The Democratic Party Needs to Look Inwards

with John McWhorter & Richard Kahlenberg

This week, John and I talked with Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute and George Washington University. Rick was an expert witness for the plaintiff in Harvard v. SFFA, and he is a staunch critic of affirmative action as it existed before the Supreme Court’s ruling. Now that racial preferences in college admissions have been declared unconstitutional, he wants to remake affirmative action as a class-conscious endeavor. His new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, presents an argument to that effect.

I’ve been saying for a long time that if the Democratic Party continues to champion racial diversity as an end in itself and to ignore economic inequality, it’s going to wither and die. As Rick implies, Democrats have essentially ceded the class issue to Trump, and we now see the results. Race-based affirmative action has been struck down, and the Democrats suffered a defeat in the election that, a couple years ago, would have been unthinkable. If they had listened to internal critics like Rick and returned to their mid-twentieth-century roots as the party of the working class instead of indulging the identitarian fixation of elites, the 2024 election might have gone the other way. At the very least, people like me would have found much less to object to in their platform.

So is the Democratic leadership going to wake up or not? Do they think they can ward off serious concerns about inequality and the grievances of working-class Americans with more pablum about race and diversity? I want to tell them it’s over. Nobody’s buying it anymore. If they’re really concerned about struggling black families in this country, an easy first step would be to champion programs like Rick’s, which would benefit applicants of all colors and ethnicities, including African Americans. The only difference would be that the children of wealthy parents—including wealthy black parents—wouldn’t be eligible.

Perhaps that’s what’s really concerning to progressives. Class-based affirmative action would aid economic mobility. Race-based affirmative action, more often than not, aids class reproduction. Progressives are happy to see more black and brown faces on campus, as long as they’re the right kind of black and brown faces. Can they trust that smart, talented working-class students will arrive at Columbia and Yale pre-loaded with the “correct” liberal opinions? Economic diversity brings ideological diversity along with it—college freshman raised in small-town Pennsylvania and Ohio are less likely to have absorbed liberal goodthink than those raised in Boston or Manhattan. If that kind of diversity is too repellant for progressives to handle, they’re going to keep losing, and they will have earned their defeat.

---

This is a clip from an episode that went out to full subscribers earlier this week. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

JOHN MCWHORTER: Rick, what do you think the reason is that, over about the past twenty years, there's been a major sea change in people's receptiveness to the class argument. When I first, in my humble way, tried to make it in the year 2000, a great many very sensible people seemed to think there was really something wrong with me. That was a really renegade argument to make. I was missing the role of racism and society. I was being disloyal to people of my own skin color. There were people you just could not reach. And I think it was only partly that I was at Berkeley at that place and time. It was ordinary New York Times reader, NPR opinion.

That's really different now. Like for example, I think your book is gonna make a major noise, and I think that reasonable people are gonna be much more open to it than they would've been in, say, 2005. Obama maybe had a little to do with it, but it couldn't have been just that one statement. What do you think has changed in the twenty-first century?

RICHARD KAHLENBERG: I think the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial preferences helps explain why people are more open to class. It's the best game in town that's legally viable. And especially now that some on the far right are going after class, that makes it more attractive to those on the left as a counter.

So I think it's a practical path forward for people on the left. I also hope that the election of Trump a second time is getting people to reconsider some of the craziness around issues of race that went on that you wrote about in Woke Racism.

There's a pulling back and, in part, I think a recognition that the emphasis on racial preferences is so far out of touch with where the public is and that there are negative consequences. As a liberal myself, I'm astonished that Democrats lost to this guy. The guy who championed a quasi-insurrection was elected. And so to my mind, that says Democrats have to look in the mirror. Universities and others have to look in the mirror. What have we been doing wrong?

I think a part of that, as that as the role of race increased, the role of class has increased. The Democratic Party never caught up. They never changed and saw that maybe we ought to be reframing these issues. Obamacare, which I support, is basically class-based affirmative action. To my mind, the most successful liberal initiative in the last generation did not say “If you're black and if you're privileged, you're gonna get Obamacare, and working-class whites won't.” No. The subsidies went based on economic disadvantage. And that to me is the successful path forward.

GLENN LOURY: That's why they call you a liberal maverick. I've got an answer to my question now. You're against identity politics, whether you're willing to say so out loud or not. You probably watched with horror as defund the police became the mantra of progressive Democrats across the country. And you think, how could we lose to this guy?

The answer is, we've not been the party of the working people in the bottom-middle ranks of American society for a while. We've been captured by coastal elites who have their own fashionable enthusiasms, among which are bringing kids with both parents being lawyers who happen to be black to Harvard at the expense of some kid from Kentucky or Southwest Ohio. Not to put words in your mouth, Rick, but that's the message I'm getting from you.

RICHARD KAHLENBERG: You said it much more succinctly than I did. Exactly. And it goes back to Bayard Rustin. He said any racial preference will disrupt a progressive working-class, multiracial working-class coalition, which was always his dream. And we've been doing the exact opposite. It's not surprising that we find ourselves in a situation where we're in.

---