How to Bridge the ‘Diploma Divide’ in the Progressive Movement

Despite the admirable goals of the social justice movement, its proponents have thus far failed to build a viable majority coalition. Worse, they seem increasingly out of touch with the blue-collar workers they need on their side to win. 

In face of this failure, progressives are quick to insist they don’t need to moderate their demands, and to chastise those who advocate reducing the salience of progressive priorities around race, gender, climate, and immigration. Underlying this refusal to self-examine is the fact that most progressives happen to live in a professional-class bubble where they widely embrace liberal social values, and, concerningly, show disrespect for the priorities and values of working-class Americans. 

A new report by Jared Abbott, the director of The Center for Working Class Politics and Joan C. Willliams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, shows how this yawning class divide on the Left will only result in “a politically costly politics of scorn.”

In The Left’s Coalition Crisis, Abbott and Williams draw from the results of a new Class Gaps Poll conducted earlier this year. They find that the gap in issue priorities between college-educated and working-class voters, combined with poor messaging strategy, has further entrenched the diploma divide. 

While both liberal college grads and working people prioritize economic issues like affordability and social security, college-educated voters place substantially more importance on culture and climate issues — many of which have become the main talking points of the establishment left.

For example, liberal college grads prioritize resisting authoritarianism by 33 points more than the working class, protecting LGBTQ+ rights by 21 points more, and protecting abortion access by 19 points more.

Instead of seeking to bridge this gap between working-class and college-educated Americans, many liberal leaders have chosen to take this division for granted, directing their attention towards securing the support of educated voters, and considering the working class as unreachable. 

This instinct has had the effect of turning many cultural issues into what Abbott and Williams classify as “identity issues” for liberal college grads. Abbott and Williams classify any issue that has near-unanimous agreement (over 85 percent) as an identity issue. 

For college-educated liberals, this includes issues like opposing the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, opposing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, favoring no-excuse mail-in voting, and stricter gun laws. These issue positions have become moralized and turned into a part of liberal, educated identity, leaving no tolerance for disagreement and no room for compromise. 

Identity issues form as a result of living in a bubble. College-educated liberals more often than not are surrounded by people similar to themselves, consume media that reinforces their beliefs, and direct their frustration at the lack of progress towards working-class voters they see as holding the movement back. 

When working-class people don’t share the assumed consensus, or when they have different sets of priorities, gaps in preferences emerge between classes. These issues are characterized by Abbott and Williams as wedge issues, and they primarily consist of cultural and social issues like the defense of democracy, abortion, and immigration, as well as climate initiatives. 

This gap has been seized upon by the right, who utilize reactionary, populist rhetoric to drive the wedge deeper. They perpetuate the narrative that the elites are looking down at working-class Americans. This is not far from the truth: in both the U.S. and Europe, university graduates show more bias against the less-educated than almost all other stigmatized groups. While liberals may not utilize the inflammatory rhetoric of the right, their assumed position of moral high ground has made building a cross-class progressive movement feel nearly impossible. 

Contrary to what moderate strategists would have us believe, the solution is not for college-educated liberals and progressives to abandon their values and retreat to the center to appeal to the much mythologized “median voter.” 

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. As Abbott and Williams write, “The key isn’t centrism; it’s mutual respect accompanied by class-competent reframing.” This involves bringing college-educated liberals down from their high-horses, and to recognize the concerns and priorities of working-class voters without pandering to them — nor, as the right likes to do, taking advantage of their disillusionment. 

Reframing shifts the language of issues from policy-heavy phrases like “subsidized childcare” activist-coded terms like “climate action,” and turns it into everyday language, like “affordable childcare,” and economic populist messaging like “rein in corporate profiteers.” 

This kind of reframing shows significant effects in the Class Gaps Poll: applying the class-competent language increased working-class support for care economy policies by nearly 28 points, energy transition policies by 24 points, trans girls in sports by 23 points, and support for legal status for long-tenured immigrants by 22 points. Moreover, in nearly all cases, reframing kept constant or even increased average support among liberal college graduates. 

These results show that there is potential for widespread support for progressive policies when the issues are put into real-world language and grounded in a respect for working-class values. 

Working-class Americans show pride in hard work, feel deep loyalty to community and country, and often value stability over freedom. The right has painted the picture that these values are antagonistic to progressive reform, and has successfully sold conservative talking points like “America First” and peddled anti-immigrant sentiment.

Many liberals, erroneously, have capitulated to this rhetoric, and view working-class Americans as a lost-cause, destined for descent into reactionary conservatism — all while ignoring their complicity in creating the conditions that led to the right’s emergence. 

In dismissing working-class values, liberals confirm the story the right tells: the educated elites don’t care about you.

Abbott and Williams’ report serves as a blueprint for building a cross-class, progressive coalition that has the potential for real electoral success. But this can only occur if college-educated liberals look themselves in the mirror and recognize that their ideal of equality must extend to economic class, and come to view disagreement with their priorities not as a sign of moral inferiority, but as an opportunity to find common ground and build mutual respect.