There was an unintentionally revealing moment in acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing last week. After Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Blanche whether he and President Donald Trump are friends, the leader of the United States Department of Justice replied, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself and saying he “was his lawyer.”

Blanche previously defended Trump in three criminal cases brought while the president was out of office, but he is emphatically not supposed to be Trump’s lawyer right now. As acting attorney general — Blanche currently leads the DOJ because the attorney general’s job is vacant and Blanche is the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general (DAG) — Blanche’s client is the United States, not the person who happens to occupy the White House. 

But it’s easy to see why he misspoke: Blanche has largely acted as Trump’s hammer since he was confirmed as the DOJ’s No. 2 official, overseeing numerous prosecutions of Trump’s perceived enemies. Now Trump wants to promote him to the DOJ’s top job — a sign of Trump’s confidence in his former criminal defense lawyer turned personal enforcer.

It’s unusual for a president to put his own defense lawyer in such a powerful position — indeed, it’s unusual for a president to have a criminal defense lawyer at all. But Trump has a long string of attorneys who’ve defended him and his companies against an equally long string of criminal allegations ranging from tax fraud, to falsifying business records, to illegally taking classified documents, to charges arising from his failed attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election. 

And he’s put at least five of those criminal defense lawyers in top federal jobs. 

Trump’s decision to turn much of his criminal legal team into powerful government officials matters for two big reasons. The first is that two members of that team, Blanche and Solicitor General John Sauer, are leaders within the Justice Department. Next to the military, there is no more fearsome government institution than the DOJ, which has the power to arrest people and try them for federal crimes. 

The DOJ is supposed to exercise this authority with restraint — and often with restraints imposed by the Constitution itself — but Blanche has used the Justice Department’s power against Trump’s political enemies who appear to have committed no crime and removed constraints on Trump and his Justice Department, all while Sauer has worked consistently to convince the Supreme Court to remove other constraints on Trump.

Meanwhile, three of Trump’s former criminal lawyers, Emil Bove, Justin Smith, and Matthew Schwartz, now have lifetime appointments as US Court of Appeals judges, placing them one rung on the judicial ladder down from the Supreme Court. The judiciary, of course, is the branch of government that is supposed to prevent the president from breaking the law, so every Trump loyalist appointed to this branch weakens the remaining legal constraints on Trump and his administration.

Trump, of course, isn’t the only president to place close confidants in the Justice Department or the federal bench. President John F. Kennedy famously named his brother attorney general. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Abe Fortas, who represented him in a 1948 election dispute, to the Supreme Court in 1965.

But Trump’s decision to place someone willing to pursue his personal vendettas in charge of the Justice Department is, at the very least, a break with post-Watergate norms established to prevent the DOJ from becoming a political weapon. And Fortas, who resigned in disgrace after fewer than four years on the bench, is more of a cautionary tale than a model of good governance.

Although the current Supreme Court is dominated by conservative Republicans, some of these justices do break with Trump on questions that divide the Republican Party — such as whether Trump should unilaterally impose high tariffs on many nations. But if Trump gets to turn his personal cronies into justices, that could change quickly. A judiciary controlled by MAGA loyalists means that all remaining checks on Trump’s authority could end. Many of his former-lawyers-turned-appointees are already working to make an unchecked Trump administration a reality.

How are Trump’s former personal lawyers already reshaping American legal norms?

Smith, who worked on the Trump v. United States immunity case, was confirmed last month. And Schwartz, who worked on the false documents case that led to Trump’s conviction, joined the bench last week. So there’s not much to say about these two men’s record in federal office — yet.

But Blanche, Bove, and Sauer have all displayed ruthless cunning in their efforts to advance Trump and his causes.

Blanche has been DAG since March 2025, a role that oversees the federal government’s criminal prosecutions and its 93 regional US attorneys’ offices. He’s led the entire Justice Department since April, after former Attorney General Pam Bondi — another of Trump’s former personal lawyers — left office.

