“…from the Great Recession in 2008 to 2018, both gross domestic product and household income increased in Democratic districts and declined in Republican districts. Likewise, in educational attainment, the number of adults with a college degree grew significantly in Democratic districts compared to Republican districts, where it stayed roughly the same. While conservatives and progressives have always spoken to different sectors of the American economy, their audiences reversed. Progressives now controlled the places most central to economic power and prosperity, and in the process, many progressives have grown distant from the day-to-day struggles of working-class Americans.
Accompanying this shift was a transformation of progressive ideology from the interests of economic populism it historically represented to a social libertarianism and ultimately to the post-material and symbolic interests surrounding marginal identities–in short, identitarian politics.
These transformations began when the institutional carrier of progressive politics moved from labor union to universities and its chief advocates shifted from working-class liberals and socialists to middle-and upper middle class students, professors, and administrators. With these changes, the center of gravity within progressivism shifted to an orientation defined by the primacy of individual autonomy and self-determination, a distrust of all public authority, the abandonment of traditional religious, familial, and sexual norms, and an enthusiasm for social, sexual freedom, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism. By the 1980s, the critique of capitalism and advocacy on behalf of labor unions and the working class had largely receded from the docket. Not only had these new progressives become alienated from the old Left, they had become alienated from the values, beliefs, and habits of life of ‘middle America’ as well.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 239-240.