A. Rivera> What’s Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/15/whats-wrong-with-the-american-left-captured-by-the-professional-class/
FTA: "Thomas Frank captured one face of this in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, asking why working people vote against their economic interest. But the deeper question runs the other way: why has the party of the left given them so little economic reason to vote for it? When a movement led by the credentialed offers the working class culture war on one side and means tested technocracy on the other, it should not be surprised when the working class drifts away."
Queue up the butthurt Dems protesting they are not so bad because this just the kind of thing they refuse to hear.
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.