Sex, yes. But race, too. Trump does well among working class women.

In the US, the line from the Civil Rights Act to Trump runs fairly straight. What was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” if not an appeal to white, working class families? As the left, and especially the Democrats — catered more and more to people of color, white people began to leave the party. Nixon had his silent majority, and Reagan had the “Reagan Democrats.” Clinton was the “first black president.” Until we had a real one. (Great movie line: “I thought I wanted to be a boxer, until I got in the ring with someone who really wanted to be a boxer.”)

The nomination of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 was a signal event. In that year, race trumped sex. Feminists can ascribe that fact to sexism, but it was the black vote that made the difference. Until then, feminism had actually been the Great White Hope, allocating the expanding economic pie to the two-earner white couple rather than the colored one trying to move into the neighborhood. The Democrats abandoned white people in 2008. You could count the blue-collar union leaders on the convention dais with Hillary on the fingers of one foot.

The “Left” has always been about the “oppressed,” but from the 1950’s forward, the white working class has not been sufficiently oppressed to serve the guilt-driven utility function of the reformers. Who needs socialism when you’ve got powerful unions? Marx never really understood that the solution for labor was not to denigrate self-interest, but to harness and empower labor’s own interests as a class. The working class did not want a classless society; they wanted one in which the working class had political clout sufficient for its own purposes. Leftness is, above all, messianic and foolish. It seeks to fix what only it believes is broken. It seeks sameness where the universe demands equilibrium.

So what were “progressives” to do? Where was progress to be made? Like the March of Dimes when it had cured polio, the heat-seeking missile of left-wing do-goodism had to acquire a new target. The enemy was no longer capitalism, which had been dealt with by unions and legislation. It was racism. And then sex. In both cases, however, the working class was irrelevant. As a result, the working class chose the party that pretended to care about them over the party that overtly didn’t care about them. Globalization became a “thing” around the turn of the millennium. How did the free traders capture the working class vote when free trade was taking their jobs? Answer: it’s not terribly difficult to scapegoat a party that isn’t paying any attention to you.

So let’s not get too granular about this. The left moved on from the working class when the working class stopped needing the left. Then, when the working class needed a savior, the left was too busy gathering snowflakes to do fill that role. I mean, why bother? We know how a successful rescue of the working class ends. It ends with unions that don’t like leftists. So fuck labor. Right?