It’s tempting to focus on what unites the populist energy on both sides of the aisle: a shared hostility to a ruling class that has overseen the downward mobility of labor and the shrinking of the middle class. But what divides today’s Right-wing populism from its Left-wing counterpart is equally important. If either side hopes to craft an agenda that appeals beyond its base, it will have to grapple with what it’s missing.

Both camps diagnose the same problem: a corrupt elite that has disinherited the American working class and lined their pockets with the proceeds. But when it comes to the solutions to that problem, the Left and Right have different answers. Yet each side is missing a piece of the puzzle.

Before Trump, the GOP was defined by social conservatism, free-market economics, and foreign interventionism. It was for war and free trade, and against gay marriage and abortion. But Trump took an ax to every one of those commitments.

He abandoned free trade and questioned foreign entanglements, believing that America should mind its business and focus on US interests, rather than the Sisyphean task of spreading liberal values across the globe. And, while gesturing toward a moderate social agenda, he made economic populism his true platform. In his second term, he’s only doubled down: mass deportations, tariffs, and a revived industrial policy. He made illegal immigration a centerpiece, launching nationwide deportation campaigns that have drawn both condemnation and praise. He escalated a global trade war, levying tariffs across America’s trading partners. He issued executive orders to expand AI training to help blue-collar workers access good-paying technology jobs, and claims to have brought in more than $10 trillion in manufacturing investment.

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This is the core of why he won the majority of working-class Americans: his economic populism got to the heart of what they felt they had lost thanks to disastrous trade deals like NAFTA, or disastrous immigration policies endorsed by the elites of both parties that allowed the foreign-born population of the United States to balloon to 15 percent. In industries that swelled their ranks with illegal migrants, wages stagnated. Immigration and the economy were the top concerns for voters in the 2024 election — two issues which often overlap for workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. Trump’s promise to deport every illegal migrant won him votes from workers who had never supported a Republican before, including millions of Hispanics. His populism — call it Protectionist Populism — spoke directly to them. Because this promise is so central to his success, his recent comments about allowing illegal farm and hotel workers to stay has engendered immense pushback from the base.

But this is not the only populism on offer now. The Left has its own version — one equally hostile to what it calls “the oligarchy,” but proposing different solutions. Sanders campaigned for president on free college, free health care, and a higher minimum wage — funded by taxes on the rich. AOC and Mamdani have adopted this model, too.

Rather than limiting the supply of labor or foreign goods to drive up wages, the populist Left proposes taxing the rich and beefing up the welfare state. Instead of empowering workers to demand more from employers, it would redistribute wealth through subsidized housing, health care, transit, and childcare.

This marks a turn away from the identity-first politics of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who leaned on the historic nature of their gender and race in their campaigns for President. Left-populists today offer something more universal: class war. The rich, they argue, are too rich — and they should “pay their fair share” so that the working class and the poor can receive more benefits from the government, given that their low-paying jobs aren’t likely to represent anything close to a living wage. Let’s call this redistributionist populism.

But here’s the surprising twist: despite its economic focus, redistributionist populism appears most popular among the young and the educated. Voters without college degrees preferred Cuomo; those with advanced degrees preferred Mamdani. Mamdani beat Cuomo with New Yorkers earning more than $100,000 a year, but Cuomo crushed him among those earning under $50,000. Mamdani also lost decisively in neighborhoods with the highest concentration of black voters.

The redistributionist message, paradoxically, was unpopular with the very people it was supposed to help, while it was most popular with young, disillusioned, overeducated urbanites.

That’s not to say their preferences are illegitimate. They vote, too, and have become the Democrats’ new base since the working class drifted to Trump. But their overwhelming support signals that Mamdani’s success in New York City isn’t likely to translate much further, not least because of the position Mamdani has taken on immigration. Mamdani opposes ICE raids and was seen in a widely circulated video attacking Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar. It was a revealing moment.

