I couldn’t decide if it was ironic. And if it was, whether he recognized the irony. And if he did, whether he might be vexed by our conspicuously pretentious surroundings.

I’d been to the place before, only not really. It’d changed owners twice in the decade and a half since I was last there, and locations at least that many times. In its latest incarnation it felt more like a cigar lounge than a restaurant, just without the cigars. Local suits murmured over rocks glasses in a dimly-lit sitting area around the bar.

It was there, ensconced in low-slung leather floor chairs among people who don’t do their own grocery shopping, that we chewed over grocery prices.

“Well, they’re not going up as fast they were, but that doesn’t–”

“It’s cumulative,” he interposed, with some urgency.

“Right.”

“Look, I don’t like Trump,” he sighed. As preambles to Donald Trump apologies go, it was an eminently genuine sentiment. That was apt. Genuine was always his defining character trait. I waited for the rest. “But since Joe’s been in, everything’s so goddamn expensive.”

It was hard to argue that point. Particularly with someone for whom double-digit grocery inflation’s a financial death knell. “That’s true,” I conceded, suddenly wary of our dinner menus. Wagyu NY Strip $120. Koji duck confit $80. A $45 squash small plate.

“You know I got this,” I offered. “The meal.” It went without saying. Dinner was always my invite. You don’t invite someone to eat if you’re not going to pay for it. But the mere prospect of a $400 dinner check might’ve been terrifying, so I felt compelled to reassure, despite the risk of tacitly suggesting something about the breadth of our financial asymmetry. He chuckled. “Yeah, yeah.”

We ordered milk bread with cultured butter and I listened, unprejudiced, to Main Street, perhaps for the first time. Certainly for the first time in a long time.

“I’m shopping for five, and it’s killing me,” he said. “Every week when Trump was president I filled up at the same gas station and it was the same pri–” This time I cut him off. “You have to understand how this happened.” I was a few words into my own apology, mine for Biden, when the bread arrived in a miniature cast iron skillet. “Don’t touch that,” the waiter counseled, harshly. “It’s hot.”

I cut the tiniest $14 loaf anyone’s ever baked in half, being careful to avoid the skillet. In that moment, it occurred to me that a retelling of the post-pandemic macro narrative was likely to fall flat. I’d aim to explain, not explain away, the circumstances, but the effort was doomed to come across as a belabored, and ultimately irrelevant, justification for an intolerable situation. So, doomed to come across as exactly what it would’ve been. And explicated by someone (me) unaffected or anyway unperturbed. I went the safer route instead: “The bread’s great!” About that, at least, there was no debate.

In their new book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis describe a “Great Divide” in American politics. On one side, they write, are “the great postindustrial metro centers,” which flourished during (or at least made the most of) the era economists generally refer to as “The Great Moderation,” a period defined by tectonic macroeconomic shifts, including globalization, financialization and a succession of technological epochs. On the other side are the hollowed-out remains of America’s manufacturing sector, the soot-covered residuum of once-viable mining towns and the anachronistic (if nostalgic) remnants of the country’s farming communities.

The book’s good. But even it wasn’t it’d be required reading: It’s a sequel of sorts to The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 volume widely regarded as one of the most important politico-demographic studies of the modern era. More than two decades after mapping the path to a durable Democratic majority coalition, Teixeira and Judis paint a concerning picture for Democrats in the 2020s and beyond. In essence, they argue the party risks squandering a historic opportunity in pursuit of increasingly extreme social policies that have little or no relevance for the working-class. “In fashionable jargon, the changes in the Democrats’ governing coalition over the last fifty years led to the party espousing a combination of neoliberal economics and social liberalism that has alienated working-class voters and led to the changes in the party’s electoral coalition,” they write.

As a quick aside, I’m instinctually averse to the haphazard wielding of the term “neoliberalism,” which is by now so nonspecific as to have lost meaning. It’s routinely employed by both sides of every important socioeconomic debate to critique the other side. Appending “economics” to the term (i.e., to talk of “neoliberal economics”) goes some way towards ameliorating the nonspecificity problem, but not far enough. In contemporary discourse, “neoliberal” is almost always accusatory, typically derisive and deliberately oblique — an effort to mask the vacuousness of a given critique with an imposing word.

