Why has the right become more popular among low-income voters?
Explaining the growing defection of the working class from the left
This post continues a discussion on the evolution of the left-right opposition in Western countries. Previously, I described the progressive gentrification of the left, and explained the reasons for the changes on the left. This post turns to the other side of this evolution: gradual shift to the right among many low-income voters who traditionally supported left-wing parties.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, correspondents in Germany, the UK, and Canada observed that:
In country after country, many working-class voters—especially those outside the biggest cities—are signaling the same thing: They mistrust the establishment—from academics to bankers to traditional politicians—and feel these elites are out of touch and don’t care about people like them. — Wall Street Journal
This evolution has been associated with a growing vote for right-wing parties, in particular populist right-wing candidates like Trump in the US, Le Pen in France, Farage in the UK, Weidel in Germany, and Meloni in Italy.1 This post looks at the possible explanation for this evolution.
A sceptical look at two explanations
The cultural backlash
Social scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue that the growing support of low-income voters for populist right-wing parties reflects a “cultural backlash”: older working-class voters have been unsettled by the progressive ideas of the left and are pushing back.
Over time, therefore, the traditional values often held most strongly by the older generation, less educated sectors, and men have gradually become out of step with the changing cultures of contemporary Western societies, with this displacement generating resentment, anger, and a sense of loss. — Norris and Inglehart (2016)
In other words, some parts of the population remain attached to older ways of thinking, now seen as outdated by younger generations. As the latter became the majority, older generations pushed back. From this perspective, working-class resistance among older voters is a temporary phase in the historical evolution of political values, as new generations gradually adopt left-wing ideas.
I see three issues with this criticism. First, its focus on low-income voters’ preferences takes for granted the evolution of left-wing parties’ ideas. From a realist perspective, one must ask why this shift occurred: why left-wing parties changed their stance rather than continuing to represent working-class views. The answer lies in the argument made in the previous post: de-industrialisation and mass education shifted left-wing coalitions towards highly educated voters. As a result, the bargaining power of working-class voters to shape left-wing programmes gradually declined relative to these new groups.
Second, this explanation carries an implicit negative judgment: low-income voters are seen as failing to accept the value of new left-wing political ideas that will eventually prevail. Though Norris and Inglehart do not spell it out in so many words, the implication is that these voters are morally wrong, clinging selfishly to their privilege. Such a judgmental stance may lead to dismissing the conflicting views of low-income voters too quickly, without trying enough to understand the factors shaping their views.
Third, the cultural backlash thesis links the populist surge mainly to cultural grievances. Yet historical examples, like the rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage and cannabis legalisation, suggest that populations can adapt quickly to liberal norms, casting doubt on the idea that cultural resistance alone strongly drives low-income voters. Instead, survey data often point to economic and political concerns, such as globalisation and immigration, as the main factors behind working-class support for right-wing populist parties, rather than cultural shifts per se.2
The manipulation by business elites
Another explanation is that low-income voters are being manipulated by part of the economic elite into voting against their own interests. The fact that Donald Trump is very wealthy certainly lends some credence to this accusation. Nathan Robinson, the Editor of the political magazine Current Affairs, expressed this criticism clearly in a recent article:
Right-wing populism is a sham led by real estate developers and venture capitalists. — Robinson (2022)
The claim that poor voters are manipulated into supporting right-wing parties rests on the assumption that they can be consistently fooled. The realist perspective I take here tends to assume that we should take such an argument with caution. People are, in general, very good at identifying their interests over time. You can fool one (silly) person repeatedly, or many unsuspecting people once, but it is hard to fool many people repeatedly.
Economist John Roemer, an analytical Marxist, provided a counter-argument against the view that low-income voters make mistakes when voting for right-wing parties. In his article “Why the Poor Do Not Expropriate the Rich,” he shows that in a multidimensional political space, it can be rational for low-income voters to support right-wing parties if their preferences on non-economic issues align more closely with them.
