I recently read a lengthy essay in The Guardian titled “The White Working Class Knows the American Project Isn’t Working. Here’s Why That Will never Matter to Them.” The author, Saida Grundy, is a sociology professor at Boston University. The essay is historically informed and thoughtful but also, I will argue, fundamentally flawed. I believe the essay offers a clear example of how not to think about American politics and history. The author is not a conservative, so this isn’t a case of left versus right interpretations of American history. It has more to do with disagreements among those left of center on how to assess these issues. The essay I am critiquing is an example of what could be called the radical race perspective. (It can be accessed here: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/ng-interactive/2026/jun/21/american-racial-anxiety-white-working-class-rights?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other).
First, the piece is torn between two conflicting viewpoints. The first recognizes that political and economic elites have used racial cleavages to divide and weaken the working class. It condemns this and calls for a cross-racial working class coalition. This is the position of labor organizers and socialists, from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders. I will refer to it as the historic left project and its advocates as the class based left. I endorse it.
Citing W.E.B. Du Bois, Grundy says that “the racial order required by capitalism could only be maintained if white elites successfully manipulated the white masses against their class alliances with other races. They needed to be goaded into loyalty to a white supremacist planter class…” This seems to imply, in other words, that the Jim Crow order that was created in the post-Civil War south was against the material interests of southern whites and that they had to be, in effect, tricked into accepting it. This is an example of the first viewpoint.
The second viewpoint, which seems to dominate the piece, is that the white working class is so invested in its aristocratic racial status that it will never choose to embrace a cross-racial coalition. According to this view, all efforts to create a successful multi-racial democracy, including the left project of democratic socialism, are doomed from the start, crashing on the shoals of an unchanging, forever racist and deeply powerful group of whites. As Grundy bluntly states, referring to the “white lower classes, “in reality, access to power over other racial groups is their preferred political currency.”
I think this second perspective, the radical race perspective, is both descriptively wrong and politically defeatist. But it is very common among scholars and activists and it seeps into all politics from the center to the left.
In short, an ever-present, vague, inchoate racism pervading the polity explains nothing. Being everywhere, it can’t explain anything. The radical race perspective offered in the piece fails to address anything concrete. For instance: the multiracial, working class New Deal coalition that dominated American politics from the Great Depression in the 1930s through the postwar decades, before breaking apart in the 1970s, is a direct rebuttal to the author’s perspective.
Looking back to the direct aftermath of the Civil War, Grundy discusses the grotesque racist presidency of Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. Powerful as this is, it ignores the fact that Johnson, who was not elected President, was succeeded for two terms by Ulysses S. Grant, the pro-racial equality Union hero whose two electoral victories had to consist in substantial part of white votes.
In more recent decades the popularity of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama depended in large part on their ability to win the support of masses of working class whites. They may have been neoliberals but their rhetorical gifts won widespread support from this supposed homogenous and racist group. Similarly, the loss of such support among the working class, and with it the shift in support to the professional classes for center-left parties, what Thomas Piketty has termed the rise of the Brahmin Left, is a new dynamic that calls for explanation not offered by the author. The gradual break-up of the New Deal Coalition, a key part of this story, is likewise unexamined. American social democracy, such as it is, came into being because working class whites are not inevitably and always focused only on racial grievance.
The author also suggests that if the Trump phenomena is at least partly class-based it should impact nonwhite voters as well. Contrary to what the piece claims, this is exactly what has happened. Given that the year is 2026, it is a glaring omission for the essay to ignore the surprisingly multi-racial nature of the Trump 2024 coalition. Trump won more Latino votes than any Republican in decades, perhaps ever, through his ability to win over working class Latinos, particularly men. He also won more black votes than any Republican in decades, again by pulling in a surprising number of working class men. Ditto across different categories of Asian voters. This is exactly what happens when working class Americans of all races are shifting right. Again, this ties into the changing dynamics of American politics and shows how much the US has in common with Europe, even though our domestic histories are distinct.