That said, there’s a lot to the idea that Democrats, over time, became the party of “Progressive neoliberalism,” where that means cultural radicalism fused with the familiar set of doctrinal economic policies which facilitated deindustrialization, fatally undermined already diminished organized labor and otherwise gutted the American working-class. Mired in an existential malaise, blue-collar workers, and particularly blue-collar whites, succumbed to the epidemic of depression documented so poignantly by Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their 2020 volume Deaths of Despair, a situation made immeasurably worse by the onset of the opioid epidemic in the late 1990s.

Scorned and left for dead in the desolate debris of a domestic manufacturing sector that was systematically dismantled, that portion of the electorate found empathy for their plight was lacking among mainstream Democrats, who seemed beholden to the economic agenda of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. At the same time, the party’s social agenda appeared to revolve increasingly around issues which, at best, were irrelevant to the working-class. At worst, Democrats’ cultural program began to look incongruous with working-class interests and concerns, perhaps even deliberately.

Even Democrats’ efforts to advance racial equality became, in the eyes of some, a caricature — a kind of cause du jour for fashion’s sake that was quickly monetized and exploited by corporates and political opportunists thereby cheapening, and ultimately working at cross-purposes with, the underlying struggle.

To be clear, Teixeira and Judis don’t confine their argument to the white working-class. It’s the loss of working-class voters regardless of race that “could undermine Democrats’ chances not simply of being the majority party but of being competitive with the Republican Party,” as they put it, ominously. They cite an alarming statistic. Since 2012 (so, in a little over a decade), Democrats saw their electoral edge among non-white working-class voters shrink by 25ppt.

A Gallup study published in February underscored the point: Democrats’ lead over Republicans in African Americans’ party preferences dwindled by almost 20ppt in just three years.

Gallup uses the share of self-identified Democrats and “leaners” (among Independents) minus the share of Republicans and GOP leaners to get a net metric. The figure above is simpler: It just shows the share of each cohort (i.e., non-college educated voters, African Americans and Hispanics) who identified themselves as Democrats at a given time. The slope of the lines may look gradual, but remember: We’re talking about elections here. The defections implied in the visual are enormous.

“Reflecting the national trend, several key subgroups of US adults showed declining Democratic support in 2023, which in most cases meant an increase in the group’s Republican identification and leaning combined with a drop in Democratic identification and leaning,” the color accompanying the poll results read, on the way to noting that only one subgroup bucked the trend: Adults with postgraduate educations, “who have become one of the most Democratic-leaning groups in the US.”

Teixeira and Judis are adamant and unequivocal. “Democrats no longer can be said to suffer simply from the defection of white working-class voters,” they write, adding that “the term itself had no political meaning until the white backlash that began in the 1960s to the civil rights legislation.” In their telling, the trend’s clear and irrefutable: Over the last decade, Democrats have seen “a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. Part of the difficulty is delineation: What exactly is “the working-class”? It’s easy enough to define conversationally, but if you need to operationalize it (e.g., for public opinion polling or demographic studies), the kind of ad hoc characterizations we typically employ in casual discussions won’t work.

Once upon a time there might’ve been an archetypal American “Everyman.” But “he” was driven to the brink of extinction over the last three decades. Indeed, the disappearance of that archetype is part and parcel of the whole debate. The “working-class” as we defined it a generation ago is endangered. It’s rare to spot an American steelworker in the wild these days. They’re stocking shelves at Walmart instead.

Income’s pretty clear as a differentiator past a certain threshold — maybe we can call it a $400,000 annual household income — but less so below levels that count as unequivocally affluent regardless of location, family size and circumstance more generally. You can make $80,000 (slightly above the national median), but if you have a large family or live in an expensive city, it’ll feel like $40,000. Or less.

For his part, Teixeira prefers to use education levels to help separate the working-class from other socioeconomic categories. “There’s no right, scientific way to do this,” he told The New York Times‘s Ezra Klein, during a February interview. “But the way I typically do it is to look at the four-year degree and more, and less than a four-year degree.”

