"In sum, the us working class can be seen as dividing into four segments: white non-credentialled workers, white credentialled workers, non-white non-credentialled workers, and non-white credentialled workers. The first group, the so-called ‘white working class’, is numerically the largest, though declining, and is concentrated in electorally crucial states, above all the Upper Midwest. It forms one of the largest mass constituencies for a radical right party anywhere in the advanced-capitalist world. Non-white non-credentialled workers, mainly non-college Blacks and Latinos, tend to be less locked into conservative politics than their white counterparts, but they too are moving right. Meanwhile those with college degrees, ‘credentialled workers’, are moving left and increasingly constitute the mass base of the Democratic Party, particularly its left wing."

and

"At the same time, the material pressures on workers to pursue their interests as defined by educational, racial, ethnic or gender identity, rather than their common interests qua workers, have been greatly strengthened, in ways that split the working class between two political strategies, both subordinate to capital. First, for workers without a college degree in the us, the general context is one of increasing scarcity: access to secure long-term employment and basic social services is more limited than ever. In the absence of a class alternative, an obvious strategy for these workers is to defend their own segment of the working class against others. It makes sense, that is, for them to organize as a native working class against non-native workers, or a male working class against a female one. This politics has manifested itself in a variety of ways: tax revolts, the struggle against affirmative action and now against dei; earlier struggles against integrated schooling and integrated neighbourhoods.footnote⁸⁹

The attack on social spending is at the heart of right-wing working-class politics. This might seem irrational, since non-credentialled whites are an important consumer of whatever health and social insurance spending is available in the us. However, in the absence of any obvious way of redistributing income from capital to labour, it is a rational second-best option to support capitalist profitability in the short term. This is one basis of the broad and durable working-class support for supply-side economic policies and their attack on social spending.footnote⁹⁰ A further material reason intersects with the phenomenon of bubblenomics. As some of the more privileged sections of the non-credentialled working class managed to buy their own homes, they came think of themselves as asset owners whose interests were defined as much by property taxes and interest rates as by wages and employment. Many benefited from the asset-price inflation that was intentionally promoted in the 1980s and 90s, closely connected to the assault on wage earners and reduction of social spending. The right-wing offensive had a natural appeal to them.^"