If voters care deeply about some non-economic issue, and have widely disparate views on that issue, it does not follow that all those whose wealth is less than the mean will necessarily support a party which proposes a tax rate of unity. — Roemer (1998)
The downgrade of working voters’ preferences and status on the left
Preferences
Low-income voters are generally more conservative than high-income voters on issues such as women’s rights, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights. However, these topics typically rank lower in priority compared to two major concerns: globalisation and immigration.
Globalisation and the opening of national economies is the elephant in the room in discussions about the changing vote of low-income voters. Survey after survey shows that low-income voters express strong resentment toward economic openness and high levels of migration in the West.
In contrast to these positions, major left-wing parties have generally adopted the mainstream pro-market stance on economics. Economists agree that opening economies offers the potential for significant efficiency gains. Everyone can benefit from trade, as specialisation increases in larger integrated markets and consumers gain access to cheaper goods. This is why economists viewed the UK’s Brexit and Trump’s tariffs very unfavourably.
Nonetheless, one aspect often overlooked in economists’ public discourse on globalisation is that the gains are on average. Trade also has redistributive effects. The classic Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson theorem shows that when countries open to trade, wages adjust according to the relative scarcity of skills compared to other countries. Rich countries have more skilled workers than the global average. As a result, when economies open, these workers, who are scarce at the global level, benefit from increased demand from abroad. By contrast, unskilled workers are relatively scarce within rich countries but abundant globally. In an open global economy, they are no longer scarce, as their labour can be accessed indirectly through imports or offshoring to lower-wage countries. In wealthy, capital-rich countries, this means higher profits and better pay for skilled workers, but lower wages and fewer jobs for unskilled ones. National income may rise overall, but a larger share goes to the well-off, leaving many low-income households worse off.
See box at the end: The economic debate on the effect of globalisation and immigration on low-income earners
Highly educated voters belong to the segment of the population that benefit most from globalisation. They get access to cheaper goods produced in low-wage countries, while their work in the service sector typically face little foreign competition and is harder to outsource.
There is therefore a gap between the preferences of low-income and highly educated voters in Western countries. As the influence of the latter group has grown within left-wing parties, it is perhaps no coincidence that concerns about globalisation have not been central to the programmes of mainstream left-wing parties.
In addition to the movement of goods and capital, the movement of people through immigration has also become a major point of contention. Historically, socialist parties often viewed immigration with suspicion, seeing it as a way for capitalists to weaken the bargaining power of the working class by importing cheap labour.3
Today, left-wing parties have largely abandoned negative views on immigration, partly because the issue has become strongly associated with far-right parties. As with globalisation, major left-wing parties have embraced mainstream economic views on immigration. Economists generally view immigration positively, seeing it as a way to better match worker skills with firms’ needs and to facilitate economic and skill transfers across countries.
As with globalisation, immigration may have distributional consequences though: low-income earners could be affected by competition from low-skilled migrants. The debate on this point remains open (see the box at the end of this post). For that reason, low-income voters’ opposition to immigration may not be economically irrational.
In any case, it would be a mistake to focus solely on economic consequences. The rise of anti-immigration sentiment among low-income voters in the West cannot be fully explained by concerns about labour market competition. A 2013 study in the US found that opposition to immigration was only moderately linked to whether migrants were skilled or unskilled; instead, it was more strongly related to the number of migrants.4
The evidence suggests that identity and cultural insecurity play a central role. A broad literature has examined the drivers of this pattern. For example, in a study of 15 European countries from 2000 to 2018, political scientists Hutter and Kriesi found that identity-related concerns, such as perceived cultural threat, are especially salient among lower socio-economic groups in shaping attitudes toward immigration. Their findings are consistent with the account by Piketty and his co-authors of the political realignment of working-class voters around issues of national belonging and migration.
