The New Class and Right-Wing Populism: The Case of Wisconsin

ABSTRACT

While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward right-wing populism in the twenty-first century. We draw on Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu to theorize intellectual-worker alliances. We then present historical evidence that an intellectual-worker alliance played an important role in the earlier period. Logistic regression analysis with survey data shows continued political antagonism between the state’s wealthiest and most highly educated citizens in the later period, as well as an enduring political alignment of highly educated and working-class Wisconsinites. Our results demonstrate that right-wing populism prevailed in Wisconsin despite an intellectual-worker alliance, not because the alliance broke down. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings imply about contemporary right-wing populism beyond Wisconsin.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectuals
• new class
• progressivism
• right-wing populism
• working class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See more details here: https://law.marquette.edu/poll/about-the-poll/, accessed September 16, 2022.

2. It should be noted that Model (2), which incorporates both individual and county-level variables, indicates an ICC of 0.09, a value greater than the ICC from the null model (i.e., unconditional model).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chad Alan Goldberg

Dr. Chad Alan Goldberg is Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He writes about politics, history, and social theory. His award-winning books include Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and (as editor) Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).

Masoud Movahed

Dr. Masoud Movahed is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Social Norms & Behavioral Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the nexus of social stratification and economic/political sociology. His works have been published in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of International Development, Sociological Quarterly, Harvard International Review, and Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements, among others. Occasionally, he contributes to Foreign Affairs, Boston Review, Al-Jazeera, and World Economic Forum.