Have the Democrats Become the Party of the Élites?

Why did Kamala Harris lose the election? So glad you asked. Pull up a chair—actually, no need to sit, because the answer is so simple that it can be summed up in a few seconds. The main problem was the incumbency disadvantage, exacerbated by inflation—and immigration, and also urban disorder, wokeness, and trans swimmers. Also, Joe Biden dropped out too late, and Harris peaked too early, and the Democrats should have picked another candidate, or maybe they should have stuck with Biden. Donald Trump’s voters were motivated by white grievance, except for the people of color who were motivated by economic anxiety; ultimately, the main issue was the patriarchy, exacerbated by misinformation on long-form podcasts, although of course Harris should have gone on Rogan. From now on, the Democratic Party has no choice but to move left, move right, overhaul its approach entirely, and/or change nothing at all.

A few days after the election, Musa al-Gharbi, a forty-one-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, published a lengthy piece on Substack called “A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives,” using bar charts and cross tabs to “rule out what wasn’t the problem”: sexism, racism, third-party spoilers. “It didn’t take me long to write, because I realized I’d written essentially the same piece after the 2020 election, and also after the 2016 election,” he said the other afternoon, at a diner in Greenwich Village, while finishing off a black coffee and a plate of fries. “The details change, of course, but the basic trends have been consistent for a long time.” Harris didn’t do herself any favors, he argued—she was “unwilling or unable to distance herself from the unpopular incumbent,” she shouldn’t have campaigned with Liz Cheney, and so on—but any Democrat would have had a hard time winning, because, during the past three decades, “Democrats have become the party of élites,” alienating increasing numbers of “normie voters” in the process.

More specifically, al-Gharbi maintains that the Democrats have become the party of “symbolic capitalism,” a coinage so important to him that he used it as the title of both his doctoral dissertation and his Substack. The phrase is his play on “symbolic capital,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term for prestige, cultural status, and other types of capital that can’t be measured by money alone. (A TV-news producer or an H.R. officer may wield rarefied forms of social power without cracking the top tax bracket.) Symbolic capitalists—academics, commentators, lawyers, consultants—manipulate words or data rather than making things with their hands. In conversation, al-Gharbi, a tenure-track professor with a sideline in punditry, tends to use “symbolic capitalists” and “symbolic élites” interchangeably, and always in the first-person plural; he may be one of the club’s sharpest critics, but he can’t deny that he’s also a member. “We are valued—overvalued, I would say—for what we know, not for what we make or do in the physical world,” he said. For him, this is the key divide in American politics. In the past three decades, he argues, the Democratic Party has been transformed from the party of non-symbolic workers to the party of symbolic élites. This strikes him as a fateful misstep: If elections are about convincing voters that you’re on their side, then why associate your party with a group that most voters not only don’t identify with but actively resent?

Despite Donald Trump’s many shortcomings as a politician, al-Gharbi continued, “one thing Trump has always been good at is triggering these outraged, condescending reactions from normie liberals, which work to his benefit.” For example: McDonald’s. All politicians pretend to like junk food while they’re at the Iowa State Fair, but Trump, despite being able to afford champagne and caviar, has long seemed to prefer Diet Coke and Filets-O-Fish. “He’s passionate about the product,” al-Gharbi said, with a snort-laugh. “It’s one of the many things about him that drive us”—symbolic élites—“crazy. He was born rich, went to fancy schools. He should be one of us, but he just isn’t.” Al-Gharbi paused to acknowledge the server who cleared his plate. In October, when Trump stopped at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and briefly pretended to work the drive-through window, he made little effort to hide that it was a flimsy P.R. stunt; beneath his McDonald’s apron he wore a pressed shirt and his signature red tie. “It’s not like voters were supposed to see this and get duped—‘Oh, he’s a regular Joe like me,’ ” al-Gharbi continued. Rather, the point was to “heighten the cultural and class differences between normal people,” who like McDonald’s, and symbolic capitalists, especially coastal liberals, who could be counted on to seethe about the garishness of the spectacle. Substantively, the seethers may have had a point. Harris has spoken fondly about her summer job at McDonald’s, and now advocates for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage; Trump was born rich, and his public gestures are often at odds with his actual policies. (When Trump was asked, through the drive-through window, whether he favored raising the minimum wage, he dodged the question.) Semiotically, though, it’s not hard to see how the episode might have pushed a normal voter toward Trump. Who is more relatable: the scolds who seem to turn their noses up at McDonald’s or the guy who’s clearly lovin’ it?

There is, famously, less social mobility in the U.S. than Americans would like to believe, but al-Gharbi’s trajectory has involved an exceptional amount of change. He grew up in southern Arizona, near an Army intelligence base. Most of his close relatives served in the Army, including his father, who is Black; his mother and stepfather, who are white; and his twin brother, who was killed in Afghanistan. He considered joining the Catholic priesthood before, in his late teens, becoming an atheist; he later converted to Islam and changed his name. Al-Gharbi’s mother, a Trump supporter, sometimes introduces him as “my liberal son,” which he finds amusing. He will cop to being a coastal symbolic élite, but he never refers to himself as a liberal.

