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Brian Villanueva's avatar

In 2016, the white rural underclass shifted GOP to vote Trump.

In 2024 the urban minority underclass shifted noticeably toward Trump.

Trump won Latino men in 2024.

It appears we may be witnessing the re-emergence of a class-based political alignment (ala the 1900's-30's). The Democrats have gone hard into race to prevent this, but it appears the urban minority underclass and the rural white underclass may be realizing their problems are pretty similar -- mostly that the ruling class hates them.

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B.T. Smeller's avatar

"Working class" doesn't mean you drive a truck and listen to country music and are masculine, it means you work for a boss in a non-management or non-professional role. If you own enough assets to quit your job and live off of passive income, you are an upper class capitalist. If you own a small business but need to keep working to get by, you are middle-class petite bourgeois. If you are in a prestigious profession like law or medicine controlled by a credentialization cartel limiting membership, or if you are in a place in the corporate org chart where you are responsible for making hiring, firing, and other personnel decisions for lower level employees and are prohibited by labor law from joining a union for that reason, you are middle-class PMC. Everyone else is working class.

The working class therefore includes many white-collar workers in cities and suburbs who went to college but aren't professionals and aren't in management, even if this group has "middle class" cultural signifiers. A lot of the federal workers Trump fired are working class (although many would be PMC). It also includes people in crappy retail jobs who listen to NPR and use pronouns. Republicans don't understand this because the entire idea that "class" as a socially relevant category that can be defined in precise terms comes largely out of Marxism. The author is borrowing a term from a political tradition his opposes and then reframing it in an incoherent way. Normally, conservatives/libertarians just don't see class as relevant social group.

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