Does “Conservative Leftism” Have a Future?

2025-09-11 Chris Maisano

Commentators right and left survey today’s political landscape and conclude, with historian Matt Karp, that “the political story of the 21st century” is “the unstoppable flood tide of class dealignment.”¹ This includes the socialist magazine Jacobin’s founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara, who concludes that the Democratic Party, along with its counterparts on the center-left around the world, “has less working-class support than ever.”² It also includes Sohrab Ahmari, one of Compact magazine’s three founding editors, a former Trotskyist who has moved to the illiberal Catholic right. In language that would not be out of place in Jacobin, Ahmari laments “the takeover of erstwhile workers’ parties, including the U.S. Democratic Party, by professionals more likely interested in liberalizing cultural mores than mounting countervailing power against capital.” With highly educated, professional-managerial-class (PMC) voters now at the core of center-left parties, Ahmari contends, ostensibly progressive political projects like environmentalism

too often amount to little more than policing ordinary people at the level of consumption—the straws they drink out of, the forms of mobility they use to get to work, and so on—rather than advancing grand-scale reforms in the mode and relations of production.³

Nominally social democratic and labor parties, as well as roughly analogous center-left parties like the Democrats, have chosen the interests of a highly educated “Brahmin left” over workers, spurring the “mass departure of workers from parties of the left.”⁴

Despite much evidence challenging this narrative, it persists.⁵ As European political scientists Daniel Bischof and Thomas Kurer observe, it is often employed in center-left parties to “suggest that listening to some specific voter segment . . . will eventually enhance their electoral fortunes.”⁶ Among American adherents of the class dealignment thesis, that voter segment is socially conservative working-class voters. After Trump’s reelection last November, Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, and Sean Mason argued in Jacobin that

Democrats also need to rethink their approach to tackling cultural and social issues if they ever hope to reach more working-class voters. Progressives need to face the fact that working-class voters are just a lot more conservative than middle-class voters on many of these issues,

like immigration, racial justice, abortion, or guns.⁷ Elsewhere, Guastella has argued for a political program that is “progressive on wages and jobs, protectionist on trade, restrictive on immigration, moderate on culture and conservative on the deficits,” a program that adds up, in his view, “to a fundamental break with the prevailing economic order. A call to shift society in favor of workers.”⁸ This sort of bricolage signals a move by some on the left away from the fusion of economic and socio-cultural progressivism that has long underpinned social-democratic politics, toward what labor studies scholar Benjamin Fong calls a political “minimalism” entailing “no definite opinion” on anything beyond a commitment to economic redistribution.⁹

There are many overlaps between a project like Compact and adjacent projects on today’s right, from the journal, American Affairs, to the American Compass think tank, to the National Conservatism conference, which brings together right-wing intellectuals and operatives with major Republican politicians including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance. This is one of many reasons why it is jarring to see one of Compact’s current editors claim its masthead shares “a kind of Marxian inspiration.”¹⁰ This milieu’s analysis and critique of contemporary capitalism is arguably more indebted to another Karl—Karl Polanyi, whose seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation provides, at least according to certain readings, the intellectual foundation for a nostalgic variety of socialism. It also draws heavily on Catholic social teaching, particularly Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on the “rights and duties of capital and labor,” Rerum Novarum. This emergent trend on the right aims to achieve a new fusionism¹¹ that would, as Ahmari describes it, join “leftists who found themselves exiled by the new progressive orthodoxies on race, sex, gender, and migration” with “conservative Christians discovering (or rediscovering) the insights of thinkers on the left in attempting to explain the social and economic functions of woke-ism and pandemic authoritarianism.”¹² If anti-communism was central to the consummation of an older fusionism, an ideologically transversal opposition to “wokeness” would play a similar matchmaking role in this new iteration. Its main site of programmatic articulation would likely be a deeply gendered project of reindustrialization, aimed at shifting employment and economic activity away from the service sector and back toward manufacturing, thereby eroding the class base of wokeness: the PMC.

If anti-communism was central to an older fusionism, an ideologically transversal opposition to “wokeness” would play a similar matchmaking role in this new iteration.

While certain affinities between the two currents are apparent, Ahmari and other self-described “left-conservatives” will likely struggle to bring their attempt at a new fusionism to fruition. Their worldview is ultimately too disparate, their labor program too anti-union, to win over a critical mass of labor-oriented leftists. Moreover, they have staked their political fortunes on Donald Trump and JD Vance, whose administration is not delivering on their agenda while alienating most Americans outside the hardcore MAGA base. Even so, the history of leftist discomfort with cultural progressivism stretches back at least as far as the 1960s, when former liberals and socialists inaugurated a neoconservative project grounded in contempt for the “new class” of college-educated professionals in postwar America.¹³ So long as this discomfort persists, so will the possibility of a conservative left-right fusionism.