As Teixeira was quick to point out, there’s a lot of utility in differentiating based on educational attainment. 50 years ago, three-quarters of jobs in America were open to those with no college education. On the eve of the pandemic, that share was just a third. Together with the structural decline of good-paying union jobs and, relatedly, domestic deindustrialization, the prospects for those without a college degree are entirely grim. That’s reflected on any number of metrics from earnings growth to corporate equity ownership, and it’s become a defining feature (maybe the defining feature) of politics in America.

“This has been a country, in the last 40 years, that has been much, much better to people with a four-year college degree than people who lack it,” Teixeira told Klein, in the same interview. “That’s very well-established in all the empirical data.”

That divide — lowercase, common noun — goes a long way towards explaining, and is indeed part and parcel of, the Divide — proper noun — Teixeira and Judis describe in the book. The “postindustrial metro centers” mentioned above are in many cases bastions of liberal thought and progressive politics, with the latter seen by critics as progressively (pun intended) distant, and in some cases even distinct, from historical progressivism. Today’s progressives, the criticism goes, are cultural radicals pushing ideas and policies that “escaped from the academic lab,” as Teixeira put it, “powered [by] the young, college-educated folks” who “set the tone for the culture” in cities identified with postindustrial America.

Those college-educated professionals, Teixeira and Judis argue, conceptualize of themselves as card-carrying members of an elite global social club, the benefits of which are vast and multifarious, as is the constellation of subgroups to which these “cosmopolites” also belong by virtue of their sprawling professional and academic networks.

Meanwhile, those on the other side of the Divide are singed fauna wandering a burned-out forest: Their habitat was destroyed and with it, the very context for their existence. The factories are gone and the communities which depended on the factories are too. Before deindustrialization, the men who worked at those factories “would go to the same bars after work and play on the weekends in softball or bowling leagues, which were often connected to their jobs,” Teixeira and Judis reminisce. Factory workers and their children “would go to the same high school and follow the fortunes of the school’s sports teams.” And then: “If they were men, they would have gone into the military and identify as veterans.”

I’d be remiss not to note that in their well-meaning attempt to save Democrats from themselves, Teixeira and Judis inadvertently end up constructing straw men, and at fairly regular intervals. There’s something a bit disingenuous, for example, about grafting the first hour of The Deer Hunter to Friday Night Lights and The Sandlot to create a kind of idealized industrial-era fusion cuisine which you then juxtapose with a deliberately dystopian description of 21st century liberal metropolises where, the implication seems to be, gangs of transgender PhDs, high on flat whites and furious about rising sea levels, loot and burn in the name of racial justice.

That said, they’re absolutely correct when they write that working-class Americans “have been thrown back on the most basic elements of their identities: Nation, family and faith.” And the socioeconomic contrast at the center of their “Great Divide” is as real as it is stark. The current polling reflects as much. The latest Times/Siena poll of registered voters, for example, showed a paltry 19% of white, non-college educated voters think the country’s on the “right track.” That cohort goes for Trump by an enormous margin (62% to 29%). If you look instead at all non-college educated voters, the margin’s not quite as wide, but at 54% to 36% (Trump over Biden) in the same poll, the disparity’s still insurmountable.

Although you can put a lot off on Trump’s “skills” as a demagogue and grifter, the fact that a billionaire Republican leads the most labor-friendly US president in modern American history by 18ppt among working-class voters is a damning indictment both of Democrats’ messaging during the Biden administration and, more to the point, of the party’s abject failure to deliver for the working-class over the past several decades.

In September, a Morning Consult poll showed that in the Trump era, Republicans have closed the gap on Democrats when it comes to who Americans believe cares about “people like me.” Not surprisingly, middle-class voters, those without a college degree and whites now say Republicans care more than Democrats. As the editorial was keen to point out, the GOP “has cut the Democratic advantage among voters of color” on the same question, “most notably [among] black voters.”

In the 2020 election, the share of Biden’s support attributable to non-college educated white voters was 27%, less than half of the same metric for Bill Clinton in 1992. A granular Pew analysis of the 2020 election showed that 68% of Trump voters didn’t have a college degree. That share for Biden was 53%. “As was the case in 2016, white voters without a four-year college degree made up a considerably larger share of GOP voters,” Pew wrote, analyzing the education skew by race. Whites with no college education made up 58% of Trump voters. That share for Biden was a mere 27%.

