Upon Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September, many tributes cast her seventy-year reign in terms palatable to today’s political tastes. Liberal outlets celebrated a monarch who helped her country shake off its imperial past, portraying her as a “feminist” and even an opponent of Brexit. While the endless sycophancy drew widespread mockery online, right-wing media from the Telegraph to the Spectator made the queen into an unlikely symbol of class oppression from below: the victim of sneering woke elites out of touch with the masses.

If this interpretation was a bit of a reach, it drew on a well-established playbook: the claim that those in progressive ivory towers stand against the patriotic and traditionalist working class. From Donald Trump to British Tories, the Right has developed its own particular language of class politics, defining it not in terms of income or relationship to production but cultural preferences and tastes. Yet the only reason it can get away with this is rooted in the dissipation of an earlier model of class politics — and the Left’s inability to turn decades of growing social inequalities into a class-based mobilization of its own.

In December 2021, Harvard University Press published an important book called Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities. Edited by economists Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty, it examined electoral patterns in fifty democracies since World War II and the competing influences of factors like income, education, religion, and gender in shaping voter behavior. In particular, the studies offered deeper insight into the breakup of class-based voting systems: across a remarkable variety of Western democracies, while higher-income voters still generally vote for right-wing parties, the left-wing electorate is now increasingly defined by its high education levels.