Note on American politics today and the social bases of center and left

“Why is it so hard for democracy to deal with inequality?” Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times columnist, Feb. 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/democracy-inequality-thomas-piketty.html?comments#commentsContainer (4 “recommends”):

Edsall is right that we have two competing elites. One is attached to universities and their law schools, and the other to business elites who are not lawyers or other professionals. That is what Hilary vs. Trump was about. 

But he fails to mention that a substantial number of Americans now are highly educated but lack good employment opportunities. They are the new intellectual proletariat and precariat. 

This group includes the large number of adjunct professors who have PhDs but work for low pay and without the chance to do the kind of research and writing they were trained for. It includes college-educated people in debt peonage, and those who fail to find good jobs and work as baristas. These were the people behind Occupy Wall Street, the most important radical left movement in recent years, which led to the Sanders campaign. (Which Edsall does not mention).

It's also important that voters on the left wing of the Democratic Party that almost seems newly discovered in the last election season recognize the ways in which the Party has consistently used a set of cultural issues including those associated with identity politics to co-opt the left. Issues of racism and sexism are formulated in ways that basically only appeal to professional elites. One can see this same division in comparing the protesters associated with Black Lives Matter to the very different Affirmative Action-oriented college student "radical" (angry and militant) liberal crowd.