While suburban knowledge workers make up a small portion of the electorate and an even smaller percentage of the national population, they have come to hold a disproportionate amount of political power — especially within the Democratic Party. This cohort tends to vote in high numbers, contribute to campaigns, engage in issue-based advocacy, and receive outsized media attention.
Engineers, tech executives, scientists, lawyers, and academics in postindustrial, high-tech enclaves across the country — from the Route 128 to the Research Triangle and Silicon Valley — broadly share a political agenda that combines economic and cultural issues. They generally favor environmental protection, low taxes, freedom of choice, promotion of high-tech industry, education as a means to advancement, and expertise as a solvent for social problems. Richard Florida, who initially coined the term “creative class” to describe this constituency, characterizes their politics as “generally liberal-minded.”
Above all, he argues, knowledge workers are “staunchly meritocratic” and opposed to “inequality of opportunity.” While that commitment has at times driven them to favor collective remedies to social problems, at other points, it has provoked sharp antipathy toward labor unions.
Such opposition to one of the New Deal’s principal tenets confirms one thing: though American liberalism hasn’t disintegrated since the 1960s, it’s undergone a clear metamorphosis, reshaping its home in the Democratic Party along the way.
The roots of the professional class’s growth go much deeper than is immediately evident. In fact, they go back to the New Deal itself. Often depicted as the heyday of social democracy in the United States, the New Deal did consist of initiatives such as the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and the Works Progress Administration, which brought factory workers under the Democratic tent.
But at the same time the New Deal solidified support from generations of industrial workers, it also initiated a set of policies and ideas that would eventually empower suburban knowledge workers by giving them substantial privileges and resources. These policies exacerbated forms of structural inequality that have defined and plagued American society ever since.
In the effort to create economic security and opportunity and stabilize market forces, bureaucrats under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman developed a range of public policies to encourage single-family homeownership for whites outside central cities. Black and brown families received no such privileges. As historians and other scholars have carefully documented, the result — postwar suburbanization — was systemic residential segregation by race and class.