Is Blue Labour a Model for Rust Belt Democrats?

These are dispiriting times for those who want to turn the page on Kamala Harris’s defeat and grow the Democratic coalition. Swamped again by Trump’s transgressions, most Democrats are grasping for new ways to denounce his abuse of executive power and extreme tariffs, instead of advancing a vision of genuine national renewal. While the party faithful may seek solace in special election victories like Susan Crawford’s in Wisconsin, just 10 percent of voters think Democrats are effectively responding to Trump, according to Blueprint, a liberal polling firm.

Some House Democrats, however, are trying to forge ahead with a politics that confronts working-class disillusionment with the liberal establishment. Following in the footsteps of former Senator Sherrod Brown, who recently wrote for The New Republic that it is “an electoral and a moral imperative” for Democrats to regain workers’ trust, the "New Economic Patriots" group, led by pragmatic populists Chris Deluzio (D-PA) and Pat Ryan (D-NY), combines an appeal to communitarianism and economic patriotism with a stance on corporate power that hearkens back to the party’s anti-monopoly tradition.

Yet these Democrats are partly hamstrung by the rhetoric and positions that continue to define both the activist left and liberal elite, particularly in regard to immigration, public safety, and identity politics.

After a slew of autopsies explaining how Democrats lost their working-class base (including growing numbers of nonwhite workers), there is still considerable pressure within the party’s ranks to simply take the opposite stance of Trump’s. This has made the party’s congressional stars and presidential aspirants reluctant to face the problems and blind spots that discredited progressive governance in the eyes of lower-income voters.

This dilemma similarly troubles other center-left parties across the Atlantic, perhaps most acutely Britain’s Labour Party. While under Keir Starmer’s leadership Labour finally brought an end to the Conservatives’ 14-year rule, his government is now losing support to the right-populist Reform UK, headed by the media provocateur and veteran Brexiteer, Nigel Farage. That has created a window for the party’s Blue Labour faction, which forthrightly criticizes economic and cultural globalization, to flex some muscle over the party’s direction, despite having just four parliamentary members. (The group’s political and intellectual umbrella extends beyond parliament, and other parts of Labour echo their themes.) Blue Labour’s hope is that by seriously addressing the sociocultural dislocation and hardship that afflicts Britain’s working-class towns and fading industrial cities, it can help stop Britain’s slide toward Farage’s familiar blend of libertarian and nativist ideas, typically advanced under the cover of rolling back the “nanny state.”

Despite a desire to meet the electorate’s mood, gaining traction under this “left-conservative” banner will be difficult. Ideological polarization along regional lines, once a markedly American phenomenon, has spread to the UK and Western Europe. Like their Democratic cousins, Blue Labour is a fledgling cohort in a party now dominated by upper- and upper-middle-class professionals who, besides major multinationals and China’s enterprises, have benefited disproportionately from globalization. At the moment, neither faction is poised to realign its party internally and recreate a social-democratic platform attuned to family life and working-class mores.

Democratic insurgents nevertheless may learn from Blue Labour’s more fleshed out philosophy. The resonance with an older strand of American liberalism, combined with Blue Labour’s unhesitating focus on social “bonds” and “reciprocity,” shows there is another way to respond to the rebellion against unchecked globalization sweeping Western societies. While the political right, as usual, would have us believe we are in an “anti-government” moment, it is clear many voters have low trust in all institutions, including economic sectors which have provided handsome returns to a select few but little of the development that raised human welfare in past decades. By striking, in the vein of Blue Labour, a more assertive pose against market abuses, unaccountable government, and globalization’s atomizing effects, might Democrats find a better path to “bring their party home”?

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In some ways, Blue Labour owes its relevance to dissatisfaction with post-Covid conditions. As with the Democrats between 2018 and 2021, Labour capitalized on the disarray of its opponents in government, their mismanaged pandemic policies, and their parade of broken promises. Yet it is dogged by many of the same issues that plagued the Conservatives: Discontent over Brexit’s implementation, high energy costs, persistent inflation, the ongoing surge in immigrants, and weak investment in public services and British industry. Should support for Starmer buckle further, Blue Labour may become a central player in determining how the reform-minded left can reclaim the “common ground.”

