Inflation is down, unemployment is low, and the economy continues to grow. Yet many Americans are dissatisfied with the economy. A recent poll showed that just 36% of US adults approve of President Biden’s handling of the economy. With President Biden placing “Bidenomics” at the heart of his reelection campaign, understanding the reason behind this gap seems vital for crafting a successful campaign and shaping the future of the Democratic Party.

So why is there such pessimism? One key factor is the deep sense of precarity that countless middle-class and working-class Americans are experiencing, even though they may have stable jobs or even recently seen their wages rise. Many feel like they are just one tragedy or crisis away from slipping all the way down the economic ladder.

Long-term inflation in a few key areas, including healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, is likely a key driver of this sense of precarity. And while President Biden has proposed and even enacted some policies in these areas, these challenges continue to put great pressure on everyday Americans.

Healthcare premiums continue to swallow up a bigger and bigger part of people’s paychecks. Too many Americans face huge medical bills, burdensome debt, or the uncertainty of inadequate insurance. One illness or accident could be ruinous.

Meanwhile, the cost of buying a home has skyrocketed, particularly in cities and their most attractive suburbs. Rents keep rising, pricing many people out of the market, and a normal, modest home can now cost over a million dollars in many places from Washington DC to Seattle to Miami. For many, owning a home is out of reach, while for others, there is a struggle to secure any housing at all.

Childcare costs have also soared. In many places, childcare costs more than attending a public university. And parents do not have 18 years to prepare to take on these costs, as they do in saving for college. With so few Americans having access to adequate paid leave, the cost is often immediate (within weeks, or even days, of birth) and deeply unaffordable.

Of course, the cost of college still weighs heavily on parents, as colleges grow more and more expensive. And many millennials have their own student debt to worry about. The rising costs of housing and education also intersect, as the ability to move to certain (expensive) neighborhoods with good schools seems more important than ever, particularly as Catholic and other private schools become less accessible in many places.

For those who have followed the script provided by the reigning meritocratic ideology and secured stable professional work, anxiety is still pervasive. As Daniel Markovits writes in his book The Meritcroacy Trap, “Meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry.” Affording healthcare, housing, childcare, and every other necessity, while ensuring that their children have access to excellent educational opportunities, is fueling a culture of workism, materialism, resource/opportunity hoarding, and helicopter parenting. As Michael Sandel explains in The Tyranny of Merit, “Overbearing, helicopter parenting” is “an anxious but understandable response to rising inequality and the desire of affluent parents to spare their progeny the precarity of middle-class life.”

This sense of precarity, pressure, and anxiety is almost certainly contributing to the crisis of depression and sadness among teenage girls and the struggles so many boys and young men face. Given this overall climate, it is not surprising that many millennials are having fewer children than they intended or even none at all.

For those who do not have the right degrees and pedigree in our faux meritocracy, the pressures are stronger still. The traditional American Dream of owning a house in a safe neighborhood with a spouse and a couple of kids that attend good schools and a job that covers all the basic necessities can seem extraordinarily distant. And meritocratic ideology and its champions tell those whose dreams are shattered (either overtly or implicitly) that they are responsible for their fate—they should have studied more when they were a kid or developed the right skills for a postindustrial economy.

This is their message, even as the middle class shrinks, inequality deepens, and social mobility remains low. It is driven by a hubris that is at the heart of meritocratic ideology.  Sandel notes that “the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility.” This undermines solidarity and fosters arrogance and indifference. Elites struggle to see that, as Markovits puts it, meritocracy itself “concentrates advantage and sustains toxic inequalities”—that merit has become a false idol, a mechanism for a “caste order that breeds rancor and division.”

Among working class people, we have seen a collapse in marriage rates and adherence to organized religions. A growing number of people feel isolated, alienated, and anxious. We have an epidemic of loneliness. Deaths of despair are rising. In certain pockets of the country, working class men are seeing their life expectancies decline. Short-term inflation in key areas like food and transportation, despite its recent reduction, is still hitting hard, making it difficult for people to pay their bills, let alone dream of a brighter future for themselves and their loved ones.