In their 2008 book West European Politics in the Age of Globalization, Kriesi and his co-authors argue that globalisation has created a new structural divide between highly educated voters, who tend to benefit from economic and cultural openness, and lower-educated, lower-income voters, who feel left behind. As mainstream left-wing parties increasingly embraced pro-globalisation positions, many of these voters became politically unrepresented. Right-wing populist and nationalist parties, which placed opposition to immigration and global integration at the centre of their platforms, were best positioned to attract their support and made the greatest inroads among working-class voters.
In 2017, Wall Street Journal writer Greg Ip described the new political reality as opposing globalists versus nationalists.
From Brexit to Trump to the rise of nationalist parties across Europe, the old division between left and right is giving way to a battle between self-styled patriots and confounded globalists. — Ip (2017)
That same year, the British essayist David Goodhart published a book titled The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In it, he described the opposition as being between the "Anywheres," the highly educated elite who benefit from the ability to move freely around the world, and the "Somewheres," low-income workers unsettled by changes in their neighbourhoods.
Recent elections in the US and France illustrate this pattern, with left and centre parties dominating in urban centres, while right-wing populist parties lead in peripheral areas. The maps of support for Trump in the US in 2024 and for Le Pen in France in 2022 resemble Swiss cheese, punctuated by large holes where urban centres stand out.
The downfall of the status of low-income white voters
Losing their central recognition in the left-wing coalition
One of the key concerns people have is status: the social recognition received from others in society. Status might be immaterial, but, in a social species like ours, it has real practical consequences, and our cognition is therefore fine-tuned to value social recognition.
’s book The Status Game describes the nature and effects of social status.Feeling good about it is part of our human nature. It’s in our basic coding, our evolution, our DNA. … We can feel the velvet touch of status repeatedly throughout the course of a single conversation or in the glance of a passing stranger. — Storr (2021)
Social status is granted to individuals for personal achievements (e.g. being accepted into a prestigious university), but it is also attributed to groups: for example, soldiers in wartime, nurses during pandemics, or firefighters confronting disasters. Beyond the distribution of economic resources, the allocation of social recognition is a key element of the social contract offered by political ideologies. Should entrepreneurs be praised for creating wealth, or are they exploiting workers who are those who truly keep the economy running?
From this perspective, the gentrification of the left has brought a major decline in the status of the 1950s left-wing coalition’s backbone: white male blue-collar workers. In the 1950s, the working-class community offered a counterculture, a sense of identity, and a space for recognition.5 You might have been at the bottom of the economic ladder, but within your community, you could still earn respect. Socialism portrayed workers, typically male, as the driving force of social change, through whom a better society would emerge.
Today, low-income white males have lost their central position of recognition within the left-wing coalition. The rise of new socio-cultural issues often puts them on the “wrong” side of historical progress. Their ethnicity (white) and sexual orientation (typically heterosexual) assign them to two “dominant” categories. Somewhat paradoxically, highly educated people on the left often refer to them as “privileged.” Here is, for instance, how Norris and Inglehart describe the cultural backlash:
Sectors once culturally predominant in Western Europe may react angrily to the erosion. […] Older white men with traditional values- who formed the cultural majority in Western societies during the 1950s and 1960s - have seen their predominance and privilege eroded. The silent revolution of the 1970s appears to have spawned an angry and resentful counter-revolutionary backlash today. Norris and Inglehart (2016)
In his autobiographical book Troubled,
gives an example of how lower social class has been downgraded as a marker of centrality in the left-wing coalition. He recounts attending Yale after a very challenging youth spent in foster care in a poor, high-crime neighbourhood with low educational attainment. He describes his surprise when encountering discussions of “privilege” at university.A student from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy (an expensive private boarding school), explained that I was too privileged to understand […]. At first, I was stunned. But later, I came to understand the intellectual acrobatics necessary to say something like this. The student who called me “privileged” likely meant that due to my background as a biracial Asian Latino heterosexual cisgender (that is, I “present” as the sex I was “assigned” at birth) male, this means that I have led a privileged life. — Henderson 2024
The education divide
The rising education levels among left-wing leaders create another source of tension: a divide over education and the social status it confers. Philosopher Michael Sandel points out in his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit that as education has become central to success, it increasingly serves to justify social inequalities. The supposedly “meritocratic” nature of the education system implies that those who fail may be seen, by others and themselves, as responsible for their fate.6 In this context, Sandel notes that disdain for the less educated has become one of the few socially accepted prejudices.
