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It's nice to hear that some of our intellectual "leaders" are finally catching up with the rest of us. I'm afraid, though, that despite an honest effort our author cannot avoid a certain elitist contempt himself. There are several underlying premises acting that are not altogether attractive to anyone attempting to bridge the gap between economic classes, the first of these being an assumption that working class people vote out of anger, bitterness, resentment, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, etc, the entire panoply of contemptuous accusation that typifies the elitist attitude toward that class, and that the elitist class votes out of enlightenment, rationality, and intellectual objectivity. That is so embarrassingly out of touch that it is no wonder the social analysts miss the mark so often.

Among sociologists, race and gender have swamped class.

Yes, they have. Even in this discussion the term working class is unfailingly prepended with "white". No one appears to notice that the decline of the working class isn't broken along racial or sexual lines. It's everyone. It's the answer to the perpetual mystery of why black and Hispanic working class people could possibly vote conservative. It's outside their class interests, goes the narrative, obviously a sign of false class consciousness; in short, only because they're dumb, as dumb as their white counterparts... Could it be that they're all voting not out of ignorance, but in their own class interests that have nothing to do with race, sex, ethnicity, etc?

A second issue with this piece actually begins in agreement with this:

In the context of race relations, Harvard professor Gordon Allport’s well-known “contact hypothesis” suggested that prejudice is reduced when people of different races come into contact on a basis of equal status.

Well, yes, and that too ought to suggest that within the working class there is a certain tempering of prejudice that appears not to cross the economic boundaries. Any military veteran can tell the author that. What rings oddly is a sense of estrangement between the author and us denizens of the class he's attempting to view like bugs under a microscope. Are we to believe that even in the stratospheric halls of academia no one has to empty the trash? Are working-class people a rarity in Cambridge? Or is somebody simply too lazy to ask them a few simple questions? I'm leaning toward the latter hypothesis, myself.

Maddening stuff, this institutional deafness. When a conservative such as myself has to offer Marxian analysis to Marxists because they've never heard it before, there's a real problem here. And within this relentless Balkanization the Marxian dialectical knife separates us all into there's one other class signifier, one other class, that is apparently unworthy of consideration, and that's the American class. Because when tribal politics separates the country, as it has, into one class of people who love it, warts and all, and another of people who hate it, other class dynamics tend to be blurred. If the Left ever figures that out we could be in trouble, or they could, but in fact they never will.