The Politics of Dignity
In October 2018, during the midterm elections, I paid a visit to Ohio, the midwestern swing state that had moved hardest toward Donald Trump two years earlier. My goal was to learn why Senator Sherrod Brown was running far ahead of his Republican opponent, winning back a lot of voters who had strayed from their traditional party.
The staunch pro-labor Democrat offered a compact sermon as we sat in the back seat of a Chevy Suburban riding toward his party’s state convention in Columbus.
“I think it’s all about the dignity of work,” he said. “I talk about how we value work. People who get up every day and work hard and do what we expect of them should be able to get ahead. I don’t think they hear that enough from Republicans or national Democrats.”
[George Packer: The throwback Democrat]
Brown won reelection that November—not by the huge margin he had in the polls when I visited, a margin he said at the time he didn’t believe himself, but solidly, by nearly seven points. The vote in Mahoning County, a union stronghold that includes Youngstown, offers an illustration of just what he accomplished. Barack Obama had won the county in a landslide with 63 percent in 2012. Hillary Clinton nearly lost it, winning just 50 percent. Brown won back most of the lost ground, earning 59 percent.
The broad idea of dignity and its specific connection to work has been on my mind ever since. The idea appealed to me because it rang true to the core idea of Catholic social thought—“the equal dignity of every person”—that helped shape my own politics long ago. But to see it used so explicitly in a campaign was instructive. The idea finds its power from a deep intuition that the anger in our public life, across many of our lines of division, arises from a felt denial of dignity.
Blue-collar workers of all races—very much including the white working class,