All of this is fueling a big populist backlash that may only grow stronger. The education divide may deepen, threatening Democratic support among working-class voters and others without college degrees, including Black and Latino voters. President Biden’s strong natural ability to connect with many working-class people has likely been critical for a Democratic Party that has increasingly been dominated by its most highly educated and affluent members.

Further movement toward bourgeois, pro-corporate, technocratic liberalism—a hyperindividualistic, liberaltarian ideology that perpetuates privilege while pretending otherwise (hiding behind meritocratic myths)— threatens to disconnect the Democratic Party from the working-class and middle-class base it claims to champion, in favor of an elite that values autonomy, efficiency, and self-interest above solidarity and social justice. Everyday Americans see that these elites often view relationships through a contractual prism and only seem to offer real respect to those who share their class sensibilities, educational attainment, and material success, creating a chasm within the party and the country.

In recent years, we have seen companies led by these affluent liberals try to demonstrate their progressivism and supposed commitment to social justice by promising to pay for their employees’ abortions or selling merchandise that celebrates the identities of particular marginalized groups. When these same companies also engage in unionbusting, lobby to minimize corporate taxes, use deceptive marketing practices, charge junk fees, or engage in other actions that throw workers and consumers under the bus in order to maximize profits, many suspect that profit maximization was, in fact, the true motive behind all of their actions.

With the collapse of civil society and growing socioeconomic segregation, affluent liberals and working-class Democrats often seem to live in entirely different worlds. The quick rush to credentialism, scientism, and meritocratic ideology to defend the broken status quo has many working-class and middle-class people feeling like this is by design. And they know they are the ones who will suffer most from the reckless libertarian policies favored by elites.

President Biden cannot dislodge the immense power affluent liberals have in the Democratic Party. This requires structural political reform, including campaign finance reform that the Supreme Court would inevitably strike down. But he can help to alter the trajectory of the party by placing three core concepts into the heart of his campaign: dignity, respect, and solidarity. And he can draw on his Catholic faith and the personalist philosophy behind it to do so.

Work does not give a human being dignity. The dignity of the human person is innate. It is universal—it is equal in each person. It cannot be forfeited or stolen. But it can be denied. Political, social, and economic systems can reflect human dignity or trample upon it.

This is the foundation for a belief in the dignity of work. Martin Luther King Jr. explained that “whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.” Human beings can serve as co-creators with God in building the Kingdom and advancing the common good, where all people may flourish.

And our flourishing is tied up with the flourishing of others. Thus, King explains, “For the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.” We all have a right and responsibility to participate in the construction of the common good. And work that is done the right way, that allows a person to provide for themselves and their families, that contributes to human flourishing is a form of this type of participation, which is an essential ingredient in authentic freedom. Freedom is not mere choice and autonomy, but rather the conditions that allow human persons to reach our potential and flourish.

This type of work affirms the dignity and worth of the person. And it should confer respect—from others, as well as self-respect.

But it often does not. The pervasive meritocratic ideology creates hierarchies of winners and losers, what Chris Arande calls the “front row” and “back row” in his book Dignity, and it perpetuates the idea that this hierarchy is morally just. For those in the back row, “there’s a sense of having been left behind, of being forgotten—or, even worse, of being mocked and stigmatized by those who are moving on and up with the GDP.” Even many middle-class people, particularly those without college degrees, feel disrespected by elites.

Markovits argues that elites do not just monopolize “income, wealth, and power, but also industry, public honor, and private esteem.”  Pope Francis has decried a culture of indifference and the throwaway culture. He is critiquing not only unjust social systems, but also the lack of respect for people’s innate dignity that accompanies them.