Capitalism against Traditionalism
Ahmari’s critique of neoliberal “market utopianism” is straightforward. He argues that coercion “is inevitable in human affairs, not least the significant portions of our lives we spend as workers and consumers.” While libertarians insist that market competition protects workers or consumers from coercion impersonally, and without the need for centralized authority, the fact is that buyers and sellers rarely enter the market on strictly equal terms. In a world where most of us must sell our labor power to others to live, it is the buyer of labor power—the employer—who enjoys a fundamental advantage. One may be free to walk away from any individual employer, but one is not free to walk away from the employing class if one wants food, shelter, and the other necessities of life. In the absence of countervailing sources of power, we have a system that “allows coercion to proliferate unchallenged . . . that grants every advantage to those who control most of society’s productive and financial assets.”¹⁴

While Ahmari draws liberally on Marxist theorists to describe the operation of unequal social relations in capitalism, his assessment of capitalism’s social impact is essentially Polanyian.¹⁵ “The road to the free market,” Karl Polanyi argues in The Great Transformation, “was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.”¹⁶ The paradigmatic example is the brutal system of land enclosures landowners imposed on a formerly free peasantry in early modern England. Ahmari cites Polanyi’s horror at how the enclosure movement tore at the social fabric and disrupted traditional forms of village and family life. For Ahmari, Polanyi’s enduring insight is that before the advent of market society, “the economy was but one component of the social order,” a traditional arrangement attacked by “a movement that sought to partition off the autonomous market from the political imperative to maintain a just and stable order.”¹⁷ The rampant destructiveness of markets, in turn, spurs a defensive countermobilization to re-embed them in a stable social order—a dynamic Polanyi famously called the “double movement.”

Polanyi’s influence is important, because certain readings of his work offer ground on which left and right critics of neoliberalism can meet.

Isolating Polanyi’s influence is important, because certain readings of his work offer ground on which left and right critics of neoliberalism can meet. The social theorist Melinda Cooper points out that once capitalism is “understood as a force of social disintegration . . . resistance can only be imagined as conservative” in the sense of protecting established lifeways from the encroachments of the market. “If capitalism is theorized as uniquely and exclusively destructive of prior social solidarities,” Cooper observes, “then the countermovement can be imagined only as an effort to restore, or at least reinvent, that which was allegedly destroyed by the advent of industrial capitalism,” or, in our current moment, post-industrial capitalism.¹⁸ This kind of perspective can nourish a politics that is premised on undoing or reversing the great transformations of the last fifty years, not one that takes the current configurations of class relations, social structure, and class composition as its starting point.¹⁹ Instead of, for example, prioritizing policies to boost unionization and job quality in the service sector where most people are employed, it often encourages a misguided focus on reengineering mass manufacturing employment, a goal that is quite unlikely to be achieved.

German Lessons
Cooper picks up this thread and observes that this type of leftist often “shares the conservative’s nostalgia for community, land, and family but seeks to transform these institutions into conduits for state-based forms of social protection.” This conception of the double movement, in Cooper’s view, “can be read as the ideological expression of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state, which perfectly combined social democracy and social conservatism in the form of the Fordist family wage.”²⁰

Social theorist Wolfgang Streeck represents one particularly prominent example of this viewpoint. According to Streeck, the mid-twentieth-century “Fordist family” was sustained materially “by a ‘family wage’ that, along with various welfare state benefits, was enough to secure a decent standard of living for all its members.” By underpinning an order of “stable patriarchal families in integrated social communities,” Streeck views the family wage as a bulwark against the market, something a countermovement against the commodification of labor should have defended. But this did not happen, and liberals and leftists alike celebrated women’s mass entrance into the paid workforce as a form of liberation from male domination. In doing so, the progress of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for the neoliberal transformation of employment relations.²¹

Streeck has become one of the most influential thinkers in the left-conservative milieu over the last half-decade.²² That is little wonder, considering his critique of feminism, his support for immigration restrictions, or his insistence that the nation-state is the only plausible framework for democracy and social solidarity. Streeck is one of the main intellectual influences on German politician Sahra Wagenknecht, a former Left Party leader who split in 2024 to form a new self-described “left-conservative” party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). As Wagenknecht describes her party, “socially and politically, we are on the left, but in social-cultural terms, we want to meet people where they are—not proselytize to them about things they reject.”²³ Practically speaking, this entails conservative positions on immigration, gender and sexuality, and environmental policy, all under the sign of reasserting national sovereignty against the impositions of globalism. Wagenknecht contends that BSW remains, in some sense, on the left. But the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey argues that her “singular focus on resovereigntization has supplanted a politics of class with one of the nation,” a vision that also holds up “the family entrepreneur as the model citizen” and prioritizes reindustrialization over climate policy.²⁴ Taken together, this amounts to a nationalist political movement that claims to speak for working- and middle-class Germans against a comfortable and self-satisfied “lifestyle left” that has left them behind.

