What is the “Working-Class?”

Reading Fiona Hill’s memoir There is Nothing for You Here was a deep imbibe of class consciousness. Perhaps that’s to be expected. Hill has long been a Russia expert of the post-Cold War mold. She has been focused on the ideology and political culture surrounding Vladimir Putin.

Hill asserts that she has a unique perspective on a global trend of authoritarianism. She grew up in Bishop Auckland, an impoverished coal mining town in England’s Durham County. Her depiction reads like she’s describing West Virginia. I suppose that’s intuitive. She sees an archipelago of such communities providing the base of support to a global alt-right movement.

She might be correct on that, but Hill misses another trend: the alienation of these communities from left-wing parties. If we were to call Durham County “red” in the sense that we call West Virginia a red state, it’s important to remember that these communities used to have strong ties to various shades of communist or social democratic parties. Now, the left has become captured by elites that may spout some solidarity slogans but are more concerned with cultural issues that find the proletariat to be the villains.

Missing that, her analysis of what makes Putin possible and the tide of resentment politics from rural America to rural Hungary is incomplete, as she just uses class warfare as the explanandum. Hill cannot account for why they don’t vote for left-wing parties.

I see the alt-right as a movement to make socialism great again. It’s an opportunity to mobilize the old passions of “die yuppie scum” without having to be in the same political party as the likes of Elizabeth Warren. They have the same trade policy as Warren, the same anti-trust policy as Warren, and generally agree with her more than I do. However, her affluent views on gender, American history, environmental policy, and guns grind their gears.

There is a particular passage of Hill’s to highlight for nicely containing a contradiction.

Back home in Bishop Auckland, everyone had been working-class. Some kids at school had thought that my sister and I were posh because we lived in our own house, not a council house. They had made fun of us because we wanted to do things in our spare time like visit local museums and castles and read the poetry anthologies from the library. Having aspirations wasn’t normal—or perhaps it just seemed pointless when you were unlikely to escape poverty or ever leave County Durham. But owning your own home was certainly something.

That is a common use of the term “working-class,” a prized locution shared by the left and the alt-right. This paragraph also contains a reference to a human phenomenon that can hold people back: resentment when one’s neighbors strive too hard.

Such striving is work, right? That’s the problem with this use of the term “working-class.” The people who rise to higher socioeconomic status tend to work harder, not less. Doing better in school takes a lot of hard work. After success in school, these people work long hours in white-collar jobs that are not eligible for overtime. Another group of people not considered “working class” are entrepreneurs. Starting one’s own business is incredibly hard work. So, whether we are talking about highly educated knowledge workers or successful business owners, they don’t work less hard than people clocking in and out at a blue-collar job. They may ultimately work harder throughout their lives than the romanticized class of the left and the alt-right.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.