From John Judis’, The Bern Supremacy (boldface mine):
But who are the voters flocking to [Bernie Sanders’] message? Sanders often uses the term “working people” to refer to the constituency he wants to lead. It’s a term that conjures guys in overalls; yet the bulk of the people at the rallies I attended were college students, recent college graduates, or white-collar professionals who have the types of jobs that require a college or even a post-graduate degree.
At the Sanders rally in Las Vegas, I interviewed about 30 people and also circulated around the crowd. I did talk to a janitor from Las Vegas’s militant culinary union and to a retired auto mechanic from Idaho who had moved to Las Vegas, but the rest of the people I encountered were students, teachers, scientists, civil servants, and social workers. At a Sanders rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, I found a similar crowd, with government consultants, IT administrators, and engineers also thrown into the mix.
These Sanders supporters are part of a stratum of the American labor force that the census designates as “professionals.” They most often work for a wage or salary. They produce ideas and sophisticated services rather than physical goods. They work in hospitals and clinics, schools and colleges, and, above all, offices. Unlike routine service workers, they make decent or even very good money. In White Collar, which appeared in 1951, C. Wright Mills labeled this group “the new middle class.” The French sociologist Serge Mallet called them the “new working class.” At the socialist journal I helped edit in the early 1970s, we called them “educated labor” and part of a new “diversified proletariat.”
The ranks of professionals grew steadily during the 20th century. In the Labor Department’s Monthly Labor Review, Daniel Hecker and Ian Wyatt estimated that this group, which they identified as “professional and technical” workers, went from 4 percent of the labor force in 1920 to 23 percent in 2000. The biggest jump came during the economic boom of the 1960s—which was also when this group began turning leftward.
Professionals were once the most conservative and Republican of occupational groupings, even more so than managers and executives. In 1956, according to the American National Election Studies, professionals backed Dwight Eisenhower by 69 percent to 31 percent; in 1960, they voted for Richard Nixon by 62 percent to 38 percent. But during the 1960s, they began to move toward the Democratic Party and toward more liberal or progressive positions. In the extensive surveys he conducted for his 1976 book The Radical Center, sociologist Donald Warren divided the electorate into “low-income,” “average middies” (those with middle income, but no education beyond high school), “high-education middies,” and “affluents.” Warren found the group that most consistently backed George McGovern in 1972 were “high-education middies.” Moreover, in the four elections from 1988 to 2000, professionals favored Democrats by an average of 52 percent to 40 percent. In 2012, Barack Obama won 56 percent of this vote, compared with 40 percent for Mitt Romney….
Why have “high-education middies” moved so decisively to the left over the last 50 years? Part of it can be explained via the theory of post-materialism developed by the political scientist Ronald Inglehart. In the wake of the 1960s revolt, he argued that rising prosperity after World War II had brought new nonmaterial issues such as the environment, the quality of consumer goods, and race and gender roles to the forefront in place of more immediate economic concerns. Colleges, especially those that catered to upscale students, became incubators of this post-materialist politics.
But there was another factor that explained why professionals turned leftward. The older professionals, epitomized by the dentist or doctor, saw themselves as entrepreneurs and identified with Republican support for the free market. They took pride in their autonomy and in their product: Teachers wanted to teach; physicians and nurses to heal; engineers to make things that worked. But just as happened to the crafts workers of the late 19th century who went on to form the American Federation of Labor, professionals began undergoing a process that Marxists call proletarianization. They lost their independence and autonomy, they increasingly worked for a salary, and their work became subject to the imperatives of administrators and executives. In response, some of them joined or formed unions; but, more generally, they became critical of the new economy and of those who ran it. Unlike an older generation of professionals, they didn’t regard capitalism and the free market as holy writ.