The other day, while flipping through radio channels in my car in an effort to find the latest NBA news, I came upon the conservative radio program Clay and Buck. One of the hosts was warning listeners about the probable presence of FBI provocateurs at pro-Trump rallies. Such agents were easy to spot, he claimed. If you saw someone in brand-new Carhartt, and work boots that looked like they’d never been used, they were probably infiltrators “trying to look working class.”

While it has dramatically accelerated in recent years, the movement of the working class to the Republican Party is nothing new. At least since Thomas Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, progressives and radicals have had a simple answer to the question of why the working class fails to mobilize according to its economic interests: it’s been tricked. The Right, by appealing to various cultural attitudes and racial prejudices, has obscured the underlying economic interests that link workers of all races.

In his new book, Class War: A Literary History, Mark Steven takes a dramatically different approach by arguing that common economic interest — a shared structural position as the exploited — will never serve to motivate radical class politics. His evidence is that it actually never has. Class feeling isn’t the precondition for radical political action; it’s the result.