RUTHFULLY YOURS

US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.

Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.

Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.

As a result, in the US, the main beneficiaries of the much-discussed oligarchic ‘dark money’ have been, contrary to the general media perception, the Democrats. Big-spending oligarchs like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Marc Benioff helped Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris raise well over $1.5 billion – the highest figure in history – for her losing campaign.

Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media. In the same vein, the Atlantic, owned by Steve Jobs’s widow, has denounced Musk’s oligarchic embrace of ‘strongman politics’. Progressives were far less concerned when Google camped out at the Obama White House (visiting 427 times during his administration) or when Harris scooped up big cash from oligarchs.

Perhaps the biggest political divide between the oligarchs comes from how they make their money. Many of those rallying to Trump actually build things and compete directly with China. Most obviously, this includes Elon Musk, who sources from China but also competes with its industrial machine at both Tesla and SpaceX.

Another important component of the right-wing oligarchical shift is the ‘defence bros’, like Palantir co-founders Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey. These are mostly habitués of the defence and space centres in Texas, Florida and southern California. In these places, they are building what could be a MAGA-friendly tech base. Military tech and space projects, which for security reasons must be built in the US, require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs and, as one executive told me, ‘good places to blow things up’. For this, he added, the wide open spaces of Texas are a unique blessing.

In contrast, the post-industrial firms focused on consumer markets, digital communications and entertainment have remained predominately with the Democrats. Although some of these have hedged their bets, most of them – Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon – remain dominated by Democrats. This progressive, woke tack is particularly marked among the inheritors, such as ex-wives of oligarchs and their offspring, including the son of George Soros and the inheritors of the Rockefeller, Hewlett-Packard and MacArthur fortunes.

There has been a shift in the middle classes, too. Though similar to the oligarchs, they are deeply divided by how they make their living. The electoral base of the Democratic Party lies with the professional classes, whose jobs are often tied to the government and who benefit from regulations.

This is not a small group. Their numbers have expanded globally with the massive increase in college enrollment, which grew almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010. People who work as lawyers, environmental consultants and teachers are now reliably Democratic. This slice of the middle class often considers itself both enlightened and fit to lead, thanks to their high test scores and degrees. They tend to have little use for patriotism, family or religion, in comparison with working-class voters. To them and their favoured media outlets, the MAGA legions, whatever their income, are hateful rubes and fools, if not outright Brownshirts. Their anti-Trumpism is also motivated by the fact that they are directly threatened by Trump’s budget cuts and federal restructuring. After all, if there’s no Green New Deal, or race-conscious policies, where is a newly minted environmental engineer or DEI consultant to get a job?

Nonetheless, other parts of the middle classes are heading to the right. This seems to be particularly true of people who work in the ‘carbon economy’ – that is, fossil fuels, manufacturing, agriculture and logistics. People who labour as construction workers, oil drillers, truck drivers and loggers are often burdened by green policies that drive up their costs and threaten to send their jobs abroad.

There is also the large group of small-business owners who have been the bulwark of Trumpism, in part due to their concerns over regulation and taxes. Particularly well-positioned could be small industrial firms, which are beneficiaries of Trump’s expansion of loan programmes from Washington.

Yet the fealty of the MAGA wing of the middle class could be tested in coming months. Many small businesses sell a lot of imported items, notably from China, and some may be severely threatened by higher prices or even the availability of products. The anti-tariff business press is certain to highlight and exacerbate these claims, perhaps nudging more of the middle class back to the Democrats.

More distinctly, working-class voters remain a decisive constituency, as well as key players in the economy. In the US, almost two-thirds of the population over the age of 25 lack a four-year degree. Similar patterns can be seen in the EU and the UK. In all these places, working-class voters have shifted to the right from their former left-of-centre allegiance. Under governments of both left and right, their prospects and quality of life have been deteriorating for at least a quarter of a century.

Yet once again, this group is deeply divided. Trump won roughly half of voters with a yearly income of less than $50,000. Here too, a lot depends on how you make a living. If you are a typical blue-collar worker in the ‘carbon economy’, you tend towards the right, in part due to the impact of climate regulations. If you work in a restaurant, are a nurse or are on welfare, you have plenty of reasons to back an expanded government.

It is among the working class that the failures of liberal capitalism seem most obvious, often offering only low-wage service jobs. A growing percentage of young working-class people remain outside the labour pool entirely, with more men now out of the workforce than in half a century. In much of Europe, between a quarter and one-third of the population under 30 is neither in school nor employment, including in Italy, the EU’s third-largest economy. In the UK, one out of seven under-25s is on the economic sidelines, the highest level in a decade. They are angry with the status quo, and for good reasons.

Under such conditions it is not surprising that many voters, particularly the young, are heading to the political extremes. In France, younger voters tend to support either Marine Le Pen or her far-left opponent, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. German working-class voters have embraced the right-populist AfD, but also increasingly Die Linke (the Left Party), which won a quarter of the youth votes – more than the Social Democrats and Greens combined in February’s federal elections. Others, meanwhile, embraced the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a group that espouses socialism with a strong anti-immigrant twist. More recently, working-class voters in the UK are showing signs of abandoning the established parties in favour of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

This shift to more radical politics will not, however, be limited to the traditional working class. Many educated millennials face a world where the ‘good’ jobs are disappearing, while they have to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition payments. In the US, some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning they work in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless. In the UK, roughly a third of young people doubt they will reach their career goals.

Increasingly, many with college educations (once seen as the ticket to a middle-class life) consider university a waste of time, with more seeking careers in the trades instead. At the same time, there is an ever-growing shortage of industrial and craft workers, whose jobs could expand if Trump’s drive to bring manufacturing and construction back to the country comes to fruition.

Things may not be so rosy for the college crowd. Among millennials, 82 per cent fear that AI will reduce their wages. They may have good reason to worry. Even the ‘geeks’ are proving extremely vulnerable to what economists refer to as ‘skills-based technological change’. Tech firms like Salesforce, Meta, Google, IBM, Amazon and Lyft have all announced major cutbacks, potentially giving a warning for what is to come. Within months of AI’s emergence, freelance work in software declined markedly, along with pay. Even many ‘creative jobs’ – actors, writers and journalists – could be threatened by AI-generated content.

The creation of what one Marxist scholar describes as ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’ could drive politics towards the extremes. The notion of achieving success and acquiring assets, which is critical to support for capitalism, is undermined in an economy where buying a house seems impossible, even with fancy degrees.

The disenchantment of the young is amazingly universal. In virtually every high-income country, Pew has found that the vast majority of parents – 80 per cent in Japan and over 70 per cent in the US – are pessimistic about the financial future of their offspring. It’s no surprise, then, that less than 10 per cent of Americans under 30 think the country is heading in a good direction.

These attitudes, whether expressed from the right or left, threaten support for a state created by the neoliberal elite and the oligarchs. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world, according to a recent Edelman survey, believe capitalism does more harm than good. More than four in five worry about job loss, especially from automation. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility could have the effect of boosting support for expanded government and greater redistribution of wealth.

This could also lead to ever greater pushbacks against the oligarchs. According to Pew, 80 per cent of Americans believe wealthy donors have too much power. In 2024, election spending, in real dollars, is estimated to have been two-to-three times that of two decades ago. Some 40 per cent of all political contributions, suggests Jacobin, come from the top one per cent.

The new class conflict is far more complex than the favoured narrative of the oligarchs vs the people, or the old Marxist battle between industrial workers and the bourgeois merchant class. The only way to address the shift to an increasingly extreme politics comes from finding ways to provide greater opportunities for income and ownership. If we fail in this, the results won’t be pretty.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.