Ahmari calls Wagenknecht his “political queen” and describes her as a “heterodox German social-democrat” who nonetheless “speaks reverently of Germany’s Christian-democratic tradition.”²⁵ Indeed, Wagenknecht casts BSW as the rightful heir of both postwar social democracy and Christian Democracy, a syncretic movement that retrieves the conservative elements of both traditions to better combat neoliberalism. Postwar conservatism, according to Wagenknecht, “meant protection of society from the maelstrom of capitalist progress, as opposed to adjusting society to the needs of capitalism, as in neoliberal (pseudo-)conservatism. From the viewpoint of society, neoliberalism is revolutionary, not conservative.”²⁶ This type of formulation gestures toward the possibility of left-right alliances to restore the conditions of mid-twentieth-century social relations applied to the present.

Reindustrialization for the Working Man
The key to restoring those conditions is reindustrialization. Numerous commentators on the left and right identify the transition from an industrial to a service economy as the driving force behind contemporary material deprivation, social disintegration, and moral decay. Guastella, for example, argues that “Everywhere factories have fled, social rot has followed.”²⁷ He links manufacturing employment to a stable and prosperous family life, and manufacturing’s decline with a “familial recession” that “has generated a host of social challenges” including loneliness, substance abuse, and declining birth rates.²⁸ Manufacturing, in this view, does not only have “a special way of fixing sick economies,” it also has a special way of fixing sick societies. Putting more people to work making physically tangible things “might rebuild hope in the government’s capacity for social betterment, restore a sense of pride in the working class, and raise our public spirit once again.”²⁹ Ahmari, for his part, contends that “deindustrialization is a geopolitical, social, and even spiritual catastrophe. We Americans have been learning the hard way that it matters if our economy is dominated by finance and services, or one in which the production of tangible goods is prized.”³⁰

Manufacturing, in this view, does not only have “a special way of fixing sick economies,” it also has a special way of fixing sick societies.

For advocates of reindustrialization, growing manufacturing employment and shrinking service sector employment is a political, cultural, moral imperative as much as it is an economic program. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), a Compact contributor and the leading Republican “populist,” contends that the “true test of a republic is whether it can sustain the kind of men democracy depends on.” The gendered language is not incidental, for Hawley’s moral economy is explicitly premised on the restoration of traditional gender roles and the strengthening of the patriarchal family. He draws on Catholic social teaching to argue for a Christian Democratic political movement in the United States. “Leo XIII,” in his famous papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, “insisted a man needs a wage sufficient to ‘support himself, his wife, and his children.’” Today, in Hawley’s view, “We have too little industry in this country, too few good paying, blue-collar jobs, too few fathers, too few families.”³¹ The decline of manufacturing work, in this view, is intimately bound up with a crisis of masculinity in American life, one that has sapped communities, destroyed families, and threatened national security in what Ahmari describes as “a new age of industrial war.”³²

The decline of manufacturing work, in this view, is intimately bound up with a crisis of masculinity in American life . . .

Vice President JD Vance sounds many of the same themes, and like Hawley, he is a favorite in the Compact milieu. In his address accepting the Republican vice-presidential nomination, Vance argued that the nation needs leaders who answer “to the working man, union and non-union alike,” who will “fight to bring back our great American factories” and “stop importing foreign labor.” He pledged that together with Donald Trump, “we’re going to build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families, made with the hands of American workers.”³³ Again, Vance’s repeated references to the “working man” are not incidental. Nowhere in his speech does he refer to “working women” or even to “working families.” This is a deeply gendered vision of reindustrialization in which men work at making tangible things, women stay home to raise families, and the government promotes patriarchal family formation.³⁴ The real-world model to emulate is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a self-described “illiberal democracy” which has become an object of fascination and reverence on the national-conservative right.³⁵

