Priced Out of Progress

Trading Solidarity for Personal Fulfillment

Donkey Punch by Mr. Fish

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The Politics of Personal Growth

Liberals abandoned the working class. Then they replaced them.

Over the past few decades, a new kind of politics has taken hold in elite progressive circles. It’s fluent in therapy-speak, allergic to class analysis, and obsessed with the aesthetics of liberation. Class struggle has been quietly pushed offstage, replaced by lifestyle branding and curated selfhood. If it looks good on a podcast or fits in a carousel post, it qualifies as activism. Rent relief? That’s a little more complicated.

In a recent essay for The Atlantic, cultural critic Tyler Austin Harper offers a diagnosis for this shift. He calls it 'therapeutic libertarianism,' a fusion of market logic, self-help jargon, and the politics of boundless personal choice. It’s a worldview in which every constraint is an obstacle to "growth," every relationship a site for self-actualization, and every crisis a chance to optimize the brand called You. As Harper puts it, “We are all our own start-ups.”

In More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, the case study at the center of Harper’s essay, we see the familiar outline of a modern liberation narrative: a wealthy woman seeking freedom not from oppression, but from the boredom of privilege. Her open marriage isn’t a revolt against injustice—it’s a curated pursuit of “selfhood,” shaped by therapists, branded as growth. What Harper sees—and what many working people recognize immediately—isn’t freedom. It’s avoidance.

This kind of individualized liberation—whether through polyamory, wellness routines, curated identity, or trauma aesthetics—is often framed as inherently radical. But what makes it legible as politics at all is class. You need time, money, and cultural fluency to access this kind of freedom. And once class drops out of the conversation, liberation becomes something you buy, schedule, or post. Solidarity is replaced by the performance of becoming.

That diagnosis, as sharp as it is, only hints at the damage. When politics becomes a platform for elite self-expression, it doesn’t just fail to deliver material gains—it actively alienates the people most in need of them. Working people look at this version of progressivism and see something built for someone else. It sounds like moral superiority. It feels like condescension. And in the vacuum it leaves, the right makes its move.

The Rise of Professional-Class Liberalism

In Listen, Liberal, Thomas Frank charts how the Democratic Party stopped being the party of labor and became the party of the winners of the new economy: the credentialed, the mobile, the “creative class.” These were people whose politics were shaped not by struggle, but by success—engineers, lawyers, designers, consultants. Meritocrats who saw their professional accomplishments not just as proof of skill, but of virtue.

The result was a liberalism that no longer fought for the bottom. It preached fairness, but only within systems it refused to challenge. It celebrated mobility rather than stability, credentials over community. It replaced the working class with what Frank calls the “liberal class,” whose faith in markets and education allowed them to feel progressive while defending the very systems hollowing out the middle.

This shift wasn’t subtle—it was strategic. As Frank writes:

“To the liberal class, the economic concerns of working people are an embarrassment, a sign of backwardness. They believe in opportunity, not equality; in reform, not redistribution.”

In that worldview, solidarity becomes passé. Economic justice turns into a TED Talk about “access.” And the people who once made up the core of the Democratic base—factory workers, teachers, retail clerks, tradespeople—become strangers to their own supposed movement.

This is how you get a politics that platforms curated liberation while outsourcing the question of survival to gig apps and GoFundMe pages. A politics that knows how to tweet about justice but not bargain for it. A politics where everyone is told to “do the work,” but no one is building anything.

The betrayal is not just ideological. It’s visible, and people feel it. You can’t build a movement on the language of inclusion while excluding the people who most need it. And when working people look at progressivism and see a club for people with graduate degrees, what they hear isn’t justice—it’s contempt.

Into the Vacuum: The Right-Wing Redemption Myth

When liberal politics stops offering material hope, people go looking for it elsewhere. In the U.S., that "elsewhere" has taken the form of MAGA—a movement that claims to speak for the forgotten, the working man, the abandoned heartland. But what it offers isn't justice.

The collapse of class politics creates a vacuum, and the far right is always ready to fill it—with nostalgia, nationalism, and scapegoats. The emotional core of the pitch is simple: They took something from you, and we will get it back. The villain changes depending on the country—immigrants, globalists, cultural elites, the EU—but the narrative remains consistent: the reason you're suffering isn't capital, it's corruption. Not exploitation, but betrayal.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán consolidated power by framing liberal elites as decadent, foreign, and out of touch—while positioning himself as the protector of “traditional” Hungarians. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party weaponized the language of family and sovereignty to pull working-class voters away from the cosmopolitan center. Even Germany’s far-right AfD has made inroads in post-industrial regions once loyal to the left, not by solving economic problems, but by giving them a face to punch.

In the U.S., Trumpism follows the same playbook. It wraps plutocratic policy in working-class aesthetics: trucker hats, rust belt rallies, a billion-dollar con performed in a diner booth. And it works—not because the right is offering real solutions, but because the left stopped offering any at all. What MAGA offers instead isn’t justice. It’s revenge—directed at other victims.

This isn’t an endorsement of that reaction. It’s a warning. In a landscape where the left is more fluent in self-expression than solidarity, the right doesn't need to win on policy. It just needs to look like it’s listening.

