Fashionable Attacks on America’s Working Class Has Marxist Roots

Will Progressives Realize Their 50 Year Mistake?

Well, our holiday spirit was again spoiled by celebrities. As Thanksgiving was about to descend on America, actors Sharon Stone and Alec Baldwin decided to condemn America’s working class while speaking overseas at a ritzy Italian film festival.

Of course, this wasn’t unusual. For a long time, elites have mocked, scorned and jeered America’s working classes. In last week’s case, Stone called Americans who voted for Donald Trump as “naive and ignorant and arrogant” as well as “uneducated.”

Alec Baldwin, fresh from his involuntary manslaughter trial, told his Italian film audience that Americans who voted for Trump “are very uninformed about reality” and are “ill versed in what’s going on in the world.” https://www.msn.com/en-

It’s now well known that America’s working-class overwhelming voted for Donald Trump and dissed Kamala Harris. By a two-to-one margin - 62% to 35% - Trump won over working-class Americans, according to an NBC election day exit poll.

But what the bashers don’t know is that the belittling of blue-collar workers has gone on for more than a half century. It was the brainchild of Marxists and later adopted by today’s progressives.

The architect of this prejudicial stratagem against working Americans was the once highly acclaimed Marxist intellectual named Herbert Marcuse. In the 1960’s, he enchanted the New Left by promoting the idea that the “intelligentsia” could serve as the revolutionary “vanguard.” As a Neo-Marxist, he rejected the working masses as the key to revolution. He called America’s upper middle-class radicals the “new working class.”

Marcuse’s plan to ignore and belittle America’s working class was a steady, deliberate policy. Today’s elites – many unknowingly - continue this Marxist strategy.

Today, bashing the working class has been enthusiastically embraced by Hollywood producers, legacy news media outlets, and of course progressives within the Democratic Party. For decades this theme has been a key theme for Saturday Night Lives. Sharon Stone and Alec Baldwin are only the latest “useful idiots” to adopt this prejudicial policy.

I’m writing this as I think it’s important we pay attention to history. It can help us to understand the motivations and strategies behind many today’s headlines

The warnings that working people no longer feel at home in the Democratic Party was clear when Sean O’Brien, the Teamster’s president, delivered a keynote speech before this year’s Republican National Convention. The Teamsters are the epitome of the working class. O’Brien smashed the working class ties to the Democratic Party and became the first Teamster president to address a Republican convention in 121 years.

And my fellow Substack contributor, writing in the “Liberal Patriot “ broke down the dramatic 2024 blue-collar vote for Trump. In a comprehensive post-election survey of 4800 working-class voters conducted by PPI and YouGov “pluralities or majorities of working-class voters overall viewed Democrats as “incompetent,” “out of touch,” “not on my side,” “weak,” and “untrustworthy.” In contrast, 50 to 63 percent of working-class Americans viewed Republicans in this election as “competent,” “in touch,” “on my side,” “patriotic,” “strong,” and “trustworthy.”

Will Democrats “Get in Touch” with Working-Class America?

Even the New York Times noted the hard times ahead for the current Democratic Party as working Americans fled the party in droves. “For decades, Democrats had been the party of labor and of the working class, the choice for voters who looked to government to increase the minimum wage or provide a safety net for the poor, the old and the sick. But this year’s election results show how thoroughly that idea has collapsed.”

So far, there appears very little hope the Democratic Party’s moderates can reverse this half-century trend.

Herbert Marcuse was part of the infamous “Frankfurt School,” a group of German Marxist thinkers who were affiliated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. The Institute tried to devise mass strategies for world revolution.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Marcuse called the American student population “the new working class.” He was revered by New Left radicals and Hippies.

The German, who later immigrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen, had a front row seat of his handiwork of the 1970’s counter-culture rebellion as a California professor. Of course, the Hippy revolution’s “ground zero” was in California.

Much to the delight of Hippies and radical student organizers in the 1970’s (including myself), Marcuse cheered them on, encouraging the exercise of Free Love, illicit drugs, rock and roll and the overall rejection of American life.

Of course, many of these 1970’s rebels became tenured professors and university presidents, the heads of Hollywood studios, as well as celebrities, influencers, intellectuals, trust fund kids, foundation presidents, and high-tech billionaires.

I know something about Marcuse and this history as I was a New Left activist in the 1970’s. During that time, I was a roommate with Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis when we both lived in Washington, D.C.

I personally knew Hippy/Yippie icons Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin along with many other New Left leaders. I earnestly attended Marxist-Leninist study groups and eagerly accepted revolutionary socialism as a wonderful crusade. Later in life I understood their world view was madness. But that’s another story.

Nick Stevenson, a British Marxist who resides at the University of Nottingham explained Marcuse’s new vision in the article, “Herbert Marcuse as a Critical Intellectual.”

He explained that “the 1960’s counterculture mixed bohemianism and political radicalness while vigorously protesting the levels of conformity required by mainstream society.”

In a 1967 London speech by Marcuse titled “Liberation from the Affluent Society,” he enthusiastically told his audience, “I would like to say my bit about the Hippies. It seems to me a serious phenomenon. If we are talking of the emergence of an instinctual revulsion against the values of the affluent society, I think here is a place where we should look for it.”

In a 1969 essay titled, “An Essay on Liberation” Marcuse identifies the “young middle class” as “formidable in every respect. The common ground: the total rejection of the existing society, of its entire value system.”

University students became the “new” working class. He called the Hippies “the revolt against the compulsive cleanliness of puritan morality.” Of course, Marcuse, among many radicals abhorred America’s puritan morality.

But it also appears now that some Marxists have some second thoughts about the abandonment of the working class.

Stevenson himself directly questioned the Marxist’s antagonism towards the working class in May 2022, calling it “problematic.”

Writing in an essay, Stevenson said “Marcuse, despite being adopted by the radical middle classes of the 1960s, retained a considerable distance from the working-class movement, and this had implications for his broader understanding of society, which remains problematic for those seeking to position themselves within the critical-Marxist tradition.”

The progressive wing’s jihad against America’s working class means the Democratic Party may have lost America’s heartland for many years. It’s up to party’s centrists to challenge their strategy - or die as a significant political party.