So Blanche oversaw several dubious federal prosecutions targeting people Trump perceives as enemies, including criminal proceedings targeting former FBI Director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. There’s also evidence that Blanche has played an unusually direct role in the Justice Department’s decision to bring meritless charges against prominent Democrats.

In May 2025, for example, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, showed up at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked to tour it. He was briefly let inside the gate, where he was confronted by about a dozen law enforcement officers and asked to leave, which he did.

But then one of these officers received a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows the officer turning to his colleagues after the call and announcing, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.” That deputy attorney general, of course, was Blanche. (In a September court filing, DOJ confirmed that officers arrested Baraka “after consulting with the Deputy Attorney General.”)

Yet, despite Blanche’s apparent decision to personally order Baraka’s arrest, the DAG forgot to check whether Baraka had actually done something that could support criminal charges. The mayor was only charged with misdemeanor trespassing, and those charges were dismissed two weeks later. At the court hearing formally dropping these charges, a federal magistrate judge admonished prosecutors for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.”

Blanche also unsuccessfully attempted to establish Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” which would have been used to distribute money to Trump’s allies — including, potentially, Trump supporters who participated in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Although the fund appears dead after it received bipartisan pushback in Congress, a DOJ press release announcing the fund said it was “established” by the attorney general, a role performed by Blanche, and that the fund would be administered by five people chosen by Blanche.

Before Trump took office, Bove was Blanche’s law partner. Shortly before Bove joined the bench, he briefly served as principal associate deputy attorney general — essentially the DAG’s top deputy, which meant that Bove was Blanche’s right-hand man. In that role, he was often described as Trump’s “enforcer.” 

Bove spent only about half a year as Blanche’s lieutenant, but he managed to spark a mini-revolt in one of the Justice Department’s most prestigious offices during his short tenure. After Bove ordered the DOJ to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams “without prejudice,” a maneuver that would allow the charges to be reinstated if Adams did not cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order. 

One was Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon. Another, Hagan Scotten, wrote in his resignation letter to Bove that “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” Scotten clerked for Republican Chief Justice John Roberts and for future Republican Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Meanwhile, a whistleblower complaint by another former DOJ lawyer claims that Bove said, in a meeting about a court decision halting some deportations, “that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order.”

Trump appointed Bove to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last September. Federal appeals courts typically spend months deciding cases, so his tenure on the Third Circuit has thus far been less eventful than his time at the DOJ. But there are early signs that he remains loyal to Trump even after moving into an independent branch of government. Bove attended a Trump rally in December, a highly unusual move for judges who are supposed to remain nonpartisan. And the background image on his iPhone is reportedly an image of a defiant Trump raising a fist, or at least it was months after he joined the bench.

That leaves Sauer, who, as solicitor general, is tasked with defending federal government programs in the Supreme Court. That includes the Trump tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down last winter, and Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to strip many newborn Americans of their citizenship.

Despite these losses, Sauer has an impressive winning record before the Supreme Court, largely because the Court is controlled by six Republicans who are highly sympathetic to Trump and his agenda. This is, after all, the same Court that said that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes, after Sauer argued as much. 

Sauer has been particularly effective in persuading the Republican justices to block lower court rulings against Trump on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a once rarely used mix of emergency motions and other matters that became a routine part of Supreme Court litigation during Trump’s first term.

So Trump has taken several of his personal lawyers and transformed them into some of the most well-credentialed — and in some cases, the most powerful — figures in the legal profession. Thus far, the evidence suggests that these individuals remain loyal to Trump, even when they move into jobs that are supposed to be nonpartisan. Three of them already have lifetime appointments. 

Any nation governed by the rule of law must have government officials who will obey whatever constraints the law imposes — whether they be federal agency leaders who follow the law out of a sense of duty, or judges who rein in executive branch leaders who refuse to do so. Institutions like the Department of Justice also depend on informal norms, many of which are a response to similar abuses of power during the Nixon administration, that have long constrained federal prosecutors.

But Trump’s DOJ is often actively hostile to these norms, and the growing legal power of Trump’s personal lawyers is just the latest example. Their steady reshaping of the judiciary clears the way for a federal government that is not constrained by anything.

