In the 1920s, Joseph Stalin coined the term “American Exceptionalism.” He called it the “heresy of American exceptionalism.” In his Marxist religion, the class struggle outlined in the words of the prophet Marx were gospel. To suggest that the universal history described in Marx’s works somehow didn’t apply to America was therefore a heresy.

This story comes to mind as leftists, in the wake of the election, take to re-evaluating the prudence of wokeness. Their assessment seems to be that overemphasizing sexuality, and to a lesser extent race, was a mistake not because it offended America’s egalitarian sensibilities, but because it distracted from the really urgent inequalities: those of the class struggle. 

If one was paying attention, one saw this line of criticism emerge in response to the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Many of the earliest and most influential critiques of the Project were published on a Socialist website. One of the main critics, the distinguished historian Sean Wilentz, is a critic of exceptionalism in the Stalinist sense of the term (he published an article “Against Exceptionalism” early in his career).

The problem Stalin was denouncing was the notion that Americans aren’t terribly interested in class struggle, and that the class struggle outlined by Marx does not describe America. Those with less money don’t want others to have less: they just want themselves to have more, to live more comfortably, and to allow their kids and grandkids to move up the ladder. They want, in other words, the American dream. 

It is worth remembering that this theme of a “classless” America—or perhaps an America that isn’t particularly interested in organizing itself into economic classes—is an old theme. It was behind Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz, readers sometimes forget, did not like the fact that our dominant tradition was the liberal one he described. But he recognized the reality, finding that American class is something different than the post-feudal division between the gentry and the masses on display in Europe.

With the notable and terrible exception of racial slavery and the caste system (which in itself was notably different from the European feudal model in form and scope), Americans consider the economic tiers of their society traversable, meaning that material endowments do not rigidly define an individual’s or family’s position. Americans instead tend to locate class, if at all, more in the manners, mores, and folkways of their particular subregion or social set. This is what Paul Fussell observed, rather ambivalently, in his acerbic book Class (1991).

The woke turn on the part of American Marxists, especially with regard to sexuality, reflected an instinctive response to this failure of economic class to obtain in America. It was posited that Americans can be made to adopt the class-struggle approach to politics, so long as those in the middle- and upper-middle economic tiers can claim to be the proletariat.

Why is it that transgenderism has gone from a problem that besets a small percentage of the population to a fad that rages most ferociously through wealthy high schools? The answer likely is, at least in part, that it allows rich white girls to claim the virtue of being “oppressed” by our “patriarchy.” We humans are, after all, status-seeking creatures. In the woke scheme, being oppressed is a status marker. This desire for status is perhaps the most fundamental part of the origin of inequality among men, a reality that the Left by definition cannot admit.

And that’s precisely what today’s lefties, even as they reconsider wokeness in the wake of Trump’s 2024 victory, fail to see. Economic class politics, of the sort the Left considers true politics, is in fact culturally specific, and not specific to our culture. It is not a universal model. To be sure, the woke turn alienated voters. But that does not mean that a more traditional Western European focus on class would work better.  

America is not well suited to a European-style class politics. In any feasible society one can imagine, there will almost certainly be a “few” and a “many.” But the way those groups organize themselves and relate to each is, to a degree, culturally conditioned. The model Marx described was specific to Europe. Perhaps Marx’s comfortable upper middle class upbringing blinded him to the actual realities of lower-class life, including how it varies from culture to culture.

America’s lower class is not revolutionary but aspirational, which is why Trump—who uses his fantastic wealth to express notably plebeian tastes for things like Big Macs and gold plating—can seem to millions of more modestly situated voters like “one of them.” In the terms of the American class system, he is—since our class markers have less to do with money and more to do with cultural sensibility.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Fran Liebowitz was being snide when she said that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” but she was also hitting on a foundational element of his appeal. In American terms, Trump is fundamentally aligned with the working poor because he doesn’t look down on them and because, though he has more money than them, he uses it (and regards them) in ways they find appealing. He may have grown up extremely wealthy and moved to Manhattan—but he’s still Donald from Queens. In European terms, Americans voted for Trump in record numbers in 2024 because we have no class.

Unless and until the American Left relearns that lesson, they will remain in the political wilderness. Mr. Trump’s victory represents our desire for a president who sees his job as serving the broad middle class, against the woke on one side and the aristocratic technocracy on the other. Enacting this attitude as a matter of public policy, however, will be much more of a challenge than one might think.