Leftist proponents of reindustrialization do not couch their arguments in such blatantly sexist terms. Guastella, for example, argues for boosting manufacturing employment in terms of the perceived strategic value it offers to the labor movement, not because “these jobs are for macho white men.”³⁶ Even so, there are inescapably cultural dimensions to the push for reindustrialization, precisely because economic questions are never just economic. Construction employment, for example, is still dominated by men. Manufacturing employment is not as starkly gendered, but it is still largely male, and women tend to be concentrated in nondurable goods manufacturing rather than in the industries usually targeted for investment.³⁷ Read alongside arguments that expanded maternity leave is preferable to universal daycare, on the grounds that daycare harms children—boys in particular—by weakening the mother–infant bond, it is difficult to escape the notion that there is more to the interest in reindustrialization than a straightforward concern for unionization and economic development.³⁸

Even if one accepts the proposition that mass manufacturing employment generates uniquely positive social and political externalities, there is good reason to think that restoring it today is not likely to occur. The development economist Dani Rodrik, for example, contends that the decline in manufacturing employment “seems to be a universal phenomenon” around the world, including developing countries in the Global South, and that the very success of a country’s manufacturing sector “seems to be associated with the adoption of labor-saving technologies that contribute to the fall in employment shares.”³⁹ Moreover, while trade policy and offshoring are often held responsible for the decline in manufacturing employment, research suggests that other factors, including but not limited to labor-saving technology, have played more significant roles. While it is certainly true that the effects of trade policy devastated an array of employers and communities in the Rust Belt, it is not the main reason for U.S. manufacturing job loss. Even amid the 2000s “China shock,” for example, the economist Robert Lawrence estimates that trade “was possibly responsible for about 11 percent of the job loss” in manufacturing, with rapid productivity growth and historically slow GDP growth accounting for the remainder.⁴⁰ Instead of seeking to reengineer the employment structure, progressives should focus on improving conditions for people employed in what political economist Fred Block calls “habitation work,” which now constitutes most overall employment. This is the labor of creating and maintaining social infrastructure like education, health care, and childcare as well as physical infrastructure and the built environment.⁴¹ In doing so, we can potentially avoid the unnecessary and self-defeating political game of pitting the “working class” against the “PMC” or the “Brahmin left.”

A Failed Fusionism?
Ahmari ends his book, Tyranny, Inc., with a pitch for a new “left-right consensus in favor of tackling the coercion inherent to markets.” Many of the potential preconditions for such a new fusionism are in place. Most important is the shared opposition to “wokeness” that led some prominent leftists to welcome the second Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in corporate America and academia.⁴² Even so, Ahmari and the “leftist conservatives” in his orbit will likely struggle to bring their new fusionism to fruition. While some of their arguments and proposals may feel left wing, a closer reading of the fine print reveals several sticking points pro-labor leftists will be hesitant to accept. Moreover, by staking their intellectual project to the political fortunes of Trump and Vance, the “pro-worker conservatives” are asking most progressives to cross a bridge too far. The Trump-Vance administration’s authoritarian lurch, combined with its radically libertarian domestic economic agenda, will likely alienate many of those who might otherwise have been willing to take the offer.

This is a deeply gendered vision of reindustrialization in which men work at making tangible things, women stay home to raise families, and the government promotes patriarchal family formation.

Ahmari has assiduously cultivated the idea that the political program he promotes is, in some sense, “social democratic.” When he, for example, argues for building “workers’ countervailing power: the indispensable lever for improving the lot of the asset-less and for stabilizing economies otherwise prone to turbulence and speculative chaos,”⁴³ it may sound, to the untrained ear, like a call for social democracy. But it is not. It is a call for privatized corporatist economics that ultimately quarantines the labor movement from addressing the fundamental balance of class power through political action. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith described “countervailing power” as an alternative to both market and state. The typical responses to the problem of economic power, Galbraith argues, are market competition and state regulation. He offers, instead, a third way: “the neutralization of one position of power by another,” voluntary collective action by economic actors to regulate wages and prices in their interest. This could include groups of workers banding together to bargain collectively, or groups of firms doing much the same thing.⁴⁴

[U]pon closer inspection, “pro-worker conservatives” turn out to be more anti-union than they may initially appear.

