Early in 2016, articles began to appear noting similarities between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” corresponded to Francis’s mandate for Vatican reform. Trump scandalized the GOP old guard by denouncing the Iraq War; Francis stunned the world by asking, “Who am I to judge?” Trump’s evocation of “American carnage” had its counterpart in Francis’s observation that the earth was looking “more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
Nine years later, a different comparison seems more apt: that between Pope Francis and Joe Biden. It is a similarity that both figures would acknowledge more readily than the one between Francis and Trump. (In a final demonstration of his often expressed admiration, Biden, in the waning days of his presidency, awarded Francis the Presidential Medal of Freedom.) But the parallel suggests something that neither would find reassuring. For though both men have left a mark, both have disappointed the hopes they initially raised. It seems that liberalism, in its political and ecclesial manifestations, has lost its ability to command broad support for sweeping change.
Upon Francis’s election in 2013, he was hailed as “the great reformer”—as the title of an influential biography by Austen Ivereigh put it. His pontificate was at once an opening to a new future and a revival of a keenly missed past. After decades of rule by the conservative popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Francis seemed to renew the spirit that had animated the heroic generation of Vatican II, with its willingness to set aside tradition and rigidity for the promptings of the spirit.
Francis spoke about the need for a “poor Church for the poor”—and made headlines by picking up his luggage and paying his hotel bill after being elected to the papacy. But his pontificate—much like liberal political parties throughout the West—has prioritized the concerns of educated professionals over those of the working poor. His first encyclical, Laudato Si, revived the Catholic critique of modernity while highlighting the threat of climate change. The pastoral exhortation Amoris Laetitia, his most controversial document, suggested that Communion could be granted to the divorced and remarried. Francis has also championed undocumented migrants, a stance that aligns him with the professional class and against the receiving nation’s working class, whose economic standing is undermined by mass migration.
Many observers predicted that Francis’s liberalism would precipitate a “Francis effect”—a sudden return of disaffected Catholics to the pews. Ivereigh wrote in 2016 that Francis’s opening to the divorced and remarried “could trigger a return to parishes on a large scale.” What do the numbers show? In 2008, 23 percent of American Catholics attended Mass weekly, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 2019, before church closures in response to Covid-19 affected attendance, that number was virtually unchanged, at 24 percent. Meanwhile, priestly vocations have been on a downward trend since 2012. Francis may deserve credit for the fact that measured attendance held steady. But the great return never materialized. Though the bold predictions have ended, the lavish praise has not. Tomáš Halík, the Czech priest and philosopher, declared recently in Commonweal magazine that Francis is “one of the greatest popes in Church history.”
Biden’s presidency fell short of expectations in a similar way. During the 2020 campaign, Biden positioned himself as a flexible moderate. But after he took office, his surrogates began to present him as a “transformational” figure in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose portrait Biden hung in the Oval Office. And, like the pope, the former president is still acclaimed by his supporters. In December 2024, in the wake of an election that most observers interpret as a repudiation of Biden, the political operative Donna Brazile declared him “one of our greatest presidents.”
Biden’s ambitious measures reflected this self-conception. He was particularly assertive in the area of trade and industrial policy. In December 2022, he bailed out the Teamsters Union pension fund, allocating $36 billion to ensure that some 350,000 Teamsters didn’t see their pensions cut by more than half. He nominated a former union official as labor secretary, stacked the National Labor Relations Board with pro-union officials, and became the first sitting president to join a picket line. He was similarly bold in his approach to antitrust. He appointed Lina Khan as the youngest-ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission and empowered her to bring antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, and Meta—infuriating Silicon Valley. Under Khan, Biden’s FTC also banned the non-compete clauses that limited the employment opportunities of an estimated one in five American workers.
Perhaps most significantly, Biden worked to address longstanding concerns about the negative effects of free trade and deindustrialization. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. He also maintained Trump’s tariffs on more than $300 billion in Chinese goods, while placing new tariffs on electric vehicles. Taken together, these measures represented the most comprehensive effort yet to restore American industry.