By 2016, many working people chafed under the sense that well-schooled elites looked down on them with condescension. This complaint, which burst forth in the populist backlash against elites, was not without warrant. Survey research bears out what many working-class voters sensed; at a time when racism and sexism are out of favor (discredited though not eliminated), credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice. In the United States and Europe, disdain for the poorly educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups. — Sandel (2020)7
This educational divide can easily slip into the left-wing coalition, as new socio-cultural values spread among the highly educated. Disdain for the less educated—typically from lower social backgrounds—can find a new expression: disdain for their “regressive views.” It is in that context that we can understand the backlash to Clinton’s 2016 remark about Trump’s supporters:
You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it8.
These reactions show that the comment was seen not just as a critique of Trump supporters’ ideas, but also as disdain for lower-class voters, traditionally a key part of the Democratic Party’s base.9
To sum up, white male low-income workers have seen their status and prestige decline from a central position in the left-wing coalition to one where they are often looked down upon. This shift has made them a potential target for political entrepreneurs offering counter-ideological narratives in which they regain greater social recognition than within the left-wing coalition.10
Reconsidering our perspective on the recent political evolution
The left–right divide in Western countries has traditionally centred on distributional conflicts, with support for redistribution highest on the left and lowest on the right. It is therefore understandable to view recent changes with surprise and ask: how can this be explained? This reaction rests on the implicit assumption that conflict between rich and poor over economic resources is the natural basis of the main political opposition in a country. We should, however, question this assumption.
For a broader context: historical and international differences
Historical differences
Distributional conflicts are a major source of contention in society, as deciding how to share resources is one of the core challenges of collective life. Historical examples from diverse contexts offer perspective. One of the most well-known dates back to the Roman Republic. In 494 BCE, the common people of Rome stopped working and withdrew to Mount Sacer in what became known as the Secession of the Plebs. They protested their lack of political rights and protection from debt bondage, marking one of the earliest recorded strikes in history.
Social conflicts over distribution are, therefore, not unique to industrial societies. But history also shows that political coalitions are flexible and can form along different lines of opposition. At the end of the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar—who came from a wealthy family—rose to power through mass support and populist tactics. He organised public games, backed land redistribution, debt relief, and grain subsidies, and used popular assemblies to bypass the Senate. He cast his opponents as defenders of privilege and the status quo, while presenting himself as a reformer championing justice and public grievance, particularly over inequality and senatorial corruption. The resemblance to modern populists is hard to miss.
Geographical differences
Modern cross-country differences also show the flexibility of political coalitions. Democratic countries like India, South Korea, and Japan offer examples where political divisions are not primarily structured around class. In India, they often follow religious, caste, or regional lines. In Japan, postwar politics have been dominated by a centrist party, with opposition shaped more by institutional or foreign policy positions than class. In South Korea, regional loyalties and security concerns have long influenced politics, with generational and gender divides now gaining prominence. In all three cases, economic conflict exists but is filtered through other political identities.