In January 2025, Linda-Gail Bekker stood inside a vaccine manufacturing plant and allowed herself to believe that the first HIV vaccine candidate conceived through African science and led by Africans might finally become a reality.

The vaccine would be built on mRNA technology, the same platform that had helped tame the Covid-19 pandemic. Bekker hoped it might finally crack the puzzle that had frustrated HIV researchers for more than four decades.

No virus has proved more evasive. Hundreds of HIV vaccines have entered testing; none has succeeded at providing durable protection against infection. And the need remains vast: In 2025, roughly 1.2 million new HIV infections were reported; anti-retroviral treatments have turned it into more of a survivable disease, but more than half a million people died from AIDS-related causes the same year. There is still no known cure.

So researchers like Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town, have more hope now, in part because there is finally a clearer idea of what an effective vaccine needs to do. It must coax the immune system into producing a particular type of protective antibody, a rare class of defender, capable of recognizing and disabling HIV despite the virus’s extraordinary diversity and rapid ability to mutate.

No one yet knows how to reliably do that. But mRNA is uniquely suited to the task of finding out, vaccinologists say. Thanks to the platform’s speed and flexibility, researchers can iterate rapidly through the otherwise laborious process of designing, testing, and refining the series of vaccine components needed to guide the body toward making those essential antibodies.

At the start of last year, Bekker and her colleagues were ready to put that strategy to the test. The clinical trial for their new mRNA-based HIV vaccine was just on the verge of enrolling its first participants. But the project depended on the same backing that had sustained HIV vaccine research for decades: US government funding. Washington had long supplied roughly 90 percent of the world’s investment in the field. Then President Donald Trump returned to office.

Within hours of his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order freezing foreign aid. The $45 million contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that was supposed to fund clinical trials like Bekker’s disappeared, as did a web of other funds, many routed through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that had helped fuel the field’s progress for years.

The timing could hardly be more cruel. After 40-odd years of chasing a shape-shifting foe, scientists believe they now know what kind of immune response an HIV vaccine must generate — and have in mRNA a powerful new tool for pursuing it. But just as many researchers have finally glimpsed a path to victory, the United States and much of the funding has pulled away from the fight. 

Pushing the envelope

From the outset, the target for preventing HIV was clear. Within a year of identifying the virus as the cause of AIDS in 1983, researchers had zeroed in on its envelope protein as the most promising point of attack for a vaccine.

Protruding from the virus’s surface in knobby clusters, the envelope protein acts like a molecular grappling hook, latching onto immune cells before pulling the virus itself inside. Without this feature, HIV cannot infect a cell.

Much as the coronavirus spike protein would later become the basis for Covid vaccines, this protein on the surface of HIV seemed an obvious bullseye. But identifying the target didn’t mean researchers could hit it. Most of what the immune system sees of the envelope protein is actually just a decoy. The parts that stick out and draw the strongest immune response are also its most changeable, differing from one strain to the next and mutating freely whenever antibodies close in, leaving the body to waste its firepower on a target that keeps slipping away.

Candidate vaccines kept making the same mistake. They would elicit plenty of antibodies, but not the kind that could keep up with the virus. Time and again, promising candidate vaccines generated excitement in the laboratory, only to come up empty when it mattered most in large-scale clinical testing.

The field’s fortunes started to change in the late 2000s when researchers began studying the small fraction of people living with HIV who developed antibodies capable of recognizing the virus’s concealed, conserved features. Though these hard-won antibodies came too late to protect their makers, they gave scientists a molecular blueprint for the defenses a vaccine would need to build.

As the field came to learn, these “broadly neutralizing antibodies” do not appear overnight but rather after years of battle with the virus. 

The challenge, then, was to design a vaccine that would not just trigger an immune response but guide a person’s immune system through the same evolutionary journey. This would require a succession of vaccine components to prompt a carefully choreographed process within the body, rather than the single, fixed target that suffices for shots against measles or hepatitis B.

