What we must recognize is that, in many ways, the configuration of the white working class, like that of the populism often associated with it, is very much the product of a particular political moment, one made possible by the transformation of the global economy over the past half- century. Declining industrial employment, stagnating wages, the dramatic weakening of large private-sector unions—all results of new economic forces and a relentless offensive on the part of manufacturers and financiers—ended the historic compromise that industrial workers struck after World War II. At the same time, the Democratic Party, like its Labour counterpart in Britain, moved to the center and also helped to undermine the material conditions and political leverage these workers had achieved. The “white working class” and contemporary “populism,” then, are expressions less of an emerging social and political landscape than of the contempt with which leaders in both center-right and center-left parties regard those who have lost ground in the last several decades and are now seeking outlets for their anger. (This is where Isenberg’s book has much to teach us.)
Angry whites have certainly earned some of that contempt. The far right has played to their fantasies of a world restored and to their fears of those who could be blamed for destroying it, and many white Americans have bought into this explanation, sometimes becoming shock troops of reaction, particularly when alternative options have been marginalized. But as was true with Vance’s grandmother, the political dispositions of those who have taken it on the chin in the new global economy are by no means set or easily shoehorned into the category of right-wing or left-wing populism. They can, as Gest shows, make any one of several political moves: They can take their fight into the established parties; they can withdraw from active participation in politics; or they can veer to the right, aiming to disrupt the political system they believe has failed them. “Populism” is meant to stand in for the last of these choices, when anger among the humbled and poorly educated threatens to rupture the political sphere. This populism has no program—indeed, it rarely even calls itself “populist”—but is instead the embodied rage, often awash in conspiracy theories, of those who detest the establishment and their clients and who imagine they can retrieve a world they have already lost.