Former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown has a must-read article at The New Republic entitled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again: Reconnecting the Democratic Party to the working class is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life.” Some excerpts: “Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the makeup of our coalition….We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think….Joe Biden was inarguably the most pro-labor president of my lifetime. He talked about the dignity of work. He ushered in a new era of industrial policy, making dramatic investments to create jobs and move production of crucial technologies home to the United States. He hired economists for top jobs who prioritized worker power in the labor market. He had the most pro-worker U.S. trade representative likely ever. He presided over rising wages and low unemployment. He walked a picket line….But he was horribly unpopular. Americans repeatedly told us that they hated the economy, thought the country was on the wrong track, and feltworse off than ever….So what happened?….The march away from the Democratic Party among working-class voters—now including nonwhite workers—began long before inflation hit. And the road back is going to require more than just waiting for Trump to fail and voters’ memories of inflation to fade….The more that’s been written, the less we seem to have learned. It’s not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not reward work and does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees.”

Brown continues, “Over the past 40 years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries have exploded, and productivity keeps going up. Yet wages are largely flat, and the cost of living keeps getting more expensive….Productivity and wages used to rise together. That changed in the late 1970s. Since then, workers produce more and more, but they enjoy a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create….And when work isn’t valued, people don’t see a path to economic stability, no matter how hard they work. A couple of years of modestly rising wages are not going to make up for decades of Americans working harder than ever with less and less to show for it….Most people in Ohio believe the system is rigged against them. They’re right. Today, income and wealth inequality rival the Gilded Age. Using one of the most classic definitions of the American dream—that children will be better off than their parents, moving up the economic ladder with each generation—we are going backward. More than 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents did. For children born in 1984, it’s only 50 percent….These changes hit working-class kids particularly hard. Children born to parents without college degrees are less likely to get a four-year degree, setting them back in nearly all aspects of life….College graduates have four times the net worth and four times the retirement savings of Americans without degrees. Americans with a bachelor’s degree live eight years longer than those without a bachelor’s degree….In the 1960s, about one in four members of Congress only had a high school degree. Today 96 percent of members are college graduates….If Democrats continue to be seen by voters in places like Ohio as the defenders of a system that rewards a minority of coastal elites at the rest of the country’s expense, we will continue to lose ground among the very people we claim to represent….Today in the Mahoning Valley, I still hear about NAFTA. One member of my Senate staff who grew up in the valley told me last year that, to this day, Clinton is not to be spoken of in his family’s steelworker household, so deep runs the sense of betrayal….People in Youngstown and Dayton and my hometown of Mans­field expected Republicans to sell them out to multinational corporations.

Brown notes, further, “But we were supposed to be the party that looked out for these workers—to be on their side, to stand up to corporate interests….young staffers in the Clinton administration became the seasoned experts in the Obama administration, attempting to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confidently pushing a vision of an ever-more-interconnected global order. To people in Ohio, that sounded like a recipe for more of the same: more shuttered storefronts, more kids moving away, and more good-paying careers replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and opportunities for upward mobility….Most people don’t wantwhat they view as government handouts. Nor do they want to be left to fend for themselves in an unfair market, rigged by multinational corporations, that only benefits the people at the very top….They want a level playing field so their hard work can actually pay off. And they want a government that will actually fight to create that level playing field, which means taking on corporate interests….But instead, the message they’ve heard from party elites, over and over, has been: We know better than you do. Voters sense it. They hate it. And until we fix it, working-class voters will continue to abandon us….Most families at all income levels feel squeezed by soaring housing costs, unaffordable childcare, rising insurance prices, stubbornly expensive health care—not to mention trying to save for retirement, higher education for their kids, and care for aging parents. Life feels unaffordable even for workers whose incomes put them well ahead of their working-class neighbors….And most people get their income from a paycheck, not an investment portfolio. Work unites all of us….We’re all trying to do something productive for our family and our community and our country. We want to develop skills and take pride in them, and we want our work to be valued, and for our paychecks to be enough to provide for our families….That should be our party’s North Star, the foundation on which we build….None of this will be a project measured in months, or in one or two election cycles. We need a generational effort to transform our party, with the dignity of work at the center.”

In “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up: A group that spent heavily to defeat Trump is now devoting millions to study voters who were once aligned with the Democratic Party but have since strayed,” Michael Scherer writes at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by….Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.” Read more here (paywall).