Biden’s larger goal was to reconstitute a working-class coalition united behind the Democratic Party. On this score, he failed. Sean O’Brien, the head of the Teamsters Union, which received that $36 billion bailout from Biden, said before the election that Democrats “have f**ked us over for the last 40 years.” This came in the wake of his decision to speak at the Republican National Convention, and to withhold an endorsement from either presidential candidate. Though O’Brien was denounced by progressive commentators, the election results bore out his argument. Losses were especially steep among working-class minorities. According to a preliminary analysis by the New York Times, Hispanic-majority counties shifted thirteen points to the right, while black-majority counties shifted toward the GOP by three points.
Why did workers abandon the president with the most pro-worker economic agenda in decades? Perhaps because Biden catered to progressive sensibilities, including on issues that undermine workers’ economic standing or violate their convictions about culture or morality. Biden moved to reverse Trump’s stringent immigration policies, aligning his administration with the open approach encouraged by Pope Francis. This move was not calculated to please the working class. According to a meta-analysis in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, higher income, higher education, and higher-skill occupation all predict significantly more positive attitudes toward immigration.
Working-class voters have economic reasons to oppose immigration. As Paul Krugman noted in 2006, “many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration.” These new arrivals “increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.” Furthermore, the U.S. Commission for Immigration Reform chaired by the Democratic congresswoman and civil-rights leader Barbara Jordan found that, at the local level, “immigrants often represent a net fiscal cost, in some cases a substantial one”—placing pressures on schools and city budgets.
Working-class voters are also skeptical of green policies—a fact that should be reckoned with even by those who find useful insights in Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si. A poll of voters in Pennsylvania found that men and women without a college degree were more likely to support fracking than those with a degree. Only 26 percent of working-class respondents to a recent survey said that getting to net zero was very important, compared to 71 percent who prioritized keeping consumer costs low. Working-class voters, especially those who live away from urban centers or whose livelihoods are tied to resource extraction, logistics, and transportation have reason to fear that eliminating fossil fuels will endanger their livelihoods.
Class divides are also present on LGBTQ issues. Voters without a college degree are 12 points more likely than those with a college degree to say that gender is determined by biological sex, according to a study by Pew. Those with a four-year degree are more likely than those without one to say “it’s “extremely or very important” to use a transgender person’s new name or pronouns. Similarly, a 2018 study by Andrew Brian Walker of Georgetown University found a significant correlation between income and attitudes toward homosexuality: The higher your income, the more likely you are to have positive views of gays and lesbians. This accords with findings by Darel Paul, a political scientist at Williams College. In a study of the 2008 ANES feeling thermometer, Paul found that Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree have much warmer feelings toward Asian-Americans, Jews, and gay men and lesbians than do those who have less than a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, those without a bachelor’s degree tend to have much warmer views toward three groups: the working class, the poor, and Christian fundamentalists.
If these class divides clarify why Biden’s policies failed to rebuild a blue-collar Democratic Party, they also suggest some of the limits of ecclesial progressivism. Like their secular counterparts, progressive Catholics see themselves as standing at once for the downtrodden and for progressive causes such as climate justice, the welcoming of migrants, and gay rights. As a practical matter, these commitments do not always align neatly. Nor are they as popular as is often supposed. This matters for liberals both inside and outside the Church. For liberal Catholicism has always justified itself not just as a direct expression of Catholic teaching, but as an attempt to make that teaching attractive and feasible in the modern world—to produce a “Francis effect.” What if the replacement of the magisterium by the opinions of Western elites does not, in fact, command popular assent (to say nothing of its consistency with two millennia of dogmatic tradition)?
Until it manages to look beyond the interests of educated professionals, liberalism inside and outside the Church will never reclaim the agenda-setting role it played at midcentury. Indeed, its efforts to “turn the page” on the past may only call forth that past with renewed energy. That need not be a bad thing for those who worship a beauty ever ancient, ever new.