This concept is deeply embedded in the left-conservative conception of a good society, which Michael Lind calls “democratic pluralism for the 21st century.” Lind describes it as a “community of communities, in which the central government has direct and unmediated authority only in a few spheres like defense and law enforcement and public markets.” In this conception, the state retreats to a sort of mediating role “over largely self-governing communities of various kinds: familial, religious, ethnic, occupational, and industrial.” Lind calls this pluralism, but he notes that it is “sometimes described as corporatism, with the term corporation referring to an entire sector of industry or society, rather than a business firm.” For pluralists or corporatists, “a legitimate government doesn’t have plenary and exclusive jurisdiction in all areas over the entire population, but must share governance within its territory with communities of different kinds.”⁴⁵ Here, we see the first major stumbling block to the kind of left-right fusionism considered here. The leftist currents conservatives like Ahmari appeal to are precisely those which assert a strong version of universalism. Theirs is a “‘Republican’ cosmopolitanism,” in the French sense, “that contests collective divisions other than those based on socioeconomic inequality.”⁴⁶ The American right, in all its varieties, is still geared toward fighting an endless succession of culture wars. That alienates potential allies elsewhere on the political spectrum, a situation Ahmari recognizes in a perceptive article on his experience attending the 2022 Labor Notes conference. “Simply put,” Ahmari concludes, “if you are an industrial laborer who wants better wages and healthcare, you are attending Labor Notes (or gatherings of your local central labor council), not a New Right gabfest. And that says something.”⁴⁷

[T]he left-conservatives got the exact people they wanted in power. The dog caught the car, and now they are stuck with it.

Moreover, upon closer inspection, “pro-worker conservatives” turn out to be more anti-union than they may initially appear. While they may extol unions as a vehicle for building workers’ countervailing power, their conception of unionism is ultimately premised on non-adversarial relations with employers and a highly circumscribed sphere of action. Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative American Compass think tank, has become perhaps the most prominent and influential “pro-worker conservative” in Republican political circles. But Cass is frankly hostile to U.S. labor unions as they exist. He argues for an aggressive program of immigration restriction and trade protectionism, not a mass unionization campaign, on the grounds that this will “improve the quality of the jobs [employers] offer, to retain workers and draw people off the sidelines to fill open positions, and to invest in boosting productivity.”⁴⁸ Moreover, he proposes to “unbundle the political and economic functions of unions,” on the grounds that there is no justification “that the worker organizations codified by the NLRA to bargain with employers should also be the worker organizations that fund political campaigns.”⁴⁹ Cass offers European-style works councils and sectoral bargaining as compensation for effectively barring unions from politics but overlooks the fact that European unions have had close and long-standing links with labor, social democratic, and communist parties. This amounts to a thoroughly privatized conception of corporatism that keeps workers’ organizations out of politics and in a decidedly subordinate bargaining position.

The biggest barrier to left-right fusionism, however, may be less theoretical and more pragmatic. The left-conservatives have hitched their fortunes to the success of Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are presiding over an authoritarian administration that has turned very unpopular, very quickly. “He’s still the one,” Ahmari and his Compact co-founder Matthew Schmitz wrote of Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 election, lauding him as the only political figure offering Americans “a chance to confront and chasten their failed elites.”⁵⁰ They cast Vance as a natural complement to Trump and MAGA, one of the few figures in the GOP who has “shown himself up to the task of preserving and extending the movement’s best energies.”⁵¹

It did not take long after the 2024 election, however, for many to foresee that a second Trump administration, allied with Silicon Valley tech moguls, might pursue a radically libertarian domestic economic policy. Indeed, Ahmari himself forecasted this scenario a mere week after the election. “‘External protectionism, domestic libertarianism’ is the Trump II vision in its purest form,” Ahmari observed, “as articulated by Donald Trump himself and, especially, the tech barons led by Elon Musk who bankrolled his campaign.” Faced with the possibility that the ostensibly populist Trump would slash Social Security and Medicare and decimate state capacity, Ahmari held out hope that Vance would step in to rescue a populist agenda “even as he also has a foot in the ultra-libertarian tech right.”⁵² But external protectionism with domestic libertarianism is exactly what we are getting from the second Trump administration.⁵³ Try as they might to distance themselves from a radically destructive administration, the left-conservatives got the exact people they wanted in power. The dog caught the car, and now they are stuck with it.

The PMC is here to stay, and elements of it constitute an important constituency of today’s left and labor movement.

For their part, left-wing opponents of wokeness may have painted themselves into a corner. With an officially anti-woke administration in power, that idea is now associated with all the ugly repression being meted out against those deemed representative of the “enemy within”—immigrants, transgender people, unionized federal workers, the social state itself. In their disdain for the PMC, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues, these leftists “largely ignored the proletarianization that was stratifying and debasing this strata. But even more wrongheaded was their assumption that this new class, whatever its obnoxious cultural and social presumptions, was itself in the political or economic driver’s seat.”⁵⁴ The PMC is here to stay, and elements of it constitute an important constituency of today’s left and labor movement. The task is to organize educated professionals and white-collar workers and bring them into a political alliance with other working people, not recycling the themes and preoccupations of the original neoconservatives.