It was a strategy rooted in rational design but dependent on trial and error. Progress would come through a steady stream of small proof-of-concept studies, each informing the next generation of vaccine candidates. Ordinarily, it would take at least a year — often longer — to manufacture and prepare each vaccine iteration before it could be tested in people. 

But then the Covid pandemic rocketed mRNA into the spotlight.

The mRNA advantage

mRNA technology upends the old recipe of vaccine development. Conventional shots work by showing the immune system a mugshot of the enemy: a killed or weakened germ, or one of its proteins, grown batch by batch in vats of cells or eggs. An mRNA vaccine takes a different route. Rather than supplying the mugshot, it supplies the instructions to draw one: a short, lab-printed strip of messenger RNA, the molecule cells normally use to ferry genetic directions from DNA to their protein-making machinery.

Inject the right sequence, and it will program the body’s own cells to become tiny factories, producing the target protein and presenting it to the immune system as if it were the real intruder. Because it is all just code, refining a design means editing text, not rebuilding a factory — the work of days, not months.

“We’ve been able to design vaccines in real time,” said University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine assistant professor Ted Kreider, who is a specialist in infectious diseases.

To HIV researchers, the appeal was obvious. HIV’s greatest weapon was its ability to shift and adapt. Now, at last, a vaccine could, too. 

The timing was ideal. Just as researchers were beginning to map the path to an effective vaccine, mRNA offered a way to move down that path at speed. With vaccine designs no longer bottlenecked by design and manufacturing, what once might have taken decades of stepwise vaccine development could, thanks to mRNA, be compressed into years.

Across a growing number of clinical trials, researchers are now testing different vaccine components, different sequences, and different delivery platforms, searching for the combination that most effectively nudges the immune system toward a truly HIV-thwarting response.

A paper published last month in Nature offered one such path forward, showing in monkeys that a painstaking sequence of eight shots could coax the immune system into producing potent antibodies capable of neutralizing a broad range of HIV strains. But even the study’s authors see a catch. “It’s still too many [shots] to be practical in humans,” said Dennis Burton, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research who worked on the project.

Whether mRNA ultimately becomes the vaccine itself — or simply the tool that helps researchers discover it — remains an open question.

The fundamental challenge for now, after all, is vaccine design, notes Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of IAVI, a nonprofit research organization focused on developing vaccines against HIV. And for that task, he says, “the most obvious advantage of mRNA is simply the speed of getting an idea from the laboratory to the clinic.”

But if the technology reaches the finish line, researchers say it could offer other advantages as well. Because the protein is made inside the body’s own cells rather than in a lab, it folds and displays itself much as it would on the real virus, giving the immune system a more faithful target to train against. That way, when the real virus arrives, the body already knows its true face.

It also gives vaccine designers an unusual number of knobs to turn, notes Kristie Bloom, an mRNA vaccine researcher and molecular biologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. By altering the vaccine’s formulation, dose, or genetic design, researchers can shape not just the magnitude of the immune response but also its balance: favoring antibody-producing B cells, virus-killing T cells, or some mix of the two.

With mRNA, “there’s quite a bit of flexibility,” she said.

Not so fast

For all the putative upsides, however, mRNA does carry some baggage. There are concerns about public acceptance given the intense backlash and misinformation campaigns that followed the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. And though those shots ultimately proved remarkably safe, with very low rates of serious side effects, a peculiar skin problem has emerged in early-stage trials of mRNA vaccine candidates for HIV specifically. 

In two separate trials reported last year, around one in 12 participants who received mRNA-based HIV vaccines manufactured by Moderna developed chronic urticaria, a form of persistent hives that in some cases endured for years. The vaccines encoded different portions of HIV’s envelope protein, yet both produced the same unexpected side effect.

The fact that the reactions appeared across distinct vaccine designs — but never before in Moderna’s other mRNA vaccine programs — has fueled suspicion that something about HIV’s envelope protein itself may be involved. Even so, no clear explanation has emerged. 

“We’ve ruled a bunch of things out,” said William Schief, a professor at Scripps Research’s department of immunology and microbiology who doubles as vice president for protein design at Moderna, “but there’s no smoking gun.”