Distributional conflict between the rich and the poor is only one of many possible conflicts
In their influential book Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism, political scientists Adam Przeworski and John Sprague (1986) examine the challenges faced by socialist parties in gaining power. They argue that the framing political conflict as primarily a struggle between rich and poor is only one among many possibilities:
At any particular moment multiple political forces compete to impose a specific causal structure on the political behavior of individuals. Class ideology is one of the potential competitors, along with the universalistic ideology of individuals-citizens, and various particularistic claims made on behalf of confessional persuasions, ethnic ties, linguistic affinities, regional, racist, or nationalistic values. Some of the most profound confrontations in European history did not involve class at all but rather juxtaposed confessional loyalties to universalistic conceptions of citizenship. — Przeworski and Sprague (1986)
The historical left–right divide in the West, centred on distributive issues, likely took shape due to the coincidence of industrialisation and democratisation: a large, cohesive, and organised working class backing a clear ideological project, on paper, and seemingly realised in communist countries. For a time, this allowed the working class to anchor coalitions supporting left-wing parties and helped structure political competition around economic lines. But the economic and demographic shifts since the postwar era have gradually eroded the foundations of this divide. It may be a mistake, then, to expect the left–right split to necessarily return to its specific twentieth-century form.
Low-income voters who once formed the core of left-wing coalitions have gradually shifted to supporting more and more right-wing, often populist, parties. This change reflects a broader transformation in political alignments. As left-wing parties have attracted highly educated, urban voters, the traditional working-class base has lost both influence and recognition. They grew concerned about developments like globalisation and immigration, broadly supported by left-wing parties, while their social status declined within the left’s evolving value system. In this context, right-wing parties have found opportunities to offer narratives that restore symbolic recognition and respond to the economic and cultural discontent of these voters.
This post aims primarily to understand the political realignment of low-income voters, not to make a moral or partisan judgment about it. Nonetheless, the implications for society are significant enough to warrant a comment in conclusion. As discussed by Norris and Inglehart, Sandel, Piketty, and many others, this shift has often led low-income voters to support anti-establishment populist parties, many of which show a questionable commitment to democratic institutions. It is fair to say that Western democracies are facing a crisis marked by uncertainty about their resilience to external authoritarian pressures and internal populist tensions.11 Given the current pressures on democratic institutions, re-engaging low-income voters in the mainstream political process would appear to be a desirable goal for parties, left and right, committed to democratic norms.
Box: The economic debate on the effect of globalisation and immigration on low-income earners
The effect of globalisation
There is ongoing debate among economists about whether globalisation has contributed to rising inequality in Western countries. A formal result from Heckscher, Ohlin, and Samuelson predicts that when rich countries trade more with poorer ones, workers with lower education or skill levels in rich countries may lose out. According to this theory, competition from cheaper foreign goods can lower wages and reduce job opportunities for less-skilled workers. Studies supporting this view (e.g. Feenstra & Hanson 1999; Autor, Dorn & Hanson 2013) find that global trade has particularly affected workers in manufacturing and other lower-paid sectors.
Some economists are sceptical about this phenomenon. They argue that most of the rise in wage inequality stems from technological change favouring skilled workers and from the weakening of unions and labour protections, rather than trade itself (Bound & Johnson 1992; Card & DiNardo 2002). Still, the existence of this debate shows that low-income workers' concerns about globalisation in Western countries should not be dismissed as unfounded.
These discussions, crucial for the public debate, are often underemphasised in core economics education and tend to appear only in specialised international trade courses. As a result, many students graduate with an overly optimistic view of trade, having little exposure to theoretical and empirical work on its potential distributional costs for low-skilled workers in wealthy countries. Introductory courses typically stress the “overall positive” effects of trade, based on classic insights from Smith and Ricardo. The issue of distributional effects are commonly brushed aside with the Hicks-Kaldor criterion, which holds that a policy is good if its gains could, in theory, be redistributed to make everyone better off. Whether such redistribution is feasible, or actually happens in practice, is usually left unexamined.
In practice, compensation for those harmed by trade and globalisation remains limited. Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Majlesi (2020) show that U.S. regions most affected by trade with China, the so-called “China Shock”, received little targeted compensation, despite significant and lasting labour market disruptions. Margalit (2011) finds that in countries with stronger welfare states, political backlash to trade liberalisation has been less intense, suggesting that broad social protections may help cushion the blow. Still, even in these contexts, explicit compensatory mechanisms are rare.