Central to the story Teixeira and Judis tell is the role of the so-called “shadow party” in the evolution of Democrats’ cultural agenda. Teixeira and Judis define shadow parties as “activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of official party organizations, but who influence and are identified with one or the other of the parties.”

Traditionally, the labor movement was a linchpin of Democrats’ shadow party. Labor’s influence in the shadow coalition served as an anchor, ensuring the Democratic agenda didn’t drift too far afield of the working-class. No more, though. In the telling of Teixeira and Judis, which is more or less accurate, Wall Street and Silicon Valley muscled out labor beginning in the 1990s. Needless to say, their interests aren’t always aligned with the working-class.

Teixeira and Judis listed other key players in Democrats’ current shadow party including a veritable who’s who of bêtes noires for conservatives: Black Lives Matter, MSNBC, the New York Times and, of course, Hollywood. Those groups, they argue, are engaged in a coordinated effort to articulate and advance “the outlook of many young professionals in the large postindustrial metro centers and in college towns.”

One overarching takeaway from the book is that the influence of Democrats’ shadow party network is tyrannical, uncompromising and prone to an absurdist interpretation of solidarity whereby otherwise disparate organizations espouse the views of their fellow shadow party members on matters unrelated to their own raison d’être, a phenomenon conducive to non-sequiturial pronouncements (so, an environmental group that takes a stand on defunding the police, to illustrate using a hypothetical).

The book argues forcefully (and Teixeira and Judis are even more forceful in interviews, including a discussion with Politico’s Deep Dive podcast that’s well worth your time) that the cultural radicalism of Democrats’ shadow party coalition is perceived by the working-class as existential insult to existential injury. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to sell out the country’s manufacturing base, killing off an entire way of life in the process, in pursuit of profits, cheap goods and a globalized economic model that implicitly treats blue-collar workers in advanced economies like the proverbial eggs that need breaking if we’re going to make omelettes. Now, what’s left of endangered American Everymen are compelled to adopt what, to them, appears as an increasingly aberrant set of social and cultural mores. Or risk being branded a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe or even a Nazi.

For many, that predicament’s as bewildering as it is infuriating. Modern America no more recognizes the difference between the biological sexes than it does the value of an honest day’s work in a factory. A police officer who tackles an African American shoplifter fleeing the scene is more likely to wind up in jail than the shoplifter. And so on. That’s how it looks from the other side the Divide.

Of course, it’s not just Democrats shadowed by a collection of activists, special interest groups, media organizations and deep-pocketed donors. Republicans are famously beholden to their shadow parties. So much so it scarcely bears mentioning. America’s culture wars are in many respects a battle between these shadow organizations. Teixeira and Judis write that, “These groups on the left and right subsist within their own closed universes of discourse, each shadow party using the extremes of the other to deflect criticism of their own radicalism.”

That, in turn, perpetuates an all-or-nothing mentality on both sides. It’s telling, I think, that 54% of Democrats identified as politically liberal in 2022, the most ever.

“Democrats have been growing more liberal since at least the mid-1990s,” Gallup said, noting that the share identifying as liberal has more than doubled since 1994.

Importantly, the trend’s most pronounced among white Democrats, more than 60% of whom identified as liberal in 2022, up a remarkable 37ppt in less than three decades. That’s almost surely due to the changing composition of the white Democratic vote. As Teixeira and Judis recount, “Working-class whites, many of whom had perceived the Democrats as their party, as the party of the common man and woman, began abandoning the Democrats’ electoral coalition in the mid-1960s at about the same time as college-educated professionals began being drawn into it.”

The figure below, based on a Nate Cohn analysis of data from the Census Bureau, the American National Elections Studies and public polling, illustrates the point.

Now we’re in a kind of echo chamber, where the electoral coalition is increasingly homogeneous, and its members are very likely to be active in the shadow party that’s working to perpetuate the ideological homogeneity. There’s no room there for dissent, which means anyone who isn’t fully on board is excommunicated.

As Cohn put it in a 2021 article, “the changing demographic makeup of the Democrats has become a self-fulfilling dynamic, in which the growing power of liberal college graduates helps alienate working-class voters, leaving college graduates as an even larger share of the party.”