The Democrats once opposed immigration on the very grounds that the Right now does: It depresses workers’ wages. But now that their base is educated professionals — the consumers of low-wage labor — it is very much in their financial interest to increase the number of workers allowed illegally into the country. They mostly talk about immigration in moral terms, stressing things like compassion for the global indigent and due process. But the economic logic remains — and lately, they’ve become less shy about saying so, fully admitting that they oppose mass deportations because they are taking away a pliant workforce. As Gov. Gavin Newsom recently bemoaned during the riots over ICE raids in LA, Trump’s “agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers, and seamstresses.” Or think of the outrage from Democrats when ICE agents raided a meatpacking plant in Nevada where dozens of illegal migrants were using forged papers. (Weeks later, the waiting room to apply for jobs was full of American applicants.)

Meanwhile, the MAGA movement’s Protectionist Populism really does resonate with many workers. Interviewing working class Americans across the country recently, I found a consistent message: they overwhelmingly preferred Trump’s protectionism to neoliberalism or redistribution. They rejected the paternalism in the Left’s ideas about how to help them, and appreciated the autonomy baked into Trump’s vision. A better wage meant independence. A closed border meant a job worth keeping.

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It is not just anecdotal. In poll after poll, the majority of Americans support deporting undocumented migrants. The Democrats’ attempts to reclaim their status as the party of the working class will fail until they stop fighting against the wishes of the majority of Americans — especially on immigration.

Yet there’s a glaring blind spot in Protectionist Populism: namely, health care. It’s the one issue where working-class voters are still aligned with the Left over the Right. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira has pointed out, the two most popular demands among working-class Americans are less immigration and more access to affordable health care. There is huge overlap between Americans who want a much more populist approach to health care and those who want a much more hawkish approach to immigration. Teixeira’s reporting showed that stricter proposals on illegal immigration also aligned with support for Medicare negotiating drug prices. He wrote, “these pro-Medicare populists favor the idea that we should simply, ‘Round up undocumented immigrants, detain, and deport them to their home countries’ by 24 points.”

Trump himself seemed to grasp this. He has shown a willingness to force drug companies to negotiate prices, yet his Big Beautiful Bill showed Republican lawmakers willing to drop millions of people from the Medicaid rolls and endanger rural hospitals. The GOP seems to be acting on muscle memory, ignoring that its base is no longer the rich but the working class. The base has changed, but in too many ways, the party hasn’t. Republicans in the House and the Senate are still committed to giving tax cuts to the rich (wildly unpopular) and treating health care like it’s a commodity.

It’s no surprise that health care is the only area where the Left holds the advantage, because the Right won’t seize it. Whether it’s the protectionist populism of the Right or the Redistributionist Populism of the Left, each has recognized a piece of the puzzle. A broader perspective that combined much less immigration with much more access to affordable health care could lead to a windfall for whichever party seizes it first. If either side were willing to embrace the complete wishes of the hardest working Americans and embrace a platform that pushed both for expanding health care access and for radically reducing immigration, they would have a ruling majority for a very long time.

I ask because the pair’s parents would have an invaluable perspective about the combination of personal discipline and social support needed to make it in America. Instead, their children offer a light and frothy piece of aesthetics, like the kinds of luxury goods that surround the rich.

Michelle and Craig were raised in a working-class milieu in Chicago’s South Shore area. Their childhood home was tiny, as they emphasize at length in the first episode, and the close relationship the siblings forged was in part a function of proximity; the two shared a room growing up. It’s a moving account, and Michelle, especially, radiates the grace that endeared her to Americans before the sharp polarization of recent years.

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Their mother, Marian Shields Robinson, was a secretary-turned-homemaker. Their father, Fraser Robinson III, was a civil servant with multiple sclerosis who never missed a day of work. From these humble beginnings, the children went on to earn three Ivy League degrees between them. Craig reveals in the podcast that he made millions as a bond trader before retiring to become a coach, while Michelle Obama’s estimated net worth with her husband, former President Barack Obama, is $70 million.

The two embody the American Dream at a time when many Americans who grow up as they did — especially black Americans — never make it out of poverty. Even black men from affluent families are much more likely to end up poor than to maintain the lifestyle they grew up with.