There are structural and political reasons why compensation is hard to deliver effectively. Rodrik (1997) famously argued that globalisation creates a paradox: it raises demand for social protection while weakening the state’s ability to provide it. He also noted that designing and implementing compensation is both technically and politically challenging. Trade’s gains are broad but diffuse, accruing slowly to many consumers and sectors, while the losses are concentrated and immediate, hitting specific groups and regions. To deliver the right compensations, governments must identify affected groups, avoid perverse incentives, and overcome ideological resistance to redistribution.
The effect of immigration
As with globalisation, economists tend to view the overall impact of migration as positive, particularly in terms of aggregate gains in productivity and efficiency (Borjas, 1995). However, concerns remain about its distributional effects. Basic supply and demand logic suggests that an influx of low-skilled workers could increase competition for low-wage jobs and depress wages.
Some studies, such as Borjas (2003), suggest that low-skilled immigration puts downward pressure on the wages of similarly low-skilled natives. Others, like Card (2005), find little evidence that immigration has substantially harmed native wages or employment. Ottaviano and Peri (2012) argue that immigration’s impact on low-income earners is often limited or offset once broader economic adjustments are considered. Immigration can lead firms to invest and reorganise work in ways that reduce direct competition between migrants and natives, for example, by allocating immigrants to roles less dependent on communication while natives shift to more interactive jobs, thus easing wage pressure.
Overall, the literature is mixed. While some studies point to possible negative effects for low-skilled native workers, results vary across studies and contexts. In his 2014 book Immigration Economics, Borjas concludes":
Remarkably, it has proven surprisingly diffi cult to demonstrate empirically the trivial Economics 101 theoretical implication that an outward shift in labor supply lowers the wage. […] We know much more about how to approach the question of measuring the labor market impact of immigration than we did three decades ago, but it is far from clear that we can be sure of the answer we now have.
My impression from the literature is that there might be economic effects of immigration on low-income earners. Though, if present, they are likely smaller than often claimed in public debate. However, here again, given the uncertainty in research findings, and the possibility of larger effects for specific groups, these concerns should not be dismissed.
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Data on the evolution of low-income voters towards right-wing and right-wing populist parties in Western countries:
United States: among households earning less than US $50 000, the Democratic lead of 12 points in 2016 (Clinton 53 % v Trump 41 %) fell to 11 points in 2020 (Biden 55 % v Trump 44 %) and flipped to a 2-point Republican edge in 2024 (Trump 50 % v Harris 48 %) (Roper Center 2016; Roper Center 2020; ABC News 2024). Over the same period, Trump’s share of white working-class voters (white, non-college) stood at 67 % (2016), 64 % (2020) and 66 % (2024) (Brookings 2024).
United Kingdom: the Conservatives led Labour by 15 points among low-income voters in the 2019 election, toppling c. 50 “Red Wall” seats (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2020). At the 2024 general election, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK drew 21 % of the working class vote (C2, D and E social categories), more than its 14% national vote.
France: by 2024, 57 % of manual workers backed Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, making it dominant in working-class districts (Ipsos 2024).
Germany: at the 2025 federal election, the AfD secured 38 % of manual-worker votes and 39 % of voters who said they were “poor”, well above its national share of 21% (Infratest dimap 2025).
Italy: an Ipsos post-vote survey for the 2022 election found the centre-right coalition winning 55.6 % of “operai” (manual workers), versus about 17 % for the main centre-left bloc (Ipsos 2022).
