The global left has moved away from social class as an organizing identity, allowing the Right to peddle a working-class identity politics untethered from the socialist vision.
Illustration by Richard A. Chance
At July’s Republican National Convention, J. D. Vance reported that there is a class struggle — and he knows which side he’s on. Declaring himself a “working-class boy born far from the halls of power,” the vice-presidential hopeful hailed Donald Trump as “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.” Vance trusted in Trump’s plan: his administration had taken just four years to create “the greatest economy in history for workers.” If reelected in November, he would “protect the wages of American workers and stop the Chinese Communist Party from building their middle class on the backs of American citizens.”
Conservative claims to represent the working class are hardly new. Just before the Great Crash, the 1928 GOP platform boasted that “the Labor record of the Republican party stands unchallenged.” But today — not just in the United States — this is especially a claim to represent the concerns of millions of people ignored by the Left. When racist riots swept through English streets in August, archreactionary historian David Starkey imperiously declared “the end of the Labour Party’s relationship with the white working class.” In June, commentator Christophe Guilluy called the rise of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National a “roar from below” by the small-town working and middle classes.
Sociologists have done much to challenge the idea that workers are swinging to the right en masse. If blue-collar ouvriers are relatively more likely to vote for Le Pen, how about the fact that even more of them don’t vote at all — or that they are a falling share of the workforce anyway? Can we really use pollsters’ categories of income, or education, or voters’ own stated identity as proxies for class? What about the urban-rural divide? Such categories are clearly far from the Marxist understanding of class as a social relation pivoting on ownership of the means of production. Yet the political claim to represent the working class does not need to establish precise definitions.
Right-wing messaging often draws on certain ideas and values that it frames as authentic working-class attitudes. Even rich Trumpians and Tories will hype up their working-class backgrounds and their cultural ties to those who have been “left behind.” Liberal media that denounces the dangers of “populism” often echoes identical assumptions. MSNBC or the Guardian or Le Monde would be unlikely to tell us that union-led mobilizations in response to social policy — the 2023 French pension reform strikes, for instance — represent a “working-class interest.” Yet they routinely speak of protests against environmental measures or immigration as reflecting working-class concerns.
Working-classness is thus narrowly cast as an identity, framed in terms of various forms of individual or inherited distinction. Cultural traits (accent, attitude toward LGBTQ issues, preferred sandwich toppings) are fused with more occupational ones (Do you have a humanities degree? Did your grandfather work in a mill?) to create a stereotype of how the working class is and has always been. The rhetorical effect relies on this being asserted as timeless common sense. Such a framing can readily declare J. D. Vance the “voice of the Rust Belt” and just as easily dismiss a big-city service worker as not being authentically working-class because of his or her proximity to elites.
Even rich Trumpians and Tories will hype up their supposed working-class backgrounds.
For some, this recasting of class as a conservative identity politics has a material basis in the changing nature of work. Paul Mason has written of the twilight of the twentieth-century labor movement built on mass employment in fossil-fueled industries. He asks whether the Left should still bother with the “ex-miner sitting in the pub calling migrants cockroaches,” now that his connection to work is merely backward-looking. Much of Mason’s writing is inspired by post-workerism, a current that identified factory workers as the central agent of history in the 1960s but then turned away from the shop floor in search of various other supposed embodiments of revolutionary subjectivity.
We can find many explanations for changing and different material interests within the working class, even those historically represented by organized labor. Research into former industrial heartlands often finds that the rise of service-sector employment, or elderly populations’ dependence on Medicare, or private homeownership, remolds the foundations of this movement and the class identity built around it. If Trump outcompetes Democratic opponents in western Pennsylvania, or former Communist bastions in northern France vote for Le Pen’s party, it might easily be concluded that the working class has turned toward a protectionist nationalism.
Yet this commonsense reading needs to be qualified in two important respects. First is the weakly evidenced claim that the bulk of these candidates’ voters are “left behind” or on the path of social decline. It is far from clear that so-called aspirational voters — perhaps younger, upwardly mobile, and in search of homeownership — are inherently averse to the rising far right. Second is the need to question a certain assumption about the working class historically, as if it had previously been a homogeneous left-wing force. How true is it that the grouping together of workers in the same locations gave them the sense of a common class interest, one well represented by left-wing politics?
