The pretend proletariat: Are the elites confusing themselves with labor?

More important, though, the prominence of college graduates in the new school of labor activism could make it difficult to find the sort of broad coalition that Democrats enjoyed during the heyday of organized labor. The somewhat incongruous enthusiasm of highly credentialed editorial assistants, graduate students, and non-profit employees might signal a restoration of class consciousness — or just alienate potential allies. Like the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, the version of organized labor that’s become fashionable recently risks becoming a kind of role-playing rather than a genuine working class movement.

You can see the electoral consequences of that dynamic in former bastions of the labor movement. Longtime Democratic incumbents in states like Ohio are sinking under the weight of a national agenda that seems hostile to fossil fuels, heavy industry, and the cultural preferences of the white working class. That’s not necessarily a problem in service fields or in cities like New York, where a unionization vote at a second Amazon warehouse is in progress. But it’s likely to be an obstacle in “brown” enterprises and the old industrial heartland.