Notes

Matt Karp (@karpmj), “the political story of the 21st century is not a resurgent nationalist Right or a rising progressive Left—it is the unstoppable flood tide of class dealignment,” Twitter, July 13, 2022, 9:40 am, available at https://x.com/karpmj/status/1547214320739782656.
Bhaskar Sunkara, “Social Democracy after Class?” The Ideas Letter, October 17, 2024, available at https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/social-democracy-after-class/.
Sohrab Ahmari, “Social Democracy, Immigration, and the Working Class,” The Ideas Letter, October 31, 2024, available at https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/social-democracy-immigration-and-the-working-class/.
Sunkara, “Social Democracy after Class?” The source of the “Brahmin left” coinage is Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137, no. 1 (2022): 1-48.
In an analysis of Western European social democratic parties, for example, the political scientists Daniel Bischof and Thomas Kurer find that “the public narrative of original social democrats’ dealignment and realignment into the Radical Right is not supported.” While some formerly social democratic or center-left voters do indeed defect to the right, these parties lose far more voters to a combination of generational replacement and defection to other progressive parties, like the Greens or radical leftist parties. “The key challenge for social democratic parties today,” Bischof and Kurer conclude, “is to attract younger generations” of voters who were not politically socialized in the twentieth century, when Social Democrats on the left and Christian Democrats on the right tended to predominate. Daniel Bischof and Thomas Kurer, “Lost in Transition: Where Are All the Social Democrats Today?” in Beyond Social Democracy: The Transformation of the Left in Emerging Knowledge Societies, ed. Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 150, 161. Here in the United States, former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer argues that what may appear to be a class dealignment is, in many respects, better understood as a regional realignment. The mass migration of white evangelical Christians from the Democrats to the Republicans also plays a key role in Podhorzer’s analysis. “In other words, in part, what is being characterized as a ‘class inversion’ is not really about class in any conventional meaning of the word (something to do with economics or work), but about an increasingly powerful backlash by Christian nationalist institutions expressing themselves politically. Thus, the ‘class’ inversion can be explained in part by white Evangelical districts consolidating in the Republican Party—a trend which began in 1994 and then was fairly completed in 2010.” Michael Podhorzer, “Congressional ‘Class Inversion’ or Sectional Reversion?” Weekend Reading, April 16, 2023, available at https://www.weekendreading.net/p/congressional-class-inversion-or. Additionally, a strong urban-rural cleavage characterizes electoral competition in the United States and other English-speaking countries. In Why Cities Lose, the political scientist Jonathan Rodden demonstrates how the Democrats have become “a heterogenous coalition of urban interests,” encompassing the “urban working poor, union members, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, educated knowledge economy workers, and young cosmopolitan progressives.” Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 96. While it may be true that many affluent and well-educated urban professionals consistently vote for Democrats today, so do large proportions of working-class voters and union members who live in the same cities and metropolitan areas.
Bischof and Kurer, “Lost in Transition,” 141.
Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, and Sean Mason, “Here’s How Economic Populism Can Win,” Jacobin, December 27, 2024, available at https://jacobin.com/2024/12/democrats-dealignment-populism-culture-class.
Dustin Guastella, “Democrats still misunderstand working-class voters—to their peril,” The Guardian, April 1, 2025, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/01/democrats-working-class-voters.
Benjamin Y. Fong, “Toward a Socialist Minimalism,” Damage, May 24, 2023, available at https://damagemag.com/2023/05/24/toward-a-socialist-minimalism/.
Daniel Oppenheimer, “Does Compact Pass the Rubio Test?” Eminent Americans, December 20, 2024, available at https://danieloppenheimer.substack.com/p/does-compact-pass-the-rubio-test.
Fusionism was the philosophical foundation of the postwar conservative movement. The brainchild of National Reviewwriter Frank Meyer, it reconciled pro-business libertarians with social conservatives on the basis of their shared anti-communism. For more on Meyer and fusionism, see Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, “43: Frank Meyer, the Father of Fusionism.” Produced by Dissent. Know Your Enemy. November 10, 2021. Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:30:48, available at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-frank-meyer-the-father-of-fusionism/. The historian Quinn Slobodian uses the term “new fusionism” to describe how today’s radical right combines radical market libertarianism with ideas from the hard sciences to combat the cause of social and economic equality. See Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2025).
Sohrab Ahmari, “The Triumph of the New Center,” Compact’s Substack, December 12, 2024, available at https://compactmag.substack.com/p/the-triumph-of-the-new-center.