Cut Adrift
“The Left has abandoned the factories. And look where it is now.” An Instagram video posted by Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party this June showed center-left leader Elly Schlein dancing on a float at a Pride parade in Rome. The accusation that Schlein’s Democrats had lost “the working class” seemed credible after the recent European election. Polls suggested that, among the blue-collar electorate, Fratelli d’Italia had scored 39 percent. True, only two-fifths of this social group had cast a ballot — meaning only around 16 percent actually supported Meloni’s party. But by the same metric, the score for Schlein’s Democrats would be a mere 7 percent.
What J. D. Vance and his ilk capitalize on is recognition of the power of working-class identity.
Such results (and their framing) illustrate many important caveats around the idea of class realignment. The right-wing claim sounds emphatic — where once the Left had a powerful working-class base in the factories, it now listens to gay rights organizations instead. While a large minority of the blue-collar electorate voted for Fratelli d’Italia, far more did not vote, and its supporters amount to a small part of the electorate. Yet a right-wing academic like Matthew Goodwin can readily identify Fratelli as a party representing Italy’s “white working class” while coupling this claim with the markedly less precise one that its base is “people who feel they have been cut adrift by the elite.”
The habitual presentation of nationalist parties’ success as a result of previously left-wing workers switching sides is striking here. This is a politically compelling claim — that Meloni’s party has taken up the mantle of representing the low-income. Yet polling data across different national contexts show that only a small minority of voters directly switch from left to far right. The more important dynamic is a decades-long decline in the blue-collar vote from the Left and, at the same time, a radicalization of those parts of the blue-collar electorate that had historically voted for right-wing parties. This is a dissipation of the Left more than the creation of a new right-wing “class vote.”
The narrative is nonetheless a compelling tool for right-wing parties, insofar as a certain moral dignity associated with the working class can be used to ennoble its electorate in general. This includes combining the positive traits associated with blue-collar jobs (“an honest day’s work,” contributing to national wealth, selflessly providing for one’s family) with a story of victimhood that rivals the claims of other kinds of identity politics — the ordinary folk despised by arrogant, urban, educated elites. A working-class identity, even one that draws on the language of the historical labor movement, can be blended with rather vague, cross-class ciphers like “hardworking families.”
Aspirational
A whole literature on the right-wing working-class vote is premised on the assumption that elections are increasingly decided by cultural wedge issues rather than by economic ones. Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? poses exactly this binary. Time and again, Frank returns to the idea that conservatives have convinced working-class Kansans to vote “against their own economic interests.” His intention was to damn the Democrats’ failure to pose a real economic alternative. Yet it’s easy to overstate the idea that right-wing workers aren’t voting for their own immediate economic interest.
In a recent book on the Le Pen vote in southeastern France, sociologist Félicien Faury tries to discern the priorities of working people who have cast a ballot for a nationalist, anti-immigration party. These are not political activists or party functionaries, and they have mixed past voting behavior. They are not organized in the Rassemblement National and often do not see their preferences and assumptions as partisan in nature. Yet Faury tries to understand their choices using an ideological lens. He draws on historian E. P. Thompson’s idea of a “moral economy” — the commonsense notions of justice, and especially economic justice, that inform political action.
Faury’s interviewees often voice the idea that hard work is a good thing — but that it no longer pays. In this relatively well-off region, these voters are mainly employed in stable working-class jobs (for instance, in public services, or at least in jobs with permanent contracts) or run small businesses. They are not the poorest of the poor, but they express strong anxieties about the pressures on their position. These anxieties are often stated in terms like “We’re doing well enough to get nothing” (referring to the benefits or tax relief that others — the incorrigibly lazy or feckless, especially migrants — get for free). It is an attitude directed against both the lower ranks of the working class and the elites who let them get away with it.
This moral economy thus concerns economic issues directly. These voters say they are hardworking but disfavored compared to those who aren’t. They are not anti-statist, but they doubt the reliability of public services. They want to be able to rely on welfare in cases of misfortune, but they are distrustful of the “culture of handouts” that allows others a free ride. They are strongly imbued with the idea of meritocracy as well as the belief that it no longer exists in practice. They bristle at the arrogance of the highly educated and the “excesses” of the superrich but not at entrepreneurial values per se.
Working-class identity is there for the taking, because the Left has fallen almost totally silent about the experience of social class.
