Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause - Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift - Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.

This has bewildered and dismayed liberals - and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," he said.

He continued: "Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren't convinced by it.

She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be "laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class".

This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.

Words of blood and thunder resonated

Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders' claims, saying:

"[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime - saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line."

But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?

Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people's lived experience - more effectively than Trump's right-wing populism.

Harris's genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages.

And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow's criticism of the left as "too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures" after Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election loss.

By contrast, Trump's words of blood and thunder hit the spot - not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier.

The greatest threat to America, he said, was from "the enemy from within". He defined them as: "All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that's a bigger enemy than China and Russia."

Harris's attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly.

In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump's emphasis on law and order and border control.

Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.

This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.

Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns.

In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media news feeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.

Is populism the new class?

In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.

These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement.

In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.

The language of populism - the people versus the elites - is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.

Trump's political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots.

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," he told a Veteran's Day rally last year.

He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages.

There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the "morals of an alley cat", as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.

The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the "laptop class", as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the "deep state" (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).

According to Trump's narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.

Australian populism

In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that "Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better".

The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese - whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion - is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year's election campaign.

The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so.

• First published in The Conversation
• George H Morgan is Associate Professor Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

The sick, the poor, and the outcasts were high on his priority list. Thus, churches (being the extension of Jesus' ministry), should focus their efforts on those exact same people.

But the data says that is not happening. Just the opposite in fact.

Religion in 21st century America has become an enclave for people who have done everything "right."

They have college degrees and marriages and children and middle-class incomes.

For those who don't check all those boxes, religion is just not for them.

The conclusions are unmistakable: Religion has become a luxury good, and that's leaving most of society on the fringes yet again.

Let's start with that old chestnut that I roll out from time to time — the basic relationship between education and religious disaffiliation.

This is 15 years of the Cooperative Election Study. These samples visualized here represent over 570,000 total responses, and in many years, the individual sample size is north of 60,000.

It doesn't take a statistical wizard to figure out the general trend line here.

People with higher levels of education are less likely to identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular when it comes to religion.

Yes, if you include atheists and agnostics, the trend reverses itself.

But nonreligious people are not just atheists and agnostics.

In fact, most nonreligious people are nothing in particular when it comes to religion.

More educated people are more likely to claim a religious affiliation on surveys.

It's true in every single wave of the Cooperative Election Study. It's also the case in the Nationscape survey, which has 477,000 respondents. They even have 4,000 people with doctoral degrees in their sample.

The most likely to be non-religious? Those who didn't finish high school.

As education increases, so does religious affiliation.

The group with the highest level of religious affiliation is those with a master's degree. I think this is likely due to the fact that the majority of folks with master's degrees are in not purely academic pursuits. Instead, they earn graduate degrees in things like education and business.

Of those with doctorates, 24% are non-religious.

That's the same rate as those with a four-year college degree.

Again, it's hard to look at these numbers and make some big claims about how education chases people away from religion.

Obviously, affiliation is just one piece of the puzzle, though. Religious attendance is another key component to the religiosity story.

So, I did the same general analysis with the CES data, but this time just focused on those who attend religious services weekly. Again, all 15 waves.

Their trend is just as unmistakable: Those who are the most likely to attend services weekly are those with a graduate degree.

Those with a high school diploma or less are the least likely to attend.

And these aren't small differences, either.

The last few years have seen nearly a 10-point gap in attendance from the bottom to the top of the education scale.

Let's take this a step further and inject income into the mix as well.

So, I divided respondents into those with a high school diploma or less and those with a four-year college degree or more and then calculated the share who attend religious services weekly across the income spectrum.

The first to note is that college-educated people attend church at higher rates than those with a high school diploma or less.

That's consistently the case across almost all income brackets.

A few little squirrely things happen at the very top end of the income spectrum, but that's probably due to small sample size.

But notice the overall shape of the orange lines, especially in the last few years of the Cooperative Election Study.

They are curvilinear in shape — meaning low on the edges and high in the middle. That's certainly the case in 2016, 2020 and 2022.