Blue Labour, however, is not exactly a new offshoot. Although its profile has risen lately, it was conceived in 2010 amid the fallout of the great financial crisis by the heterodox leftwing intellectual Maurice Glasman—then a new peer in the House of Lords. Glasman’s star rose and fell sharply thereafter. He became a noted critic of the financial sector and deindustrialization who decried modernity’s endless commodification of the self. Much as Senator Brown argued stateside, the dignity of work encompassed more than decent pay and benefits. Not only was Britain’s social fabric frayed by the erosion of workers’ rights, Glasman stressed—the country was haunted by the loss of individual purpose, civic pride, familial traditions, and industrial heritage that seemed to inexorably follow offshoring.

The spotlight on Blue Labour continued while Glasman served as an informal advisor to Labour leader Ed Miliband, who had succeeded Gordon Brown following the end of Brown’s premiership. A community-focused opposition to the regime of austerity imposed by Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne briefly raised hopes that Labour would reconsider some of its concessions to Thatcherism, particularly in the areas of deregulation and privatization. But Glasman’s influence soon waned. In addition to criticizing Miliband’s timid posture on the economy, he ran afoul of left-wing activists and progressive media for calling for a halt to liberalized immigration, a key dimension of globalized supply chains and increasingly flexible labor markets.

Explaining his position in 2011, Glasman told The Guardian that, “The free movement of labor is a bosses’ agenda…they benefit from cheap nannies…and from the general supply of cheap skilled labor.” It was a pointed but fair criticism of a system that partly grew from the decimation of the country’s famously combative trade unions.

Following the accession of Poland and several other central and southern European countries to the EU in 2004, the UK’s immigration levels soared; this came on top of a steady uptick in migration from the country’s former colonies. The neoliberal consensus insisted that more immigration was essential to economic growth, but in a flagging economy a widening pool of desperate workers seemed ill-advised to Glasman and his allies.

The trouble was that Glasman had sounded off on a sensitive issue already exploited by the far-right. The communal aspects of working-class life had indeed been transformed by an individualistic economic philosophy whose credo, belying Cameron’s Big Society rhetoric, was essentially, “every man for himself.” But with government spending cuts to education and unemployment bearing down on a new, more diverse and cosmopolitan generation, Glasman’s group was portrayed by others on the left as either reactionary or, at best, one that had mistakenly “normalized” right-wing and illiberal talking points.

Like populist Democrats from Rust Belt districts, Blue Labour seemed to misunderstand the future of progressive politics. The battles over globalization and the significance of core industries and local traditions were allegedly over; advances in tech alongside the growing salience of identity made it harder for young people to critique global consumerism and the increasing commercialization of multicultural values. Glasman, for his part, was immovable. His repeated overtures to culturally conservative constituencies—including blue-collar voters who had drifted to the English Defence League, a far-right group organized by Tommy Robinson—temporarily ostracized Blue Labour from Labour’s coalition.

More than ten years on, though, Blue Labour’s mission has been relit. As in America, atomization, staggering economic inequality, and a deep sense of national decline only weigh more heavily on workers of all backgrounds. The growing unpopularity of identity politics, meanwhile, suggests it can no longer catalyze and sustain progressive organizing on the scale it once did. A desire to mesh respect for pluralism with a stronger defense of the public interest in all its aspects animates working people who disdain the right’s wrecking ball but also recoil from the reductive and essentialist thinking of the sectarian left.

MP Dan Carden, founder of Blue Labour’s new parliamentary group, exemplifies this “post-neoliberal” outlook. Carden was previously part of the Socialist Campaign Group and revealed in 2021 that his discomfort over his sexual identity had driven him to alcoholism in his 20s. In an era of identitarian checkboxes and litmus tests, Carden might have been expected to toe a progressive line on every issue. But, perhaps sensing the millennial left had succumbed to the geographic polarization and symbolic politics it once sought to overcome, Carden formally took up Blue Labour’s baton this January in a bid to reconnect left-wing politics, as Glasman sought, with the ideas, people, and regions that make social democracy popular and possible.

That means embracing a more activist state that balances environmental concerns with industrial protection, stronger labor rights, and public investment in depressed regions. But from Blue Labour’s perspective it also means coming to terms with issues that have frayed public trust, from business corruption and failures of government oversight to unpopular immigration rates, rising violent crime, and the lack of transparency around gender medicine.

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On both sides of the Atlantic, critics of this overall approach believe it inevitably leads to capitulating to the populist right on cultural and social issues. In such polarized times, it is more often a liability than an advantage to challenge sacred cows. No smear in progressive circles is more effective than accusing one of having betrayed “marginalized communities.”