This isn’t an entirely (or uniquely) American phenomenon. In a 2018 paper that leveraged post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, Thomas Piketty (the most important economist of our time and, I’d quickly note, the only economist of our time with a claim on the pantheon that includes historical giants like Keynes, Marx and Smith), describes a “Brahmin Left.”

“In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for ‘left-wing’ (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters” corresponding to a class-based party system, he writes. Beginning in the 1970s and the 1980s, things started to shift. “The ‘left-wing’ vote has gradually become associated with higher education voters,” Piketty goes on. By the 21st century, “the ‘left’ ha[d] become the party of the intellectual elite.”

Piketty’s work is characteristically (which is to say astoundingly) trenchant. The 2018 paper clocks in at 180 pages with 112 charts, including the figure below.

Seven decades ago, the Democratic candidate’s performance was 17ppt lower among college graduates than among non-college graduates. By 2016 (so, in the election which delivered the White House to Trump), the situation had turned almost completely on its head.

In the paper, Piketty discusses “the particularities of US party dynamics,” noting that from the European perspective, the evolution of the Democratic party in America looks “strange and exotic.” Here’s a party, he writes, that “very gradually shifted from the slavery party to the poor whites party, then the New Deal party, and finally the party of the intellectual elite and the minorities.”

“How is it,” he wondered, on behalf of perplexed Europeans, that “the slavery party” in America can “become the ‘progressive’ party?”

Suffice to say many working-class whites have asked themselves a similar question over the last several decades, if not out of nostalgia for a time when America was segregated along racial lines, then out of sheer bemusement at the rapidity of Democrats’ evolutionary about-face, which to many blue-collar voters looks like a deliberate turn away from working-class interests.

As Piketty puts it, “globalization and educational expansion have created new dimensions of inequality and conflict, leading to the weakening of previous class-based redistributive coalitions and the gradual development of new cleavages.”

Writing in January for AEI, Teixeira described “the coming working class election.” Like the latter chapters of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, parts of the article are hard to read if you’re a Democrat who’s generally on board with the party’s current program. I count myself in that group, which is to say this Monthly was in part an exercise in self-reflection.

Teixeira advised Biden to bear in mind that most voters simply don’t share many (let alone all) of the positions espoused by Democrats’ current shadow party. “It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil,” Teixeira says, on the way to enumerating nearly a dozen other views the working-class doesn’t harbor. To wit, from Teixeira,

It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized. It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated. It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit. It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement. It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society. And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.

That list isn’t exhaustive. Teixeira offered a few more “core truths.”

Needless to say, I chafe at Teixeira’s chiding. I also chafe at his cadence. And at the implied derision towards viewpoints I not only agree with but openly espouse. I chafe at all of it.

Teixeira might say that’s the whole point. I’m not working-class.

Although I’m generally unassuming around strangers, I have a difficult time feigning modesty around people I’ve known my whole life. There’s a fine line between exhibiting financial wherewithal in the service of conveying a happy ending to a story that was by no means destined to end happily and self-aggrandizing fanfaronade. My most unsparing critic — a young lady who disappeared into a cloud of weed smoke, despondency and Lowcountry humidity after suffering an early-onset midlife crisis during the pandemic — would say I overstep that line routinely, and as a matter of course. She wouldn’t be wrong.

“I probably wouldn’t have bought ’em if I’d realized how uncomfortable they were going to be.” We were waiting in the lobby for a hostess to retrieve my bomber jacket. The low light of the bar lounge no longer hid the ostentatious display on my feet: A pair of Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh sneakers with blood orange trim.

“Yeah, those are terrible,” he said, apparently mistaking my humble brag for genuine buyer’s remorse. (I love the shoes.)

“I don’t know why you’d buy those in the first place.” I spread out my arms so the hostess could put on my jacket. “Right here,” I told him, nodding at my chest with my chin. “What? That sweater?” I wore one of my favorites that evening: A red-orange Gallery Dept. piece from their Chateau Josué line.

“Yeah. I bought the shoes to match the sweater. $850 full price,” I said, handing the hostess a $20. “But I got it for $700 from Bergdorf.”

He looked at me blankly: “I see. Sounds like a good deal.”

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