Is Josh Shapiro the American Disraeli? The Democrats need to unite two nations

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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