Still, progressives who want an economic system based on fair trade, fair competition, inclusive development, and robust labor protections can no longer ignore how global migration and other so-called wedge issues are actually perceived by restive electorates. As Denmark’s governing Social Democrats, frustrated red-state Democrats, and public intellectuals like Wolfgang Streeck have pointed out, a politics that refuses to reckon with globalization’s discontents is a politics of exclusion and dismissal by another name.

It is also self-defeating. Whatever its purported aims, a party of the liberal-left that is limited to a handful of starkly unequal metropolises is not really invested in expanding its coalition and delivering broadly inclusive reforms. And it either forgets or chooses to ignore that the minorities and low-income workers whom it pledges to lift up have no adequate representation in the districts it forfeits to the hard right.

The case made by Blue Labour and more tentatively by the “New Economic Patriots” is that it is legitimate, and perhaps essential, to once again think of “social justice” within the framework of the nation-state. This is not the equivalent of rejecting all the sociocultural transformations of recent decades. Modern societies are ever-changing and have generally become more accepting of ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity; sexual and gender identity; abortion; disability rights; and drug use. Despite the far-right’s worrisome pull, Western countries are more pluralistic than they have ever been. Most of these developments have helped advance the vital goals of social equality and equal protection before the law; most people, including those on the center-right, don’t want to revert to the regimentation, legalized discrimination, and repressive taboos that governed the lives of past generations.

At the same time, many citizens don’t want to sacrifice their political voice on the altar of maximalist liberty. Nor do they want to surrender their own ability to reason through complex issues that sectarian interest groups consider off-limits. And they certainly don’t want to bear the brunt of economic, technological, and cultural change while the wealthiest individuals and zip codes either reap the benefits or are shielded from the ramifications. Legions of working-class families have been cast aside by globalized markets, the economic dominance of the well-connected, and merciless competition for limited cultural capital. As Gini coefficients rise and life chances between classes and regions continue to diverge, more workers are rejecting the idea that greater global “openness” and “competitiveness” is the antidote to stagnation.

Accordingly, they are realizing that one’s quality-of-life isn’t reducible to the e-commerce available at one’s finger tips. The condition of one’s surroundings—whether it encourages family formation, community-oriented businesses, and associational life—matters. The pace, scope, and tenor of sociodemographic change is likewise salient. It cannot be relentless and unguided, as it tends to overwhelm communities already struggling with a dearth of good schools, desirable housing, and adequate healthcare.

This is where progressives’ Manichean view of immigration politics has become an obstacle to sensible and humane reform that accords with voter preferences. Since Covid, there had been a growing exasperation with lax borders and sanctuary city policies even among Democrats’ normally loyal supporters. While some economists insist that high immigration under Biden was good for growth—and that inflation would have been higher without this surge of labor into industries like construction, warehousing, food service, and food processing plants—reports of pervasive migrant child labor and strained local resources undercut their optimistic portrait.

Unfortunately, Democrats still have not faced up to these problems and have been mostly silent about the fact that the immigration rate actually exceeded its peaks in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. This pattern of avoidance merely plays into the hands of Trump and his sycophants, who are indeed implementing draconian and increasingly illegal immigration enforcement policies.

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As Trump overturns the global system of the last several decades, it will be tempting for Democrats to solely excoriate him for the economic and diplomatic fallout. The central question for Democrats, though, is whether they can offer a vision of positive government that confronts, without hesitation, the working class’s exhaustion with globalization’s endless churn. Many progressives have invested a lot in—and have persuaded their donor networks to support—a politics that elevates group identity and “post-national” beliefs over a shared American experience.

By now, however, the Democratic Party should recognize, as a few of its sister parties in Europe have, that this is a recipe for defeat. The Rust Belt Democrats who want to revive their party are right: If the party’s true purpose is to champion workers and promote stable, fruitful lives, it needs to reckon with all the reasons why regular people are skeptical of its intentions.

Standing up to Trump, DOGE, and powerful business lobbies that want to eliminate the last pillars of the New Deal won’t be enough to overcome that skepticism. Trump’s deft polarization of key issues has made it unfashionable and risky to affirm the importance of place, social cohesion, and national belonging. But that doesn’t change the fact that social democracy can’t be advanced without an understanding of why these values matter in politics and why they continue to resonate strongly—for the left behind, for our newest citizens, for young people with dreams to raise a family. A progressive movement that is finally willing to recognize and preserve the conditions which make communities thrive—above all the social trust that underpins belief in common purpose and distributive justice—has a far greater chance of winning power across the country.

Justin H. Vassallo is a writer and researcher specializing in American political development, political economy, party systems, and ideology. He is also a columnist at Compact magazine.