Cole Stangler
You’re right to emphasize the differences: the Democrats have always been a big-tent coalition whereas these French left-wing parties have had a more definite focus on labor. My interest, here, is in the people who make up these electorates rather than the political ideologies themselves, and if we look at the Democrats historically, there is a working-class base that goes back to [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and into the 1960s.
So what happened? My book is in the style of reporting, not sociological number-crunching, and I’m talking to people on the ground and showing what they look like. When we talk about class dealignment, we could consider different ways of capturing this trend. Is it about people’s jobs? Their educational qualifications? Their income? But however you frame it, I think the trend is real, and it’s an important part of the story I’m telling.
An essential part of the decline of the working-class vote for the Left in both France and the US is deindustrialization.
We should remember that there have always been working-class people who vote for right-wing parties. There’s nothing inherently new about that, especially when we look at the more socially conservative and religious. But an essential part of the decline of the working-class vote for the Left in both France and the US is deindustrialization. It has ravaged the social fabric of communities in both countries, and that has profound effects on their politics.
In the book, I report on parts of the US that have turned to [Donald] Trump, which also evoke parts of northern and eastern France, which were once left-wing bastions but have now shifted toward Marine Le Pen’s far right. One of the many things going on here is that people used to vote for left-wing parties but now hold them responsible for failing to honor their promises to protect jobs. We saw pledges like that from the French Socialists with François Mitterrand in the 1980s to the early 1990s, or more recently under François Hollande. In the US, the [Bill] Clinton administration talked about saving the steel industry but failed to deliver. That creates real frustration.
Another big part of this story is the declining union density when you lose manufacturing jobs — and the loss of an entire political culture that goes with that. One benefit of doing on-the-ground reporting is that when you ask why thirty or forty years ago people in Mingo County, West Virginia, used to vote Democratic or people in northern France used to vote for the Communists, oftentimes people will say that it has a lot to do with the union — that it wasn’t just defending wages and conditions at work but about providing a whole space for people to discuss, socialize, and transmit progressive values.
Added to these factors is a certain kind of economic suffering, different from the kind in the big cities that still vote Democratic. There’s a particular nostalgia and anger that results from knowing that your parents or grandparents had it better. It’s bound up with a bitterness toward feeling neglected and abandoned by the state.
The role of unions wasn’t just defending wages and conditions at work but providing a whole space for people to discuss, socialize, and transmit progressive values.
This mix lends itself to far-right narratives. Whether it’s Donald Trump or the Rassemblement National, they say that this is the fault of immigrants — a basic nativist message that appeals to people in these conditions. That’s why I reject this silly dichotomy asking whether it’s racism or economic anxiety that decides how people vote. Obviously, both factors are working together, when people have lost faith in the Left and when there aren’t unions offering an alternative.