Schief is continuing to investigate the source of the immune reactions. But not wanting an unresolved safety signal to bring the program to a halt, he and his collaborators have pressed ahead with lower-dose versions of the vaccine, betting that the hives will fade while the desired immune response remains intact. 

That strategy is now being evaluated in an IAVI-backed trial led by Bekker in South Africa. Known as IAVI G004, it has yielded encouraging early results. (Unlike the African-developed vaccine whose launch was derailed by the USAID funding freeze, this study is testing a different mRNA vaccine candidate, manufactured by Moderna.)

At the lowest dose tested, just one-tenth of the amount used in the original studies, the hives that had troubled earlier trials never materialized, Bekker said. Her team has since moved on to a somewhat higher dose, seeking the sweet spot between safety and immune potency. 

All of these discoveries and challenges along the way have helped map a path forward. “We know what we need to do,” said Barton Haynes, director of the Human Vaccine Institute at the Duke University School of Medicine. The task for them now is to move through the necessary iterations as quickly as the science — and the funding and political landscape — allow.

“A black hole”

When Bekker and her team learned about the sudden funding cut that would halt their African-designed, USAID-funded vaccine study in January 2025, they were already in Tanzania to prepare its launch. They immediately had to stop work on the project, which had been years in the making. “It was like falling into a black hole of depression,” she said. 

And the setbacks kept coming. With prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overseeing US health policy, the federal government moved to undermine both vaccine science broadly and mRNA technology in particular.

The NIH, in addition to terminating dozens of smaller HIV-related grants, began winding down its flagship Consortia for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD) program, which has long served as a cornerstone of global HIV vaccine research, while other federal agencies curtailed support for mRNA vaccine projects across multiple disease areas.

At the same time, South Africa, the continent’s leading center for biomedical research, found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs over allegations of anti-white discrimination. New federal research grants were no longer permitted to support collaborations with South African scientists, severing ties that had underpinned years of international HIV research.

“That’s a perfect storm to prevent us from building on the most exciting science HIV vaccines have had in 45 years,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit dedicated to HIV prevention access and policy. 

Yet for all the financial and political disruption, the scientific momentum hasn’t stopped. Philanthropic organizations and governments elsewhere have stepped up to help fill the funding gap, allowing key trials to move forward, although in scaled-down forms with more modest ambitions. 

The Africa-led effort that Bekker had dreamed of was salvaged, with emergency backing from the South African Medical Research Council, albeit in diminished form and built, in the end, on the same protein-based technology that mRNA was meant to leapfrog.

The only mRNA-based HIV vaccine study that is actually underway in Africa is IAVI G004: a program designed by US scientists, not by locals, and funded largely by the Gates Foundation.

A longtime backer of HIV research, that foundation is estimated to invest around $70 million annually — with $64 million being invested in 2022, and $70 million in 2026 — across a global portfolio of HIV vaccine programs. That’s a substantial sum, though only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars once provided by the NIH, USAID, and other federal agencies. 

For now, some of that funding continues to flow. But even what remains is far from assured. The Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget would slash the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the NIH institute that has long anchored HIV vaccine science — along with the Office of AIDS Research that coordinates HIV research across the entire NIH, leaving the field’s longer-term future in doubt.

“We’re not going to be able to fill the gap that’s been left by the US government,” said Nina Russell, director of TB & HIV research and development at the Gates Foundation. Still, she says, the foundation remains determined to keep the most promising vaccine programs moving forward: “We are super committed to it.”

All of these changes have left the research field daunted, but not hopeless. “It’s been a very disruptive time,” said Burton, who leads one of the CHAVD research hubs. But he remains convinced the field is on the right track. “The pieces of the puzzle are in place,” he said. “It’s obviously been a long, long journey, but you can begin to see the end.”

A higher bar

The funding crisis and political challenges are not the only forces reshaping HIV vaccine development.

For much of the HIV epidemic, which has killed over 40 million people worldwide, even a partially effective vaccine might have been enough to transform the course of HIV. Today, however, vaccine researchers are also competing against long-acting preventive drugs that can protect people for months at a time with just two injections. 