He went to community college and sold shoes at a local Dillard’s before getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, an environment that he found both alienating and illuminating. “Our stipend was thirty-seven thousand dollars a year, which was more money than I had ever made,” he said. It wasn’t enough—he was in his mid-thirties, the main breadwinner of a family of four, and he still had to work his way through grad school—but it felt like a lot, “especially since I didn’t consider it, you know, a real job. We were getting paid to go to school. And yet many of my colleagues—most of whom were younger, and living alone, and, needless to say, came from a different background—would openly take the position, ‘Thirty-seven thousand is trash money.’ ” The day after the 2016 election, al-Gharbi went to class prepared to discuss W. E. B. Du Bois, but the planned discussion was cancelled so that his classmates could process their feelings. “There were grown men weeping,” he said, and a mother “talking about how Trump was going to put her child in a camp.” In the ensuing days, he went on, some left-leaning Columbia students “said they couldn’t hand in their papers on time, due to mental distress, and meanwhile most of the people they purported to care about, Black and brown maintenance workers and people like this, kept showing up every day to do their jobs.”

An irony of al-Gharbi’s work, as he knows, is that his critique of the élite consensus can only spread if it is picked up by élite consensus-makers: he’s just a symbolic capitalist, standing in front of other symbolic capitalists, asking them to cite him. Still, he seems to relish telling each crowd what it least wants to hear. His standard PowerPoint starts with Uncle Sam pointing out at the audience—if you’re attending this talk, then you might be a symbolic capitalist—and goes on to assert that, when it comes to issues like inequality, “the GOP is not the main problem.” Another slide speaks to symbolic capitalists through their patron saint, Taylor Swift: “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”

The month after the election was so rich with instant takes and podcast postmortems—Harris’s top campaign staffers on “Pod Save America,” a bipartisan panel at Harvard’s Institute of Politics—that it’s hard to imagine what else might be left to say. The week after the election, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on MSNBC to explain the phenomenon of the “A.O.C.-Trump voters”—the significant number of people in her district who had apparently cast a split ballot for her and Trump. The host, Joy-Ann Reid, seemed to find this concept baffling (“It makes no sense”), but Ocasio-Cortez didn’t sound baffled. Every campaign, she said, is “a race to convince a person about who cares about [them] more”—the unstated implication being that her brand of left-wing populism and Trump’s brand of right-wing populism both resonated with the frustrations of working-class voters, while Harris’s soft-edged liberalism did not. Still, Ocasio-Cortez cast doubt on any pundit peddling a hasty grand theory of the electorate. “We had an election on November 5th, and on November 6th you’ve got an answer?” she said. “Don’t listen to those people.”

Al-Gharbi may seem like such a person—“One narrative to unite and rule them all,” he tweeted on November 6th, linking to his work—but at least his theory wasn’t concocted overnight. He has been making versions of the same argument, in peer-reviewed journals and in a range of public-facing outlets, for several years. If what we’re seeing now is a partisan dealignment, then al-Gharbi would date its origin to the nineteen-nineties, when President Bill Clinton advanced the interests of “those affiliated with the symbolic economy at the expense of most others.” Clinton, another McDonald’s-philic politician, was both a favorite son of the white working poor and a technocratic striver. In al-Gharbi’s view, Clinton’s rhetoric and signature policies (financial deregulation, tech boosterism, NAFTA, welfare reform) reoriented the Democratic coalition around the workers that his Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, called “symbolic analysts”—yuppies in the New South, I.T. professionals in the Sun Belt, and so on—and away from the working class, both white and nonwhite. In the past decade, al-Gharbi contends, this trend accelerated, as symbolic capitalists adopted sharply more progressive views on a range of cultural issues, dragging their party with them.

Another day-after postmortem came from Senator Bernie Sanders. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he posted on X, on November 6th. In an interview with the Times, Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, brushed off Sanders’s critique before changing the subject: “There are cultural issues involved in elections as well. Guns, God and gays—that’s the way they say it.” Al-Gharbi is hardly a professional campaign adviser; he doesn’t even vote. Still, in this season of Democratic friendly fire, as the socialists urge the Party to the left and the moderates counsel a tack to the center, he is telling a sweeping story about how both factions may be partially correct. “On economic issues, I see no reason for Democrats to moderate—if anything, they have more room to run to the left,” he told me. “Redistribution, expanding health care—these things are incredibly popular. There’s no reason they can’t combine that with a shift toward the median voter on things like immigration. I don’t think they will, but they could.”

This synthesis, in broad strokes, is not unique to al-Gharbi. Elements of his analysis overlap with those of Timothy Shenk, Michael Lind, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Judis, and Ruy Teixeira, and many others (including a few elected Democrats, such as Representative Ro Khanna and Senator Chris Murphy). Among the one-word explanations currently on offer for what has gone wrong with the Democrats, al-Gharbi’s choice would probably be “wokeness”; but his understanding of the word is not, as is often the case, warped by whichever blue-haired zillennial or overbearing Bluesky post happened to annoy him most recently. His account is granular enough to fill a data-heavy book, published, in October, by Princeton University Press, called “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” Al-Gharbi identifies three previous “Great Awokenings”—beginning in the early nineteen-thirties, the late sixties, and the late eighties—and argues, counterintuitively, that the most recent one began around 2010 and ended, or at least started ending, in 2021. Instead of defining the term succinctly, he offers a list of “views that seem to be discursively associated with ‘wokeness,’ ” such as a “focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience.” He is harshly critical of performative wokeness (“my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism,” as Taylor Swift puts it), but not of its putative goals. “The core idea behind intersectionality,” he concedes, “seems both important and fairly uncontroversial.” His problem with the bulk of social-justice discourse, he told me, is “not that symbolic capitalists are calling for too much justice but that we do so in ways that are counterproductive.”