Waste People and Deplorables

The poor have returned to popular political discourse in Britain and the United States, not as the gravediggers of capitalism but as its last line of defence. The radical working class has become the reactionary white working class. The prefix marks an illegitimate privilege that identifies them with power and enables them to be held responsible for the reversal of the progress they formerly embodied. Reporting on the election of Donald Trump in The New York Times the day after it happened, Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro described it as ‘a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters’.1 Commentators represented Brexit in similar terms; as Zoe Williams observed, the dominant narrative insists that the success of the Leave campaign was due to ‘the white working classes, the disenfranchised and unheeded, the voters hidden on estates’.2 For numerous people the two events were connected by the perceived centrality of this group to both; Jim Tankersley argued in The Washington Post that Trump’s election ‘was a ‘Brexit’ moment in America, a revolt of working-class whites’.3 This narrative was established before Trump’s election and embraced by the candidate himself; at a rally in Virginia he assured his supporters with characteristic eloquence that the vote was ‘gonna be Brexit plus plus plus’.4

Art · Brexit · Capitalism · European union · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Reactionary · Sociology · White (mutation) · Working class · Gender Studies · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US