What's Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class

Ideas do not float free of the people who hold them, and the abandonment of class has a sociological shape. The center of gravity of American progressive politics has shifted from the working class to the college-educated professional. The activists, staffers, donors, writers, and increasingly the voters who set the tone of the movement are drawn from a stratum secure enough to treat economic survival as a solved problem. For this group, politics can become what it cannot be for the precarious: a matter of values, expression, and culture rather than of rent, wages, and health.