That tells an interesting story about the interaction of income and religious attendance.

The group that is the most likely to attend services are not the poor nor the wealthy. Instead, it's people who smack in the middle of the income distribution.

This analysis points to the following conclusion: The people who are the most likely to attend services this weekend are those with college degrees making $60K-$100K. In other words, middle-class professionals.

Let's throw another factor into the mix now — marital status. The imagined ideal for many for a good American life is a college degree, a good job, and stable marriage.

Does religion have any place for those who are not married? Or are divorced or separated?

The Cooperative Election Study only asks about current marital status, so if someone has been divorced and remarried, that wouldn't really show up in this data.

But, good gracious, this is a crystal-clear result.

Married people are much more likely to be in a religious service than those who are divorced, separated, or never married.

And these are not small gaps, either.

Among 40-year-old married people in the sample, nearly 30% are attending services weekly.

Among those who are separated, divorced or never married — it's half that rate: just 15%.

That gap persists all the way through the life course, too.

Even among 60-year-olds, it's still there.

About 30% of married retired folks are in churches; it's just 20% of those who are not married. Marriage leads to much higher levels of religiosity — at any age.

One last little bit of analysis before I stop; just put a finer point on this.

I divided the sample into four groups based on married or not married and parents of children or not, then calculated the share attending weekly.

The clear outlier here is folks who are married with children.

Among those who fit both criteria and are under 30, 37% attend weekly.

That does begin to decline as the age category moves up. I am guessing that's because folks with children tend to be less religious later in life, but that's just a hunch.

Among those who are married without children, attendance is fairly high in their mid-20s.

But then it drops down to being no different than those who are not married, have no children, or are not married but are parents.

These results are hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith who is concerned about the large state of American society.

Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a "proper" life: college degree, middle-class income, married with children.

If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don't.

This is also troublesome for American democracy, as well.

At its best, religion is a place where people from various economic, social, racial and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith.

It's a place to build bridges with folks who are different than you.

Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best.

Instead, it's become a hospital for the healthy, an echo chamber for folks who did everything "right," which means that it's seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way.

Do I think that houses of worship have done this on purpose? Generally speaking, no. But they also haven't actively refuted this narrative.

I was always told that the job of a preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Maybe we need a lot more of the latter going forward.

• Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience.
• First published in ReligionUnplugged. Republished with permission.

On a plane on his return to Europe from a three-nation South American visit, Pope Francis was asked by a reporter why he had hardly ever spoken about the problems of the "working, tax-paying" middle class.

Francis offered a rare papal mea culpa, thanking the reporter for his "good correction".

"You're right. It's an error of mine not to think about this," he said.

"The world is polarised. The middle class becomes smaller. The polarisation between the rich and poor is big. This is true. And, perhaps this has led me to not take account of this (the problems of the middle class)," he said.

Francis said he spoke about the poor often because they were so numerous.

But he noted that ordinary working people had "great value".

"I think you're telling me about something I need to do. I need to do delve further into this . . . ," he said

The Pope is due to visit Cuba and the United States in September.

On the papal plane, he said he was willing to have a dialogue with Americans who have seen his criticism of the global economic system and capitalism as an attack on their way of life.

Asked about the Greek crisis, he said "it would be too simple to say that the fault is only on one side".

"I hope that they find a way to resolve the Greek problem and also a way to have oversight so that the same problem will not fall on other countries.

"This will help us move forward because this path of loans and debts, in the end, it never ends."

Sources

• Reuters
• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Vatican Radio

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim told the Catholic Association of Latino Leaders in Houston that his idea would mean longer work hours, and would also involve delaying retirement until 70 or 75.

But he said it would mean people having more free time with their families or for personal enrichment.

He told a crowd of about 200 that in a time of recent economic crises, countries need to focus on strengthening the middle class as well as health care systems and education.

"What is important is that people earn more and that more middle classes are formed," said Slim.

He spoke for more than an hour on how to better the plight of Latino workers and Latino-owned businesses.

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