Note for political science readers: These developments do not imply that voters have moved directly from left-wing to far-right populist parties. A recent study by political scientists Tarik Abou-Chadi and Markus Wagner (2021) finds that many left-wing voters shifted first to abstention or mainstream right-wing parties. The authors conclude that the idea of a direct shift of working-class voters to the populist right is “a myth.” This conclusion, however, seems overstated. The movement of some low-income voters from the left to abstention or the mainstream right, and others from there to the populist right, can reasonably be described as a broader shift of low-income voters from the left toward the right and populist right. Note that this post focuses on the right in general, not the populist right in particular.
Abou-Chadi and Wagner appear concerned that the “myth” may prompt calls for left-wing parties to adopt more “authoritarian” stances to win back low-income voters. Instead, they suggest that investing in more “progressive” policies might allow left-wing parties to extend their gains among “educated, middle-class voters, arguably now the core support group of Social Democratic parties” (Abou-Chadi & Wagner, 2019).
Indeed, Norris and Inglehart classify immigration as a cultural issue and identify it as by far the strongest predictor of support for populist right parties, more salient than other cultural concerns such as feminism, LGBTQ rights, or environmentalism.
This is what Marx wrote about Irish migration into England in 1870:
Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class… This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this. — Marx (1870)
A similar stance was explicitly adopted by Bernie Sanders in the US in 2015.
Mahlotra et al. (2013).
Sociologists have documented a working-class counterculture in which workers found social recognition and identity through their communities and institutions (see, for instance: Willis, 1977; Hyman, 1971).
In a study over 31 countries, sociologists Jochem van Noord and co-authors found that:
education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups — van Noord et al. (2019)
In his book, Sandel cites a study by psychologists on biases related to educational achievement. The researchers found that:
In contrast with popular views of the higher educated as tolerant and morally enlightened, we find that higher educated participants show education-based intergroup bias: They hold more negative attitudes towards less educated people than towards highly educated people. […] The less educated do not show such education-based intergroup bias. — Kuppens et al. (2018)
Similar high-profile events have happened in the UK and France.
UK: A similar incident occurred during the 2010 British general election. Labour candidate Gordon Brown, on the campaign trail, spoke with Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old lifelong Labour supporter from Rochdale. During their exchange, she voiced concerns about immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe: "You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're... but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?" After the conversation, Brown, unaware that his microphone was still on, criticised the encounter, referring to her as a "bigoted woman." Gordon Brown's remark may not have been intended to show disdain, but it was widely interpreted as a sign of disrespect toward her.
France: In 2014, the ex-partner of the socialist French President stated that in private, he referred derogatorily to poor people as “toothless”.
He is presented as the man who doesn’t like the rich. In reality, the president doesn’t like the poor. He, the man of the left, says in private: 'the toothless,' very proud of his little joke. — Trierweiler
This expression sparked a public outcry. Holland later admitted to using the term, though he claimed it was meant descriptively: “I see people who come to me at rallies, they are poor, they have no teeth.”
Matta Bennett, a democratic strategist, said the following to Newsweek:
[…] while Clinton's line was not alone “fatal,” it “underscored a central point of the Trump campaign, which is that Democrats look down on his voters.”
Resentment toward this condescension was recently made explicit by Batya Ungar-Sargon, a prominent pro-Trump commentator on social media.
See my discussion about the implications of the election of Trump for the US democratic institutions.
The left/liberal shibboleth that lower-income people vote against their own interests is one of the most subtly arrogant and condescending phrases in politics. “Those proles don’t know what’s good for them; they should listen to their betters.”
Disdain is not a strategy. Eventually those people will tell you to get stuffed.
I think it’s time to put the tired old simplistic left-right division, which assumes economic and social preferences align, out of its misery. There may have been a time when social classes neatly sorted into these binary dimensions, with the position in one strongly predicting the position in the other, but that us no longer the case. Even the fondness of authoritarianism, long associated with the extreme right is no longer that exclusive.
That disconnect is deftly exploited by “right-wing” populists who marry old left-wing redistribution policies with old right-wing socially conservative anti-woke rhetoric.