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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/
Pull quotes:
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
No, because the "working class" (as in the class of people actually doing physical work) has historically always been more right-wing and/or conservative than their counterparts in the bourgeoisie.
Shhhhh, I'm baiting here......
Congratulations, it worked, now stop being an ass.
Have we met?
The question is legitimate, the answers interesting. The fact that "leftism" most commonly presents as the middle class cosplaying as the working class to try to join the upper class is context for later.
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Are you talking about America or generally? Because at least in Europe, during Cold War times, the socialist and communist parties genuinely were working class parties by any definition one might choose, both regarding their voter base, membership and leadership.
I'm Primarily thinking in terms of the US but from what I gather that the politics of the UK and France have followed roughly similar paths. Support for "Revolution!" or any other "latest new thing" always seems to be most pronounced amongst the leisure and academic classes. Where as the core of conservative electorate ends up comprised of craftsmen and cab-drivers.
At least the biggest Western European Communist parties were, during their glory days, firmly working class in, as said, electorate, membership and leadership. For instance, there's a paper here detailing the correlations between worker representation in electoral areas and Communist party vote ("worker" here being basically a very strict definition, ie. non-retired, non-academic urban manual worker; much of the rest of the CP support came from already-retired workers and peasants and other rurals). This started changing in the 70s, as educated "technical" workers started replacing manual workers, but this is also generally associated with the deradicalization of the Communist Parties. The most notable French CP leaders also came from the working class, Manuel Thorez was a coal miner and Georges Marchais a mechanic.
Anglo countries are different, since they never really developed Communist Parties as a force, so the academic utopian segment - always present in all CPs, but as a minor force in actual mass parties - was considerably more important in their consistency. Labour had a strong working-class base until fairly recent times, as well.
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