Faury’s examples show how this “respectable” moral economy — which, we might add, closely echoes the promises of 1990s Third Way ideas — is imbued with a racialized reading of social reality. Like other recent studies, such as Violaine Girard’s Le Vote FN au village, we see how the far right can put down roots far from just the most desperate or truly “left behind” parts of the working class. Faury is especially skeptical of polls that ask voters to rank their policy priorities (Does your concern about immigration count most, or how much money you have at the end of the month?). Rather, he argues, these voters’ sense of self strongly blends these phenomena: “I worked hard to get ahead, but I am struggling because of the unfair preference given to minorities.”
Major sections of the working class favor right-wing parties because they see doing so as being in their material interest, at least within the realm of viable choices. Even voters who see the green transition as necessary might be troubled by its consequences for their own lives — for instance, tax hikes risk driving their boss out of business, and they live far from alternative sources of employment. A homeowning worker who can’t afford new insulation or needs a car to get to work is more likely to oppose green taxes than someone living in a rent-controlled apartment. But, Faury and Girard suggest, they might likewise adamantly oppose social housing being offered in their area when they fear the arrival of the undeserving, racialized poor.
Left Alone
Here I have suggested that, in multiple Western countries, the Right makes overblown claims to represent workers while deploying a certain identity politics of class to ennoble petty-bourgeois and even wealthy voters who claim to be victims of elite injustice. But this works, for the most part, because they are pushing against an open door. Working-class identity is open to capture because the Left in these countries has fallen almost totally silent about the experience of social class — or else has taken the lead in announcing that it is no longer important.
However, the right-wing identity politics of class also draws on fragments of a larger story that used to be told by the Left. The socialist message of class solidarity — “to rise with your class, not out of it” — corresponded to its rise even within capitalist society. It drew its power from a certain effectiveness in achieving collective reforms, as both the evidence of the success of past organization and the platform for building a better future. This was, to use another image from E. P. Thompson, not the class as a “mathematical” reality defined by capitalist exploitation but one that “made itself” through its own “relations, ideas, and institutions.”
It is not just that the Left used to offer the dream of a beautiful socialist tomorrow while today we are stuck with more individualist projects of education, meritocracy, and social mobility. It’s that it once combined these things in a far-reaching vision of cultural progress and the winning of control over our destiny.
Its influence was, of course, unevenly distributed across different elements of the working class. Some workers fought discrimination to battle their way into the ranks of organized labor, like the South Asian women who undertook the Grunwick strike in Britain in 1976. Yet they did so in the name of claiming their share in the working-class dignity that this movement avowed as its heritage.
Having such a vision to organize around built a class identity able to coalesce individuals with widely varying backgrounds, conditions, and prospects. Even workers whose jobs had little strategic muscle could identify with the social power of, for example, the miner. Both industrious and militant, such a figure stood as an embodiment of the working class’s necessity to society and its power to transform its own conditions. But with the undercutting of labor’s industrial might and the collective pride built around it, this identity has increasingly become an individual self-perception. The tragedy of the ex-miner is turned into a victim story — the embodiment of elite disdain for a working class pushed to the margins.
Right-wingers thus use working-classness as a rival to other identities — not a unifying force that carries collective ambitions but a retort to the claims made by minority groups who are fighting over scraps. If right-wing parts of the working class have long cited their working-classness to justify their opposition to disruptive strikes or to welfare spending, this has today become the dominant way in which the “working class” gets mentioned in mainstream politics at all. In this reading, the authentic hardworking people are the ones who accept their place — and who will not stand for organized victim groups making illegitimate claims on the public purse.
Left-wing parties often struggle to respond to such declarations beyond insisting that anger is better directed toward the ruling class. But perhaps the problem lies in the difficulty of recognizing that the language of class identity and class power is a necessary part of political mobilization, and that the Left isn’t doing enough to foreground it. In Marxist terms, it is quite right to say that class is not an individually held attribute or identity but a social relation of exploitation. Such an analytical point isn’t all that useful for shaping how people think about themselves and their political choices.
Where right-wingers say that the Left has abandoned the working class, it isn’t sufficient to say that “networked subjects” or the “multitude” or the “marginalized” in general are in fact still keeping up the fight, or that the Left has the concerns of the “disadvantaged” at heart. What J. D. Vance and his ilk capitalize on is recognition of the force of working-class identity and the attractive sense of power that has historically gone with it. If we really want to build “the greatest economy in history for workers,” the Left would do well to reclaim this identity for itself.