A key problem for the historical analysis provided by the radical race perspective is that it treats the white working class as a homogenous group, unchanging through time. But this is simply inaccurate and won’t do for serious historical and social scientific scholarship. Poor white farmers in the south in the 1820s have nothing in common with ethnic immigrant families working proletarianized jobs in northern cities in the 1920s, who have nothing in common with downwardly mobile white families in the rustbelt struggling to make ends meet at Dollar Tree in the 2020s. Their shared whiteness just doesn’t get you anywhere if you want to understand the changes in American history.
Consider the idea that white people form an “aristocracy” in America. The historic left project, best embodied by Mamdani and Sanders today (and a slew of less famous people) says that we must try to unite the exploited multi-racial working class across its differences. The radical race perspective says this will never work because white people form an undifferentiated aristocracy over all people of color. That’s the key problem with seeing all white people as part of a ruling aristocracy. If this is true, as the elites in the Jim Crow south claimed, then whites will never give up this power. And this in turn would mean that the historic left project can never be realized. What a terrible, depressing thought.
The author criticizes centrist elites, claiming that concerned writings about the white working class are produced by “almost exclusively centrist white elite authors.” Let’s set aside the fact that we shouldn’t be shaming authors for their race. The other problem is that this claim disguises the fact that the essay, and the entire radical race project, is punching left as much as right. It is, in its strongest form, a rejection of the historic left project as an impossibility.
This points to a key difference in understanding how the world works. When those of us on the class-based left look at the Jim Crow south, for instance, we see an evil system in which black people were tyrannized. We see a system in which most white people in the south were also screwed, suffering in poverty and frequently disenfranchised. The radical race perspective looks at the Jim Crow south and sees an evil system in which black people were tyrannized but white people were undifferentiated aristocrats.
Here I think we should spend a little time with MLK’s “Our God is Marching On” speech from 1965. In his words, “it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir).”
King in this speech recognizes the psychological power that came with whites being told that they were part of a ruling aristocracy. But King, unlike the current radical race perspective, recognized that this was a lie. You can’t actually eat Jim Crow. Far from being members of an aristocracy, poor whites in the south were exploited, suffering laborers, often denied full citizenship as well, who were told that they were aristocrats to distract from this reality.
In King’s words, again, “And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”
Grundy recognizes that Jim Crow segregation was an elite strategy to weaken and divide America’s workers. But once we recognize this fact, that it was a contingent strategy that was created and put in place through concerted effort, we must recognize the consequence: it can be defeated. White and black Americans divided against one another isn’t an immutable fact of America—it is a contingency that democratic socialism seeks to overcome. King is gesturing at this in the above quotes. He doesn’t flinch from condemning the monstrous evil of a century of Jim Crow. But he also recognizes how that system doesn’t work for most southern whites either. Note how King described the populist movement of the late 1800s that tried to unite working whites and blacks: “The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.” See King stressing how that vile racist order was bad for black and white Americans?
The class based left is deeply opposed to racism and sees it as a significant part of our history and our present. The evil injustice of racism is not just an unfortunate blip from our past, as some conservatives treat it. But I have tried to show that the radical race perspective, as embodied for example in Grundy's essay, does not offer the best way to think about race in American politics. The historic left project, embodied now in democratic socialism, is deeply concerned with racism but also understands its operation in different terms than the radical race perspective.
What does this mean for today? We are not battling Jim Crow but global neoliberal capitalism. To succeed we need to unite workers of all races into a coalition for something like democratic socialism. This won’t happen if you think working class whites are aristocrats and dismiss their sufferings as “feeling left behind.” Read Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton for a tutorial on the misery in much of working class white America if you need convincing on this point.
Unfortunately, the radical race perspective is not only descriptively misguided. It is politically defeatist. If you really believe that the white majority is an unchanging group committed above all else to its aristocratic racial privilege, then nothing will ever change. If you really believe this you should simply shrug your shoulders and give up on politics.
On the other hand, if you believe, as leftists throughout American history have, that a working class coalition can be formed in favor of democratic socialism, then a more just world is possible. In the political sphere today this will probably look something like Bernie Sanders’ steely anger at the dominance of oligarchs combined with Zohran Mamdani’s cheerful hope that democratic socialism offers the best prospect for constructing a more democratic, more peaceful, and more equal world.
For an optimistic take on winning rural voters see this piece from The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/democratic-socialists-rural-voters.