These drugs are an enormous step forward for HIV protection, but they also raise the standard the vaccine field must meet, Warren said. “The bar for a licensed vaccine that is going to have a public health impact has gotten much higher,” he said.

But these prophylactic drugs, which began as daily pills and have evolved into long-acting injectables, are only as good as the systems that deliver them. Cost, stigma, and the need for regular clinic visits have limited access in many countries with the highest HIV burdens. A vaccine, by contrast, that provided years of protection after a handful of doses could overcome many of those barriers.

That is precisely why many scientists view the current retreat of the US government with such alarm. After decades of disappointments and billions of dollars in investment, the field finally believes it has a coherent strategy for building an effective HIV vaccine. The fear is that momentum could stall just as researchers have begun to see a path across the finish line. As a result, what once seemed like a scientific problem increasingly looks like a political one.

For Bekker, the current moment feels all too familiar. In the early 2000s, South Africa’s government embraced AIDS denialism, delaying the rollout of lifesaving treatments and forcing researchers and clinicians to battle both the virus and the state. A quarter-century later, she says, the political opponent has merely changed address to Washington, DC, threatening once again to undermine the fight against HIV and cost countless lives.

“When politics interferes in science,” Bekker said, “that is the death of scientific progress.”

Bekker still does not know whether the vaccine she watched being manufactured last year will ever reach the people it was designed to protect. She and her colleagues still hope to carry out the made-in-Africa mRNA vaccine trial they spent years designing — if they can find a way to pay for it. But Bekker remains convinced that the scientific strategy behind it is the right one, and that mRNA may yet do for HIV what it did for Covid-19, rapidly transforming decades of scientific groundwork into an effective shot.

She only hopes politics does not succeed where HIV itself has failed in slowing the field’s progress. “We should only be fighting the virus,” Bekker said. “But we’re fighting the administration and its policies, and that is a waste of our energy.”

The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for “a government by, for, and of the working class.” 

Yet the organization’s membership and candidates consist largely of educated professionals. As of 2021, 80 percent of DSA members over 25 were college-educated, while 28 percent earned more than $100,000 a year (putting them in roughly the top 15 percent of America’s income distribution), according to a DSA internal survey. Among the group’s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic. 

In recent weeks, as the DSA has racked up victories in Democratic primary elections, the apparent tension between the group’s self-conception and demographics has attracted critical scrutiny.

In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall argues that most of the DSA’s members and supporters in the electorate are “in no way working class.” The libertarian commentator Robby Soave, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon, and liberal economics writer Noah Smith have all voiced similar sentiments. 

There are many cogent ways for socialists to respond to such criticism. One would be to note that an organization doesn’t need to have a uniformly working-class membership in order to fight for working-class interests. Another would be to observe that not all college graduates are well-heeled professionals, even as pundits often use educational attainment as a stand-in for class in political analysis. 

But some socialists prefer a simpler retort: The DSA’s critics are simply mistaken; in reality, the group’s membership is more or less entirely “working class” — because that term describes everyone who must sell their labor in order to meet their needs. 

This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.”

Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists. 

There’s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have some shared interests, due to their common status as laborers. For example, both benefit from the existence of a well-funded unemployment insurance system, in a way that the Elon Musks of the world do not. 

For the most part though, orthodox socialism’s “map” is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of “the working class” does less to illuminate modern America’s economic divisions than to obscure them.  

The long afterlife of Marx’s failed prophesies

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left’s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. 

In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism — capitalists and workers — rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed. 

According to Marx’s analysis, technological progress was in the process of obliterating “all distinctions” between different strata of working people, as automation was driving virtually everyone’s wages down to “the same low level.” The middle class of small manufacturers and shopkeepers, meanwhile, was poised to “decay and finally disappear,” as more productive, large-scale enterprises left them in the dust.

Society was therefore splitting into “two great hostile camps” — the capitalist and working classes, whose interests were impossible to reconcile. 