Michelle’s and Craig’s parents were possessed of immense personal virtues, but they made their way in a very different economy and society from the ones we have now.  Young men, especially those without college degrees, have a much harder time finding material stability and spiritual dignity owing to the decimation of the real economy by financialization and globalization — processes that Michelle’s husband did precious little to stop and in many ways accelerated while he led the nation. It has led to the breakdown of broader family support networks. The two-parent family, defined by the irreplaceable mixture of “discipline and love”, as Christopher Lasch put it, is no longer the norm, and middle-class values are thus much more difficult to transmit across generations.

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Alas, the younger Robinson siblings aren’t interested in addressing such pressing concerns. Instead, on IMO (internet slang for “in my opinion”), Michelle and Craig invite other fabulously wealthy people to sit in a rented Airbnb and wax philosophical about such pressing issues as when to decide you’ve given enough to someone else and it’s time to focus on yourself, when to break off friendships, how to be vulnerable, and how young women can get better at asking for what they want.

Their “experts” are mainly celebrities such as Issa Rae, Seth Rogan, Tracee Ellis Ross, Dwayne Wade, and Gabrielle Union. Put another way, the podcast’s heavy-hitting strength is also a perfect example of what ails the Democratic Party: it’s by and for the rich — specifically, rich women.

In the first episode, Michelle and Craig begin with an account of their upbringing. “We weren’t wealthy”, Michelle recalls. “And Dad was working class. We lived in the same apartment our whole lives. It was essentially two bedrooms”.

“No, it was one bedroom”, Craig corrects her.

“Well, that little offshoot bedroom that Mom and Dad stayed in, you would consider that a bedroom, right?”

“But that was the only bedroom”, Craig insists. “The room we were in was actually the living room, and the living room, what we called the living room, was actually the dining room.”

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But the kitchen was the gathering place. “And in our house, you know, we as young people with our parents, what they did for us was they invited us to sit with them at the table and talk”, Michelle recalls. “They wanted to hear our ideas. They wanted to hear our opinions. I think that our parents offered us both the first table where we gained confidence in our voices, where we felt like who we were, what we thought, how we felt was important. And not because it was important to the rest of the world, but it was important to them”.

It’s a lovely anecdote that situates you in the Robinson’s warm home. But it is also revealing: the siblings were raised in a family that stressed what sociologists have identified as the habits that inform a middle-class upbringing. Middle-class parents ask their children a lot of questions. They raise kids in two-parent households. They put a premium on education and extracurricular activities. They convey to their children that their autonomy matters, but also that they have to take responsibility for their actions.

The middle-class culture of the Robinson home was made possible in a wider economy that stressed stability, full employment, and good wages and benefits. The loss of these common goods — as a result of a bipartisan push to liberalize trade, immigration, and social mores — is now fueling populist uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic. These trends have also driven a sharp wedge between the Democratic Party, founded in the early 19th century as a vehicle for workers and farmers, and its traditional constituencies.

This is perhaps the most compelling issue of our time. Yet such issues — whether from the standpoint of individual advice or social critique — are of little interest to Obama, Robinson, and their guests. After looking back on the Robinson home, the first episode is mostly devoted to a conversation with the Issa Rae (net worth estimated at $20 million), and the subject is friendship. The three address a “question” they “got from a listener” about how to react to a friend cutting off contact.

Throughout the conversation, the pure opulence of the trio’s lifestyle is a recurring theme. Rae, it turns out, is a newly minted restaurateur, because she couldn’t find a restaurant she liked enough to patronize on her last birthday — so she opened her own. Later in the episode, when complaining about imbalances in friendships, the first example that comes to Michelle is a friend who never invites her on trips.

At another point, Michelle recalls checking in with a friend and asking if her friend had fired that HR person she was having problems with: “Remember that HR person you were going to let go? What happened with that girl?” The rest of us commiserate over getting fired — these ladies commiserate over firing unsatisfactory employees. At another point, Michelle recalls picking up her nephews from school in a motorcade (relatable!).

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The real problem with IMO, then, is that Michelle thinks her success would make her a reasonable person from whom to seek advice. Yet the part of her that achieved that success, and the social structures that made this possible, are utterly uninteresting to her. Meanwhile, it’s the part that’s completely unrelatable — the opulent lifestyle, the celebrity friends, the lack of real problems that leaves time to endlessly complain about her husband’s lateness and lack of curiosity — that takes center stage. The implication is that it’s interesting because, well, she’s Michelle Obama. It’s not interesting. It’s actually quite boring.

