Excerpted from Michael Lind of the New America Foundation;

Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

“…in the mid-twentieth-century glory days of American progressive-liberalism, upscale progressive “traitors to their class” were only part of a coalition that included populist farmers and militant industrial workers. The farmer-labor coalition had its own sources of funding—they didn’t depend on grants from philanthropic progressive foundations or rich sympathizers. And they had their own member-controlled organizations, including patronage-based local and state political party machines, not elite-created astroturf groups.

Benevolent donors, idealistic professionals, and reformist foundations sincerely struggle to better the lot of America’s Service Proles [workers in the service industries like fast food and Walmarts]—but with the latter as objects of charity, rather than as powerful, independent partners in a political coalition. And given the limits that self-interest imposes on idealism, there simply aren’t enough rich or highly-educated progressives in the top Eleven Percent willing to sacrifice their personal economic interests to their ideals.

The upshot is that the asymmetry of passion between the spirited right and the weak center-left is likely to continue indefinitely. The top-middle coalition on the right will be energetic and united in its campaign to cut spending on the poor, while the top-bottom coalition on the left will be hesitant and conflicted about more progressive taxation or redistribution. The situation is unlikely to change unless America’s multiplying Service Proles generate leaders of their own, from within their own ranks, and answerable to them.”