Irving Kristol, widely credited as the godfather of neoconservatism, defined the “new class” as “scientists, teachers, and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on.” This class, in his view, is not “merely liberal but truly ‘libertarian’ in its approach to all areas of life—except economics . . . almost anarchistic in its conception of the good life.” For more, see Daniel McCarthy, “The New Class War,” The American Conservative, September 7, 2016, available at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-class-war/.
Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do about It (New York: Forum Books, 2023), 178.
Ahmari, 136-39.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 140.
Ahmari, 139.
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017), 14-15.
But not necessarily so. The political economist Fred Block, for example, draws on Polanyian concepts to formulate a compelling vision of egalitarian post-industrial well-being. See Fred Block, The Habitation Society: Creating Sustainable Prosperity (Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2025).
Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, 15.
Wolfgang Streeck, “Flexible Employment, Flexible Families, and the Socialization of Reproduction,” Max-Plank-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Working Paper 09/13, 2009, 14-20, available at https://d-nb.info/1053326653/34. As Cooper summarizes Streeck’s argument, “feminists (whom he imagines as middle class) robbed women (whom he imagines as working class) of the economic security that came from marriage to a Fordist worker. By undermining the idea that men should be paid wages high enough to care for a wife and children, feminism helped managers to generalize the norm of precarious employment and workplace flexibility, eventually compromising the security of all workers.” Family Values, 11.
Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the radical right-wing Claremont Institute and a Compactcolumnist, recently praised Streeck as the “Karl Marx of our time” in the opinion pages of the New York Times. See Christopher Caldwell, “This Maverick Thinker is the Karl Marx of Our Time,” New York Times, November 28, 2024, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opinion/wolfgang-streeck-populism.html. Streeck has a byline at Compact, and has been feted there as the “prophet of left conservatism.” See Wolfgang Streeck, “Globalism Against Democracy,” Compact, November 19, 2024, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/globalism-against-democracy/; Justin Vassallo, “The Prophet of Left Conservatism,” Compact, November 22, 2024, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-prophet-of-left-conservatism/.
Sahra Wagenknecht, “Condition of Germany,” New Left Review146 (March/April 2024), available at https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/sahra-wagenknecht-condition-of-germany.
Oliver Nachtwey, “Sovereign Virtues?” New Left Review—Sidecar, December 18, 2023, available at https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sovereign-virtues.
Sohrab Ahmari, “Sahra Wagenknecht, My Political Queen,” Compact’s Substack, May 8, 2024, available at https://compactmag.substack.com/p/sahra-wagenknecht-my-political-queen.
Wagenknecht, “Condition of Germany.”
Dustin Guastella, “The case for American reindustrialization,” The Guardian, May 2, 2025, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/02/american-reindustrialization-manufacturing.
Dustin Guastella, “In Pursuit of the Family,” Damage, November 18, 2024, available at https://damagemag.com/2024/11/18/in-pursuit-of-the-family/.
Dustin Guastella, “Build Stuff and Make Things,” Damage, October 19, 2023, available at https://damagemag.com/2023/10/19/build-stuff-and-make-things/.
Sohrab Ahmari, “Europe’s Creeping Deindustrialization,” Compact’s Newsletter, October 16, 2024, available at https://compactmag.substack.com/p/europes-creeping-deindustrialization.
Josh Hawley, “Christian Democracy for America,” Compact, October 12, 2023, https://www.compactmag.com/article/christian-democracy-for-america/.
Sohrab Ahmari, “How the GOP Can Mend Fences With Unions,” Compact, November 30, 2023, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-the-gop-can-mend-fences-with-unions/.
J. D. Vance, “Address Accepting the Vice Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” The American Presidency Project, available at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-vice-presidential-nomination-the-republican-national-convention-2.
Fox News personality Jesse Watters recently stirred controversy by saying it “‘makes you a woman’ when you ‘sit behind a screen all day,’ during a discussion with his fellow co-hosts on ‘The Five’ about whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs could be ‘the ultimate testosterone boost’ and bring back a more ‘manly’ workforce of Americans ‘working with their hands.’” “Fox News’ Jesse Watters: ‘When You Sit Behind a Screen All Day, It Makes You a Woman. Studies Have Shown This.” Yahoo News, April 8, 2025, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-news-jesse-watters-sit-173344681.html.
See Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact, July 28, 2023, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/what-conservatives-see-in-hungary/.
Dustin Guastella, “Two Ideas to Make America Union Again” Niskanen Center, January 18, 2023, available at https://www.niskanencenter.org/charting-new-course-ways-build-labor-influence-moving-forward/#essay5.
