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.