There is a lot of talk about “vulnerability” and “opening up”, yet there’s precious little that reveals anything deep. Certainly, there’s nothing discomforting (one imagines Michelle Obama is seldom uncomfortable). Obama insists that emotional vulnerability is crucial in a friendship for her, but she doesn’t expose any weaknesses at all.

The one break in the facade of perfection is when Michelle complains about her husband, which she does more than you would have imagined. There’s a clear bias against men in general with their silent, masculine ways, their refusal to engage in small talk, or ask how people’s kids are doing. “That’s why y’all broken”, she tells her brother. “Y’all don’t talk about nothing”. At a time when the Democrats have a serious problem with two main groups — men and the working class — this podcast is a symptom of why that is. IMO.

Like the rest of America’s ruling class, Clinton fears we are hopelessly divided, possibly forever. The media tends to agree. Books and op-eds are churned out, hyping everything from the “polarisation spiral” to predictions of a coming civil war. We are past the point of no return, pundits warn. Apparently even scholars of polarisation are polarised, according to the New York Times. As Tiffany Cross put it on her MSNBC show a few weeks ago: “People keep saying a civil war is coming. I would say a civil war is here. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic.”

The trouble it is, it is hyperbolic. It’s true that our political and media elites, and those who run corporations and Big Tech companies, are increasingly partisan. But that’s because they have a lot to gain — in terms of money and power — from making Americans hate each other. Nevertheless, despite the billions and billions of dollars being spent trying to divide us, polarisation remains an elite phenomenon. When it comes to the fundamental values this nation was founded on, Americans are much more united than they are divided.

The evidence is everywhere. Last week, for instance, Gallup reported the latest approval rating for interracial marriage between black and white people. The polling company first started asking Americans about their feelings on the subject in 1958, when approval was an abysmal 4%. As of 2022, it stands at 94%, and there is almost no difference between white and non-white respondents. The regional difference has also evaporated. Southern Americans now approve of interracial marriage at the same rate as their eastern, Midwestern, and western neighbours. As recently as 1991, approval for interracial marriage in the south was at just 33%, compared to 54% in the east and 60% in the west. Today, those figures are 93%, 94%, and 97% respectively.

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You could argue that people haven’t become less racist, but simply less willing to admit their racism to pollsters. But even that is a huge leap forward. 93% of Southern Americans want pollsters, and presumably also their neighbours, to believe that they have the same views as the liberals they probably mocked just 20 years ago. Racism has become socially taboo.

Something similar has happened with gay marriage. Approval among Republicans has absolutely soared in recent years — from 16% in 1995 to 55% last year, including 61% of young Republicans. Many believe that at least ten Senate Republicans will join the Democrats in enshrining the right to gay marriage into law. At a time of intense polarisation — when even baby formula divides the house — this is a major feat.

And then there’s abortion, an issue that the media and our politicians assume is hugely divisive. In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree on the major points. They oppose abortion bans and want it to be generally legal in the first trimester, and in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s health is threatened. On criminal justice, too, there is no longer a partisan divide. In recent years, Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their justice systems for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch has consistently sided with liberal judges in criminal justice cases. And President Trump’s First Step Act released 5,000 black men from prison, although those men seem to be the only ones who took any notice.

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Even when it comes to police brutality, Republicans have been becoming more vocal. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he was seeking proposals to improve policing and combat “racial discrimination regarding the use of force”. Soon after, Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, introduced a police reform bill — which was later killed by Democrats.

Scott and Graham were joined by none other than the then-leader of the Republican Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, who told reporters in the wake of Floyd’s murder: “We are still wrestling with America’s original sin. It is perfectly clear we are a long way from the finish line.” And at a lunch for Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas stood up and said: “Young Black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience, and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it.”

Meanwhile, the most vocal Democrats on the subject are those who support progressive prosecutors and bail reform efforts — policies often billed as divisive. But they are not divisive; they are just wildly unpopular — like Republican efforts to ban abortion in all cases. Democrat and Republican Americans alike oppose these measures, especially now, amid a crime wave. Our elites want us to believe these issues divide Americans, but they simply don’t.