Just 11.2 percent of U.S. construction workers are women, and 87.3 percent are white (35.1 percent are categorized as Hispanic or Latino, but Hispanics and Latinos can be of any race). 29.3 percent of all manufacturing workers are women, and they are overrepresented in industries like food production, bakeries, and textiles. “Employed persons by detailed industry, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (last modified January 29, 2025), https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm.
“In the past several decades, the Left has embraced the demand for affordable daycare, which has replaced demands for robust, paid, and extensive maternity leave policies that protect women’s jobs or, alternatively, afford them real opportunities to leave the workforce, even if for only for a few years. Given this reality, and given the Left’s insistence that daycare is a viable solution to the problem of childcare, it’s worth asking whether the practice of separating children from their primary caregivers—usually, if not always, mothers—is the panacea so many believe it to be, or if it instead reveals a consistent devaluation of gendered labor that might also negatively impact children themselves.” See C. Kaye Rawlings, “The Left Should Leave Daycare Advocacy to the Libs,” Damage, October 23, 2024, available at https://damagemag.com/2024/10/23/the-left-should-leave-daycare-advocacy-to-the-libs/.
Dani Rodrik, “An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs,” Brookings, September 2022, available at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/20220928_THP_Proposal_Rodrik_GoodJobs.pdf.
Robert Z. Lawrence, Behind the Curve: Can Manufacturing Still Provide Inclusive Growth? (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2024), 172.
As Block contends, “we need to transition from an industrial society to a habitation society. Habitation is the process of creating, maintaining, and improving the social and physical infrastructure of human communities . . . during the industrial era, habitation work was done in the background; it happened when people were finished with the primary tasks of work on farms or in factories. In our current service economy, however, the largest category of employment is habitation work . . . This includes construction work, education, childcare, healthcare, communications, transportation, energy, entertainment, local government and the expanding labor force that works on research and development as part of the innovation economy.” See Block, The Habitation Society, 10.
Noam Scheiber, “As Trump Attacks D.E.I., Some on the Left Approve,” New York Times, February 6, 2025, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html.
Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do about It, 194.
John Kenneth Galbraith, “Countervailing Power,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Sixty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1954), 1.
Michael Lind, “Democratic Pluralism for the 21st Century,” Compact, October 7, 2022, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/democratic-pluralism-for-the-21st-century/.
Sila Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt, “Introduction and Theoretical Framework,” in Beyond Social Democracy: The Transformation of the Left in Emerging Knowledge Societies, ed. Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 21-22.
Sohrab Ahmari, “What the Right Doesn’t Get About the Labor Left,” Compact, June 21, 2022, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/what-the-right-doesn-t-get-about-the-labor-left/.
Oren Cass, “Workers Deserve Real Power. Unions Aren’t the Best Way to Get It,” New York Times, August 30, 2024, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/opinion/union-workers-power-us.html/.
Oren Cass, “Rebuilding worker power,” Economic Innovation Group, The American Worker Project, August 2024, available at https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TAWP-Cass.pdf.
Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz, “He’s Still the One,” Compact, September 27, 2022, available at https://www.compactmag.com/article/he-s-still-the-one/.
Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz, “J.D. Vance Shows the Way Forward for the GOP,” Compact, January 26, 2023 https://www.compactmag.com/article/j-d-vance-shows-the-way-forward-for-the-gop/.
Sohrab Ahmari, “The New Trumpian Bargain,” The New Statesman, November 12, 2024, available at https://www.newstatesman.com/international-content/2024/11/the-new-trumpian-bargain. It must be said that Vance has more than a foot in the ultra-libertarian tech right. He owes his career to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who brought Vance to Silicon Valley after he graduated from Yale Law and sank $15 million into Vance’s successful 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate in Ohio. Moreover, careful readers of Vance’s hit memoir Hillbilly Elegywill know that his worldview is deeply informed by Charles Murray, a peddler of scientific racism whose economic views are radically libertarian. See Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards, 14-18, 113-25.
“This is already apparent,” economist Branko Milanovic has observed, in Trump’s “hopes to reduce personal income taxes, deregulate practically everything, allow much greater exploitation of natural resources, and push privatization of government functions further, essentially doubling down on all the domestic precepts of neoliberalism.” Branko Milanovic, “What Comes after Globalization?” Jacobin, March 24, 2025, available at https://jacobin.com/2025/03/what-comes-after-globalization.
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Unionizing the ‘Cultural Apparatus,’” Jacobin, February 23, 2025, available at https://jacobin.com/2025/02/union-organizing-cultural-apparatus-pmc.