Under these conditions, a binary conception of class makes perfect sense. If all workers will soon be condemned to low wages, then there’s little point in dwelling on the (temporary) distinctions between them. Likewise, if shopkeepers and small-time capitalists have gone the way of the triceratops, one can more comfortably cast all business owners as members of the ruling elite.

You can’t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map

But we don’t live in the future that Marx foresaw. 

Rather than melting all workers into a uniform proletariat, capitalism cultivated a kaleidoscopically diverse laborforce — one segmented by countless fine-grained distinctions of pay and prestige. And instead of immiserating ordinary people, industrial development brought unprecedented mass prosperity (albeit, with the aid of many socialistic reforms). 

As a result, old-school socialists’ “two-class map” makes for a poor guide to modern capitalism’s terrain. And anyone trying to impose Marx’s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems.

For one, in a world where some workers earn as much in a year as others do in a lifetime, the idea that there is only one fundamental class division — that between laborers and capitalists — becomes unconvincing. 

In the United States, some convenience store owners make $70,000 a year, while many surgeons earn upward of $600,000. It would be odd to say that the former are members of society’s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries). After all, the minimart owner and Musk do not have especially similar material interests. Nor, for that matter, do the impoverished farmworker and high-earning neurosurgeon (much less, the superstar athlete with a $40 million salary). Yet this is what orthodox socialism’s binary would suggest. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary.

A second, related difficulty is that the border between labor and capital has grown fuzzier since Marx’s time. Today, American workers often own both a home and some share of their nation’s financial assets, like a 401(k) filled with stock from major corporations. Many billionaires, meanwhile, choose to work. 

Socialists are well aware of this reality, which is why they define a person’s class status by their dependence on labor: The typical white-collar worker may own a little stock, but not enough to quit her job and live off dividends. Unlike a billionaire CEO, such a professional must work in order to meet her needs. 

This is a sound distinction. But it does not actually resolve the challenge of distinguishing the working class from the ruling one. This is because, in an advanced economy, whether someone “needs” to work is partly subjective. Millions of Americans survive on less than $25,000 a year in market income. If upper-middle-class families were willing to accept a similarly austere living standard, many would be able to live entirely off their investments.

Of course, Americans shouldn’t be content to live in poverty. But it is harder to say precisely what standard of living qualifies as “enough.” In Marx’s time, a relatively good life for a wage worker might have meant reliable access to food and shelter for one’s family and a little time and money left for simple leisure. Today, the list includes high-quality education for one’s children, access to advanced medical treatments, modern home appliances for cooking and cleaning, Internet-connected devices for entertainment, and often personal transportation, like a car — all of which are typically (and justifiably) treated as basic necessities.

This raises the question: At what level of wealth does a person stop needing to work — even if they must keep clocking in to achieve their desired lifestyle? The socialist writer Matt Bruenig has proposed drawing the line at about $1.4 million (or roughly 20 times America’s average wage): Once you’ve accrued that much in housing and financial assets, your decision to sell your labor becomes voluntary and you cease to be working-class. 

This is a reasonable cut-off. But it’s still fairly arbitrary. Ask an American with a net worth of $1.4 million whether they need to work, and they’re liable to say yes. And typically, they will be correct — at least, in the sense that they could not sustain their way of life without earning a paycheck. You could say that their present lifestyle is too lavish — and that $1.4 million in assets is all that’s required to generate the amount of income one truly needs. But it’s not obvious why this threshold doesn’t actually lie at $1.6 million, or $800,000, or $500,000.

As a result, the only way to draw the upper boundary on who “needs” to work — without making arbitrary judgments about what standard of living is necessary — is to place it extremely far up the class hierarchy: The superrich generally don’t need to choose between sustaining their lifestyles and abstaining from work. But once your definition of “working class” becomes capacious enough to include low-end multimillionaires, it loses all plausibility. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary. An individual’s degree of economic freedom and power is determined by a host of factors — above all, their household incomes and net worths, but also the market value of their skills (which shapes their future earning prospects) and familial wealth and connections. Even one’s eligibility for social welfare benefits can matter; after all, the largest group of Americans who don’t need to work to meet their needs are Social Security recipients.

