Donald Trump has Scrambled the Old Class Allegiances
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.
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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: White House Archive, via Flickr under Public Domain.