Cosmetic Solidarity

To the professional-class liberal, the crisis of inequality isn’t ignored—it’s branded. Today’s institutions are filled with highly paid experts in harm mitigation and representation management. Entire departments are built around the performance of justice: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, HR-led listening sessions, six-figure consultants promising to help organizations “hold space.”

None of this is inherently wrong. Inclusion matters. So does representation. But representation without redistribution is just optics. And when these efforts become the substitute for material progress—rather than a companion to it—they serve power more than they challenge it.

The result is a kind of professionalized empathy industry. One where Black and brown C-suite staff are celebrated in company newsletters while janitors of all races fight for healthcare. Where organizations will fire someone for saying the wrong thing faster than they’ll raise anyone’s wages. Where the language of trauma, harm, and identity is weaponized to silence criticism while real exploitation rolls on uninterrupted.

This is how inequality adapts, not how it ends. The people making decisions stay the same; they just talk about their privilege more fluently. They attend anti-racism workshops at institutions where the lowest-paid workers remain invisible. They recite land acknowledgments before breaking ground on another luxury development. They update the language of power, not the structure of it.

None of this addresses the root problem: the material conditions of those left behind. Symbolic progress is easier to scale, cheaper to implement, and far more brand-safe than solidarity. And that’s the point. It makes people feel seen, without threatening anything that matters.

What Solidarity Really Looks Like

The answer isn’t to drop identity. It’s to ground it. A just politics doesn’t pit class against race, gender, or sexuality—it weaves them together into something durable. Because in a world where housing is secure, wages are fair, healthcare is guaranteed, and time isn’t devoured by survival, the politics of resentment loses its grip. It’s harder to build a moral panic out of bathroom access when the people’s bills are paid and the community has each other’s backs.

In 1969, Fred Hampton helped organize the original Rainbow Coalition, a revolutionary alliance of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords—a Puerto Rican street gang turned revolutionary political group fighting displacement, police violence, and colonial neglect—and the Young Patriots Organization, a group of white working-class southerns mostly from Appalachia. These groups didn’t ignore their differences. They named them, respected them, and worked to build power across them. What united them wasn’t identity—it was material reality. They organized free health clinics, breakfast programs, eviction defenses, and labor solidarity across racial lines. They didn’t ask to be included; they demanded to be fed, housed, protected, and heard. They weren't chasing personal fulfillment; they challenged landlords, cops, and capital directly. And they knew the only way to get what they needed was to get it together. Fred Hampton said it best:

“We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're going to fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism. You fight capitalism with socialism.”

Hampton didn’t ask anyone to check their identity at the door. He asked them to come in anyway—and fight together for what none of them could win alone. The Rainbow Coalition understood that special interest politics organized around ascriptive hierarchies—like race, gender, or ethnicity—couldn’t deliver liberation on their own. They didn’t want to raise the ceiling for a few. They wanted to raise the floor for everyone.

That kind of solidarity doesn’t go viral today. It doesn’t fit into a carousel post or a branded workshop—not because it lacks aesthetic appeal, but because it threatens the class of people who’ve reshaped progressivism into a shield against structural change. It’s not just ignored; it’s guarded against. The last time a multiracial working-class movement like this gained real momentum, the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton in his bed. That wasn’t a mistake. It was a message. This kind of politics is dangerous—not because it’s radical in theory, but because it works.

We Forgot How to Walk

I am not speaking out against therapy. Or sexual freedom. Or self-discovery. People deserve all of that—and more. But the idea that self-optimization can stand in for political struggle is a lie sold by people who would rather talk about themselves than power.

The problem isn’t polyamory. It’s pretending your polyamory is praxis. The problem isn’t healing. It’s pretending your healing is justice. What liberal elites have offered in place of solidarity is a lifestyle—an aesthetic of compassion that demands nothing, changes nothing, and costs nothing beyond your attention. A politics of podcasts and posture. A theater of virtue.

They replaced the union hall with the retreat center, the picket line with the panel discussion. And they did it not out of ignorance, but convenience. Because this new politics flatters the people who practice it. It makes them feel righteous, evolved, on the right side of history—without ever forcing them to challenge the systems that made them comfortable in the first place.

This isn’t a politics for the working class. It never was. It is, as Thomas Frank would remind us, a politics built by winners, for winners. People whose lives can be narrated through professional growth and personal branding, and who imagine that justice is a matter of individual effort and the right vocabulary.

But the rest of us know better. We know that no amount of language work will cover a rent hike. That there’s no app for solidarity. That freedom isn’t something you schedule—it’s something you fight for, shoulder to shoulder, with people you might not like, might not understand, but who are up against the same machine.

So no, we don’t need a politics that tells us to find ourselves. We need one that helps us find each other. The progressive movement can walk and chew gum at the same time. But somewhere along the way, it forgot how to walk. It chews—endlessly—on language, identity, etiquette, and ritual. It blows big beautiful bubbles shimmering with the language of change and none of its substance. But it goes nowhere. Because it abandoned the only road that ever led anywhere: class struggle.

Only the people can save the people. But first, we have to stop applauding ourselves for not saving anyone.