The Pew Research Center recently released a study that they claimed showed signs of “partisan hostility” growing. “Growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, closed-minded than other Americans,” the study claimed to find. But the questions they asked respondents weren’t about members of the other party as much as they were about the parties themselves, or politicians: “Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party?”; “How well do each of the following phrases describe the Republican or Democrat Party?”; “How much do you like or dislike Republican or Democrat political leaders who…” People aren’t turning on their fellow Americans so much as they are on political parties and leaders.

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And it’s not just this study that suggests so; a 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that “when answering questions about the other party, individuals think about elites more than voters”. When the elites of the party were separated out from average Americans, the researchers found that on every measure, “respondents are more negative toward the elites of the other party than they are toward voters”. And Anthony Fowler, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, has done numerous studies that fly in the face of the polarisation narrative, finding that voters are more moderate, more informed by policy, and more willing to change their views than many in power would have you to believe. “To be sure, there are real policy disagreements among Americans,” writes Fowler. “But for every extreme liberal or conservative who agrees with their party on most issues, there are far more people in the middle who think that Nancy Pelosi is too far to the Left and that Mitch McConnell is too far to the Right.”

Every week, I talk to working-class Americans across the country who work with people who disagree with them on politics. They tell me the same thing over and over: we don’t have the luxury of hating co-workers who vote for the other party. We rely on them too much. Party politics just doesn’t matter as much as having a good working relationship. It’s our elites who want us to believe that we are divided, simply because it benefits them.

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It’s clear how this works in politics: if you can convince you constituents that the person you’re running against is a fascist — or a groomer — then the race is over. Because if the choice is you or Hitler, you pretty much have it in the bag. And if you can also convince people that your opponents’ supporters and voters are fascists and deplorables, who cling to their guns and their Bibles and their bigotries, well, who wants to be in that category? Divisiveness in politics is a shortcut — a workaround to actually having to deliver the promises you make your constituents.

Something similar has happened to the mainstream media. With the collapse of the local newspaper industry, a new business model has emerged that is diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. The business incentives of digital media see success in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue, and the tools of digital media make it possible to target content to specific audiences based on income and zip code. Online publishing software tells you exactly what these audiences are clicking on, how often, and for how long — so you can give readers more and more and more of it. Of course, the most engaged readers online are always the most extreme, which means that our news outlets gain most by catering to them.

Social media companies work in a similar way. The currency there is attention, and the stronger you feel about something, the longer you stay on a page dedicated to it, and the more likely you are to click on an ad. Every time you hate a stranger on the internet, someone makes money.

At a time when the death of Elizabeth II is uniting her nation in grief, it’s hard to watch our own head of state fall into this trap. President Biden — who campaigned on unifying the country, and promised to represent not only those who voted for him but also those who did not — has made a habit of casting his political opponents as extremists. Recently, for instance, he has smeared MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” and a threat to democracy. Not exactly the behaviour of a unifier.

The thing that was miraculous about the response to 9/11 was not that Americans united, because we were not divided. It’s that our leaders did: they showed the grace that ordinary Americans show every single day, working alongside each other in nursing homes in Florida and factories in Iowa and construction sites in Minnesota. For once, our leaders were worthy of our support. For once, they were representing us. Today, by contrast, they simply demand that we defend them — to the extend that it means indulging in meaningless fantasies about a looming civil war.

Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of D.C., are now begging the federal government for assistance.

Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the Right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how the Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy”.

The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.

Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalise illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.

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And Biden has more or less followed through as President. From Day One, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended President Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.”

What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the Left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labour, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration. Back in the Nineties, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democrat Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labour force”.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Senator Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What Right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalising illegal border crossing.

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This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20-60% decrease in black working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”

Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive. But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.

Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration. “The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”

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But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralising.

Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them? Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Governor Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.

Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivising truly dangerous behaviours, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border. Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.

This is Leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Governor Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.

Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.

