There is no question that the Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class. Candidates actually rarely use the phrase "working class," while they never stop saying "middle class." Working class, to most Democrats, feels like a pejorative term. Everyone, after all, wants to rise up to the middle class, which makes up 50 percent of the country.
The 35 percent of the public who fit into the working class, in Rodney Dangerfield's terms, don't get no respect.
So, yes, President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans have turned the tables on Democrats and become the voice for the working class, especially white and Hispanic male working class citizens. Trump needed plenty of middle-class voters, too, but all of the statistics are showing that he got a historically large percentage of working-class voters.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has turned down the request to start a third party representing the working class, at least for now. And he should. A party focused on the working class will never elect a president and will not be successful in House or Senate races either.
What America wants is a party or independent candidates who give attention, respect and compassion to working America and retired America — that's most of us. We’re talking about men and women (and their children) of all races who work for a living or who are retired from decades of work and rely on Medicare and Social Security for the majority of their expenses.
Trump, who got just under 50 percent of the votes although a large share of the Electoral College votes, basically spoke better to working America than Vice President Kamala Harris did, and he managed well enough with retired America.
America needs a new agenda for both working America and retired America. Any viable platform would support and probably improve upon both Social Security and Medicare. That is a no brainer. The harder task is to meet the needs, ethics, interests, and hopes and dreams of working America, as well as the middle class. That is a tall, immensely complicated order. Getting 50 percent to 55 percent of their votes in a given election will probably be sufficient. It is not as though a candidate needs 70 percent, or even 60 percent, to win.
But candidates and elected politicians cannot afford to focus on either middle-class or working-class voters. They must focus on them both, along with retired voters.
A family policy that provided paid parental leave and a choice between child care and a tax credit for stay-at-home parents would apply to both hard-working middle-class families and hard-working working-class families. Such a policy — I ran on it during my 2016 House campaign in Maryland — would cut across class lines.
A policy setting the minimum wage at $15 an hour, on the other hand, would not cut across class lines. That is basically a working class policy. Strengthening the National Labor Relations Board would also be chiefly a working-class policy since it would benefit the 7 percent of American workers in unions. Promoting tax deductions for state and local taxes, on the other hand, is primarily a middle-class tax deduction although wealthy Americans benefit from it and some working-class Americans do, too.
Finally, note that a political party or independent candidates who gave due respect to working-class issues, middle-class issues and retiree issues would succeed in presenting an intergenerational agenda to voters. No candidate wants to speak only to young or old voters. You have to do both.
Although voters do not vote only on issues of economic class — as there are issues related to gender, sex, sexuality, national origins, health and other factors — the time is right for all candidates and elected politicians to elevate the old topic of economic class to a higher plateau.
Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework," has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.