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.

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.

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.