Beyond this, when people have the ability and desire to work, but lack the opportunity, it is not uncommon for them to have a diminished sense of their own worth and dignity. Work can be an important source of meaning and purpose. We are social by nature—we want to build flourishing communities together. Without this, or when forced to work in jobs where human beings are treated as means rather than ends and basic rights are denied, it is easy for nihilism to emerge.

When we consider the opioid crisis, over 100,000 Americans dead from alcohol last year, and the staggering rates of depression, isolation, and loneliness—it is clear that the absence of dignified work is wreaking havoc. It is true that sometimes Americans base their sense of dignity far too much on what they do, rather than who they are, but recognizing this does not diminish the value of work that affirms human dignity.

Respect for every person and their fundamental worth and dignity inherently leads to a sense of solidarity. Even if the myth that we live in a meritocracy were true, it would not justify workers being denied their rights or being denied a life that reflects human dignity. The need to personalize work and workplaces by making sure people receive a living wage, fair treatment, sufficient family time, and proper working conditions would remain.

The need to expand economic democracy, so that workers can fully participate in the economy and society, rather than be mere subjects to the tyranny of profit maximization at any cost, would remain.

The need to address the widespread sense of economic precarity by expanding the middle class, completing the social safety net, and enacting other policies that reflect the universal destination of goods, would still be vital.

President Biden should place these goals at the heart of his campaign, but he should also be clear that the supposed meritocracy that far too many liberal (and conservative) elites support is not real and that the hubris, disrespect, and extreme individualism this ideology inevitably breeds are deeply harmful. He should echo Dr. King in affirming the dignity of work that far too many elites take for granted. He should demand respect for workers and their contributions, in addition to pursuing policies that reflect their dignity and value. The Democratic Party should not be the party of social and economic elites, but a party committed to an egalitarian vision of democracy, where there is widespread participation and mutual respect.

He can and should emphasize that our democracy will not survive on self-interest alone. It needs virtue. We need responsible citizens. We need democratic norms to resolve disputes effectively and justly. We need institutional reforms to foster these norms. We need to knit our communities back together again. We cannot achieve these goals without solidarity.

Extreme individualism has left people isolated and sad. Hopelessness, despair, and a deficit of meaning and purpose are widespread. People are trying to replace authentic connections and a sense of transcendent meaning with faux meritocratic success, consumerism, partisan politics, digital interactions, alcohol and drugs, or anything else that promises to do the trick. But none of these can replace what is disappearing.

Some have turned to politics as a form of therapy. Some treat politics as a substitute for religion. It has left them vulnerable to narrow forms of identity politics that seek to intensify divisions and treat every relationship and interaction as nothing but a struggle for power and control. As David Brooks recently explained, “People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.” He explains, “People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.”

President Biden can highlight the emptiness of trying to find purpose down these destructive paths, inviting us to embrace the shared project of advancing the common good instead. He can evoke the vision that catapulted his friend and predecessor Barack Obama to the national stage: “It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family.”

In his 2023 State of the Union address, Biden spoke of the dignity of work. He spoke about respect. He said that his economic plan was about investing in places and people that have been forgotten, building an economy where no one is left behind. Biden seems to get it. We are still in the Second Gilded Age. Much work remains to be done to end it.

Some of President Biden’s advisors will likely tell him to run on his record of economic growth and job creation, while maximizing choice and autonomy. He should highlight his accomplishments and explain the difference his policy achievements, from the American Rescue Plan to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to the Inflation Reduction Act, are making. And maybe some working-class voters can be replaced with affluent suburbanites who think the economy is great. But if Biden wants the Democratic Party to be a genuinely progressive party that truly represents the people it claims to represent, one true to its democratic and egalitarian principles, and one capable of building a durable majority coalition that can advance economic and social justice, he will place dignified work, respect for the dignity of all, and the need for greater community and solidarity at the heart of his campaign and the Democratic Party—and he will acknowledge that many are still in a precarious position and that there is much work left to do.