. Kennedy had died the same year the book appeared. Gone was one of the supreme models of culture and sophistication. His intellectual aplomb was an asset in the White House. The same can be said even of Richard Nixon, not exactly known for his intellectual charisma, but nonetheless capable of a poetic speech utterly alien to the political arena of 2024.
For example: “Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries,” thus Nixon opened his first inaugural address. He continued: “This can be such a moment. Forces now are converging that make possible, for the first time, the hope that many of man’s deepest aspirations can at last be realized. The spiraling pace of change allows us to contemplate, within our own lifetime, advances that once would have taken centuries.” In the climax of Nixon’s speech he quoted the poet Archibald MacLeish.
How does the rhetoric compare in 2024? The winning candidate spent this campaign bombinating incoherently about such bizarre subjects as his love of the cinematic villain Hannibal Lecter and the impressive length of Arnold Palmer’s penis. His challenger, Kamala Harris, regularly played to the cheap seats, peppering speeches with stirring calls to action like, “The dude’s gotta go.” Her running mate, the Minnesota governor, rose to the task of appealing to uneducated white men by calling Elon Musk a “dipshit” and J. D. Vance “weird as hell.” Presidential politics have gone from Archibald MacLeish to Beavis and Butthead.
Barack Obama represented the last gasp of the intellect as persuasive power in national politics. His ability to combine the poetic and professorial inspired voters — as Beyonce once said, “Barack Obama makes me want to be smarter.” Those days are gone. National pundits assume that the average person has all the expertise necessary to make prudent and responsible political choices. The average person has his own experience, and he isn’t interested in the acquired knowledge of the experts.
Jim Harrison, the late novelist and poet, defined culture as “the layers of paint applied to human nature.” The conscious application of color involves effort. Under Blue-Collar Populism, effort is also suspect. A bipartisan consensus instructs voters that authenticity is chief among all virtues. Candidates for office must be themselves, because, as we often hear, “no one likes a person who sounds like a politician.”
The problem is that authenticity is impossible to gauge hundreds of miles away while watching on a television screen. I can determine if my wife is behaving authentically, but I have no idea what is authentic to Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom’s personality, character, or preferred method of articulation. Prizing authenticity will inevitably provoke a demand to strip away layers of paint. Taking a heavy-duty scraper to politics and other public expressions of national life means that the lowest common denominator becomes cause for celebration. According to this philosophy, virtues such as patience, nuance, and ambition are transformed into vices. Donald Trump is considered appealing.
Blue-Collar Populism glamorizes thuggishness and demonizes credentialed expertise, professionalism, sophistication. This inversion has real-world ramifications. During the Covid-19 pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and virologists had to compete for the attention and trust of Americans with various representatives of the working class and countless self-anointed social-media public-health specialists. Climate scientists, as the editors of the Scientific American learned, have little sway over the electorate, even as extreme weather events threaten people and property, agricultural patterns change in unprecedented ways, and the Department of Defense predicts that the climate-refugee problem will be among the most severe of the 21st Century. As the planet burns and livable ecology collapses, the average voter demands a candidate who can yuck it up with Joe Rogan.
Meanwhile, the field of education is itself committing suicide. Universities across the country slice and dice humanities, fine-arts, and social-science departments. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 36 percent of Americans have “confidence” in higher education, and a third has “no confidence” in higher-educational institutions at all. Blue-Collar Populism dictates disdain for something as “impractical” as a liberal arts degree. It is now routine to hear pundits, of right and left, decry the “ivory tower” and “managerial class,” juxtaposing professionals who don’t get their hands dirty or understand the “real world” with manual laborers who, by virtue of their occupation, possess nobility and “lived experience” expertise in macro- and microeconomics.
And wholly separate from the danger posed by the growing contempt for expertise, Blue-Collar Populism shifts the authority once given to expertise to the bigotries of the average American. If fact has no currency, if what the layman chooses to believe about vaccines must be honored, why not also honor what the lay man chooses to believe about the dark-skinned immigrant? The road to bigotry as virtue is paved and thick with traffic. The evidence is clear. The bipartisan response to Donald Trump’s transphobic campaign has not been to castigate voters who took ignorance and hatred into the ballot box. Instead, Democrats have panicked that their support for equal rights, economic opportunities, and safety for transgendered men and women was a poor campaign choice. Everyone from reactionaries on Fox News to self-identified center-left pundits, such as Caitlin Flanagan and Bill Maher, agree that harassment of a minority is not the problem, but that vague defense of said minority is a political crisis.
Blue-Collar Populism has managed to sweep the right despite the fact that the incoming administration has no intention to ameliorate conditions for blue-collar workers. Trump and his cronies oppose the expansion of the social-welfare state, an increase to the minimum wage, the enlargement of the influence of unions, and health and safety standards — all of which give low-income workers real power, opportunity, and a higher quality of life. In lieu of actual offerings, the right-wing cultural machine invokes cultural cachet, moral authority, and emotional gratification. It doesn’t matter that the policies will not pay dividends; the workers have been affirmed, and they are sated. Is it elitist to say so?
My working-class hero would have found all of this insane. Nick Bruich, my grandfather, was a veteran of the Second World War and lifelong worker in a limestone quarry. Cutting stone was not easy. He broke his right hand twice, and suffered from an arthritic invasion of his joints throughout his elderly years. Painful and exhausting labor enabled him to provide for his wife and my mother. He carried himself with pride in the knowledge that he left the world better for his loved ones than he had experienced it. Never one for self-pity or bitterness, he was happy and altruistic. He gave a weekly ride to the grocery store to a neighbor with developmental disabilities, slipping him a $20 bill when food stamps failed to cover everything in his cart. He kept company with the lonely, closeted gay man who lived next door, and he arranged for a loosely organized town collection of bottles and cans to benefit the proverbial “village drunk,” another World War II veteran, who wandered the streets in search of bounty for spare dollars and change. He was most generous with his family, doing all he could to ensure that our days were tranquil, loving, and fun. Whether it was pulling into the driveway every Sunday with a box of doughnuts and the newspaper or never failing to show up at the hospital when I was sick or hurt, the gym when I had a basketball game, or my school when I needed a ride, his presence, smile, and spirit acted as a force of nature. His disciplined generosity was part of his mission to die with confidence that his grandson’s professional life was easier and more fulfilling than his had been.
The conviction that his occupation endowed him with more virtue or wisdom than anybody else would have struck him as narcissistic, ignorant, and downright bizarre. The notion that he should dismiss well-earned expertise, because he was, by some standard, closer to the soul of America, would have been equally alien to him. He admired historians and journalists and supported political leaders, like John F. Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton, who demonstrated learnedness and spoke with eloquence. It is belittling to his memory to insist that a man like him could not appreciate high political rhetoric or scientific analysis.
One morning when I was five or six, he took me for breakfast at his favorite local diner. He blew on his coffee while I sipped my orange juice through a straw. “When I grow up, I want to be like you and work in a quarry,” I said, looking up at him with a smile.
“No,” he answered back. “Working in the quarry is hard. You’re a smart boy. You should go to school, and use your mind to make a living.”
If my grandfather were alive today, he’d be an “elitist.”
David Masciotra is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. He has written for The Washington Monthly, New Republic, Salon, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. He and his wife live in Indiana, where he teaches at Indiana University Northwest.