The right didn’t need to be better.
They just had to speak truth to a simple contradiction the left refuses to resolve.
It goes like this:
We are the party of the working class.
Expansion of women in the workforce, immigration, and global trade is an unqualified moral victory — questioning that makes you respectively a sexist, racist, or xenophobe.
The first is an economic promise.
The second is an economic landmine — and the right has pulled the pin.
Let’s refer to this contradiction as the Third Rail of the Left (TRL):
The belief that these three labor force expansions are unqualified goods — and that anyone who suggests they had economic trade-offs is branded a bigot.
Untouchable Common Sense
Common sense — and basic economics — tell us that, absent other changes, increasing the supply of labor drives down wages.
Harvard economist George J. Borjas supported this reasoning with data in 2013:
“The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economic theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages.”
Elizabeth Warren addresses perhaps the most charged element of the TRL — the expansion of women in the workforce — in her 2004 book The Two-Income Trap.
On the back cover, she writes:
“…sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before.”
Warren does not argue against empowering women — she’s proof of that empowerment. Her point is that the shift from one income to two didn’t double household prosperity. Instead, costs in housing, childcare, and education rose to match the new baseline.
Warren’s lesson: nuance exists. Moral goods can still have economic downsides.
In today’s Democratic party, however, touching the TRL — even to propose solutions — risks social and professional exile.
And that’s the opening the right exploits.
How the Right is Winning
The right uses this dynamic brilliantly.
The revealed preference of Trump’s tax cuts shows the right is still the party of the rich. But their willingness to touch the TRL has earned of the lower-middle class — even as they cut food stamps.
By pointing out the obvious — that more labor supply can hurt wages — they can posture as truth-tellers while the left scrambles to defend the moral high ground.
They don’t need to solve the problem; they just need to show that the left won’t even acknowledge it exists.
Worse, when the left responds with “sexist,” “racist,” or “xenophobe” to this legitimate economic point, it allows the right to dismiss the left’s valid accusations of bigotry on other points.
This one truth, spoken without fear, lets them parade around leftists trapped in a rhetorical cage of their own making.
So where do we go from here?
The fix isn’t to abandon progressive values — it’s to drop the taboos.
Publicly punishing those who touch the TRL is the cheap power grab that Obama spoke out against in late 2019 as the trend of woke outrage culture emerged.
It is not activism to cordon off reason from public discourse.
The Democratic Party’s floundering will only stop once the TRL is dismantled and the following can be said openly:
It’s not sexist to analyze the expansion of women in the workforce on wages.
It’s not racist to suggest the impact of immigration on wages.
It’s not xenophobic to critique the impact of global trade on wages.
Once we can speak those truths openly, we can address the downsides with real solutions — childcare, housing reform, education funding — instead of ceding the narrative to the other side.
By making these truths untouchable, we hand our opponents a free weapon.
The alt-right has mastered this weapon. It’s time the left actually woke up.