Winning Back the “Working Class”

Senator Bernard Sanders offers this op-ed in The Guardian: How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key.

The people who most heavily supported Trump are white, upper middle class, and non-college educated; contractors who own their own trucks, well-off subcontractors, small shop owners, and the like, a group more petty bourgeois than working class. 

Working class or petty bourgeois, Senator Sanders  is right in this: healing the divisions in the USA requires persuading this group to support democracy and aligning their interests with the broader public. It is a difficult project, which socialists historically have rejected entirely entirely. This past Presidential election was not won by persuading the white upper middle class, but rather by turning out marginalized people like Blacks and Natives. But the white upper middle class remains, and must be dealt with somehow.

Sanders is wrong; this is not simply a problem of corporate capitalism. The non-college educated white upper middle class largely sees its interests as aligned with corporate capitalism. There is ample evidence that those interests are not. We need only consider how the largest businesses have fared (well) compared with the small ones (poorly) during the COVID pandemic to see that the biggest enemy of the upper middle class is the same as the enemy of the working class.

I once wrote to a Trump supporter, “If you're willing to be in the middle, not at the top or the bottom, we have a place for you.” He didn't answer. Being able to claim the bottom position in society while actually being several rungs up the ladder is a fine delusion. One gets to both claim sympathy for one's oppressed state, while at the same time getting the benefits of being an oppressor. So…I don't know. White privilege is a hell of a drug.