Precisely how we should weigh these different sources of advantage is a tricky question. And implicit disagreements over it shapes our discourse about “the working class.” 

Take Graham Platner, the former Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. To his champions, Platner was a working-class candidate, due to his lack of a college diploma, years of service in the military, and low-income, physically demanding job farming oysters (along with his gravelly voice and tattoos). To his detractors, meanwhile, Platner was a pseudo-proletarian due to his upper-middle-class childhood, prep school education, and receipt of steady financial help from his father and mother, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Meanwhile, Platner probably would not qualify as “working class” under the orthodox socialist definition for multiple reasons: For one, he does not need to work in order to get by, thanks to his disability benefits and family support. For another, he is the owner of his oyster business, rather than a salaried worker who answers to a boss. 

In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it’s clear that a person’s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and “human capital” rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person’s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between “the 99 percent” and the billionaire class matters — but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.

Of course, in ordinary political discourse, we inevitably need to boil down reality’s intricacies into rough categories. No politician will ever promise to fight for the “bottom six deciles in combined SES score, nor will any labor activists ever chant, “The 30th to 60th percentiles in household income, united, will never be defeated.” 

But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as “the poor,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper-middle class,” “the rich,” and “the superrich”) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two. 

“Working-class” rhetoric can camouflage professional-class interests

All this said, even if orthodox socialism’s “two-class map” is analytically flawed, it could still be politically beneficial. Perhaps, when affluent professionals decide that they belong to the same class as the working poor, they become more inclined to fight for the latter’s interests. 

Some of the DSA’s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America’s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with “the 99 percent.” And as this cohort has grown more influential in Blue America, the Democratic Party has embraced more ambitious anti-poverty policies, such as a guaranteed monthly income for working-class families. 

The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe.

And yet, socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.  

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs. 

On its face, the idea that the US government should transfer tens of thousands of dollars to young doctors and Harvard MBAs would seem wildly regressive. The median US physician can expect to earn more than $6.5 million over the course of their lifetime, while the median graduate of a top-five business school can expect to earn more than $8 million. Virtually all Americans have worse prospects than this. And in the inflationary conditions of the Biden era, increasing young professionals’ disposable income was liable to push up prices for everyone else. In other words, blanket student debt forgiveness would have likely transferred purchasing power from low-income workers to early-career physicians and management consultants.

Many socialists would struggle to defend such a policy, were it presented in these terms. But by eliding the class distinctions between low- and high-income borrowers,  the DSA was able to convince itself (if not the public) that across-the-board forgiveness was in the interest of “the working class.”

The socialist framework is similarly unhelpful in the realm of tax policy. 

In recent years, as socialist and progressive politicians have grown more dependent on professional class support, they’ve become more averse to endorsing broad-based tax increases.

From Zohran Mamdani to Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic left tends to reserve its tax hike proposals for the superrich. And yet, the reason that America lacks a comprehensive welfare state is not that our billionaires pay unusually little in taxes; to the contrary, our top rates are comparable to those of some Scandinavian countries. The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe. Simply maintaining our existing programs, like Social Security, will likely require a major tax increase on higher-end salaried workers. 

In this context, binary conceptions of America’s class structure — which pit an undifferentiated “working class” against the capitalist elite, or the 99 percent against the 1 percent — can help educated professionals evade responsibility for bankrolling a more egalitarian economic system.

Check your class privilege

Ultimately, the DSA’s ability to serve working-class interests hinges less on its own demographics than its policies and politics. When an organization mistakes the preferences of its most privileged members for those of all working people, however, its campaigning and policymaking is liable to suffer. 

Perhaps, before this century’s end, AI will bring about the calamity that Marx prophesied — and Ivy League lawyers and delivery drivers will find their skills equally devalued by an all-powerful ownership class. Until the robot apocalypse, however, educated professionals and low-wage workers will live in very different circumstances — and harbor distinct economic interests. To safeguard the wellbeing of the disadvantaged, well-off egalitarians need to mind these gaps, not paper over them with obsolete class categories.