Back in 2016, journalists, Democratic politicians and Never Trumpers struggling to comprehend how they lost the election came up with two competing explanations. One camp argued that it was a protest vote stemming from the economic anxiety and despair birthed by globalisation, stagnant working-class wages, and downward mobility for the shrinking middle class. The other camp argued that Trump’s supporters were simply racists.

Hillary Clinton was the rare figure to hold both views, immortalised in her infamous comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. One might have expected that after Clinton lost the election, liberals would question the efficacy, if not the morality, of calling a quarter of the country racist.

Instead, they doubled down: it wasn’t just a quarter; it was half the nation. Everyone who voted for Trump was racist. By 2017, the very term “economic anxiety” had been branded a dog whistle for racism by some of the highest profile journalists in the country. So definitive was the racism explanation that during the 2020 election, the New York Times appears not to have run a single op-ed from a Trump supporter explaining their vote; how could the paper of record publish people who everyone knew were avowed racists?

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By Ashley Rindsberg

How did this happen? How did the journalists, thinkers, influencers and professional Tweeters who too often set the agenda for the nation — people who consider themselves on the liberal and progressive Left — manage to police out of existence the devastating effects of globalisation on the middle and working classes of all races? How did we allow the definition of racism to melt until it covered people — of all races — who found their lots slightly improved over the three years prior to the pandemic, a time when wages for the bottom 25% rose for the first time in a decade?

You have to be pretty far removed from the pinch of economic anxiety to confuse it with bigotry. And indeed, America’s media has undergone a status revolution over the past century.

Writing in the Nineties, Christopher Lasch observed that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighbourhood and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class. But in truth that shift was a long time coming; throughout the 20^th century, American journalism went from being a working-class trade to a highly educated caste.

As I chronicle in my new book, American journalism was born in the 19^th century of a populist revolution in the form of the penny press, which was explicitly produced by and for the labouring class. At the time, the newspapers in circulation existed solely for the political and business elites: they were prohibitively expensive, and contained shipping schedules, wholesale prices, speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made in business or politics.

The cheap penny papers filled that gap in the market, and were soon impossible to ignore thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchased them every day (catering to the lower classes has the benefit of there being so many of them, after all). From that moment, through the middle of the last century, journalism became a blue-collar job, one in which a journalist was as likely to not have a college degree as to have one.

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This is no longer the case. If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain.

But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?

With a few exceptions, journalists along with the rest of America’s highly educated liberals now, by and large, belong to what the French economist Thomas Picketty calls a Brahmin Left. And as journalists became more highly educated and more affluent, they stopped writing for or about the working class. In its place, a moral panic around race and an obsession with causes once confined to academia — open borders, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-Zionism — provided a convenient alibi for an elite that still sees itself as on the side of the little guy.

It’s not all on individual journalists, though. Journalists have for decades been more liberal than their fellow countrymen. But in the past, this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences.

Then came the internet and with it the collapse of the local newspaper industry and the birth of a business model that was diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. Success is now rated in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue. And the best way to achieve this is to build a niche audience — more often than not, a highly educated, highly affluent, highly liberal niche audience who use the politics of identity to mask their success.

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In other words, the media’s moral panic around race in America and the abandonment of the working class go hand in hand, like a photo of Angela Davis on the cover of the New York Times’s T Magazine and a Cartier ad on the back; like affluent liberals in New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods demanding we defund the police amid a historic rise in murder taking place in neighbourhoods just ten blocks away; like American Express hosting diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in which the facilitator tells employees that capitalism is racist.

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the progressive culture war. It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer.

Of course, the racism of state actors remains a problem in need of urgent repair; police brutality, for example, remains a scourge on communities of colour. But the racial moral panic obscures — and therefore perpetuates — the real divide separating America into two groups: an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever-growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain.

And therein lies the real tragedy: the liberal news media has abandoned the working class, allowing conservative outlets to swoop in and cater to them. The conservative media may not do much to help the economic fortunes of the downwardly mobile, but at least it doesn’t sneer at the working class while abandoning them economically.

That, ultimately, is the story of today’s national media landscape in a nutshell: with few exceptions, it is waging a moral panic around race to disguise the abandonment of the working class — and it’s getting rich off of it.