The Left's Disgust at Working-Class Taste

The Left's Disgust at Working-Class Taste

Alfie Bown

26 March 2025

One of the problems facing "the Left" at the moment is the slow realization finally dawning on parts of it that the Right is currently more effectively able to speak to working voters and appeal to working people than they are. Election results, in the US and elsewhere, are one way that the situation is made visible. However, it is more than just a failure to speak to the needs of workers that characterises much of the contemporary liberal-left: they are also often characterised by a visceral disgust at the working class and their tastes. 

In the intellectual scene, it was telling that Sohrab Ahmari's Tyranny, Inc spoke more to the exploitation of workers by capital than many recent leftist projects. Ahmari, a centre-right Republican surely destined for a career in J.D. Vance's future Republican party, showed how the conception of the tyrannical state needs to be reframed in the present. While prior generations of citizens saw the state as tyrannical and advocated for the freedom of markets and corporations against this tyranny, it is now clear that the corporations can often be just as tyrannical as the states they replaced as dominant power-holders. For Ahmari, Wall Street is "the command centre of private tyranny," and this amounts to a new kind of exploitation of workers in which "under the rule of Tyranny, Inc., the highest court in the land has all but given the sanction of law to wage theft" (59). This is a stance often articulated from a liberal-left position, for instance by Nick Srnicek in Platform Capitalism or by Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism. But it is Ahmari who effectively translates this into a political project, which the Left seems unable to do. He does so by showing respect, rather than distaste, for working people and their choices.

Of course, over the last decade the political Right, whether in the form of the Brexit campaign in the UK, the Trump elections in the US, via immigration discourse across Europe or by homeland rhetoric in Israel and Russia, has misled the working class to which it addresses itself. But it has, at least, addressed them.

On the other hand, the liberal-left have shown an almost visceral aversion to doing so. The image above has been circulating in Democratic circles on social media. It shows that only two states voted unanimously in the 2024 election: Oklahoma and Massachusetts. While Massachusetts ranks 1st for test scores, quality of life and education, Oklahoma ranks in the bottom ten states for all these metrics. While Massachusetts is in the ten states with the least poverty, Oklahoma is in the ten states with the highest poverty levels. 

The image is used to "prove" that Democrats are the right choice and only education and opportunity prevent voters from making those "correct" choices. It was heavily publicised that in both the 2020 and 2024 elections that Trump had a smaller share of the vote when voters were ranked by local GDP. Again, Democrats present this as evidence that smart and successful people – like themselves – will vote for their party.

On the contrary, these metrics – and their deployment in this way – point both to the devastating failure of the Left to represent the working class and to the uncomfortable disgust that much of the liberal-left appear to feel when faced with the choices of working citizens. The shaming and blaming of all Trump supporters, the use of the word "gammon" to describe suburban Brexit voters in the UK and the heaping of blame on single individuals like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson all point to the same double failure of the left: its inability to see its own complicity in the outcomes of recent elections via its failure to speak to the working voter and its visceral disgust at those fellow citizens which prevents it from taking them seriously and building a labour-focussed party. In any case, the fact that these damning statistics could be circulated to celebrate or defend Democrat achievements is frankly embarrassing.

At the heart of this problem is the relationship between politics and taste. Alex Hochuli comments on the zeitgeist of a culture in which every piece of popular culture must be analysed and dissected to reveal its secret political agenda. Today, every “musical artist or cooking show is now a vanguard of actual fascism or cultural Marxism — of which you must be made acutely aware and which you must, consequently, denounce and expunge from your life.” The warning of the day appears to be: be careful what you enjoy, in case it has bad politics. A critical theory academic recently said that they did not watch The Great British Bake-Off because they were not "that type of person," perhaps suggesting that a Union Jack pinned into a Victoria Sponge was tantamount to colluding with fascists. From the left-liberal perspective, bad taste is considered a key threat of the day.

The most famous theorist of taste is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu showed how ideological taste can be and how closely it can be tied to class, though this seems so self-evident as to barely need saying. Freud can help here by adding disgust into the conversation. For him, the sense of smell – the olfactory – was the most ideological of the senses, even while it feels to us as the most instinctive or biological. As we are socialised in one direction, we develop a repulsion to our origins. This is precisely how much of the liberal-left often seems to feel when faced with the citizens whose views are presented on Fox or GB News: they express an almost bodily repulsion to the topics, language, art and culture of the working class which is, as Bourdieu and Freud knew, largely ideological.

Coining the term “hyperpolitics” to describe our contemporary moment, Anton Jäger discusses how we have become a society in which politics is everywhere present but impotent:

Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.

This shift in the discourse is not simply the old distinction between politics with a capital P (politics ultimately directed at or by the state, whether directly electoral or not) and politics with a small p (the family, culture, everyday life). Of course, there has always been a distinction between official political systems and the cultural politics of any given context. With the first Trump election run, the panic on the liberal left was that this distinction could be erased. Would the video gamers and destruction derby drivers finally come out of their basements and rodeo arenas and elect a “fascist” head of state? Would politics finally explode outward and bring itself to bear on Politics? Perhaps part of the worry was in fact that the working class might be politicised.

The language of disease and infection can be useful here. Today, it is as if our world is infected by bad politics which needs rooting out. We come to be suspicious of everything and conduct a practice of scouring everything to root out its sicknesses. People's taste appears to contain clues to a politics hiding within. This logic essentially gave rise to what came to be called cancel culture. Whether it achieved anything or not (and there are many individual cases where it was no doubt necessary) it proliferated a certain conception of society in which the removal of an impurity implied the promise of a better and more unified society. In other words, there is a certain utopian thinking inherent to the task of rooting out bad actors and bad politics. More than that, there is a classism inherent to the notion: it is through the hoards of infected zombie-like working classes that infections spread. To combat this, the liberal-left would have to scrutinse culture for clues to the toxicity to come and head them off, before the working class became too disruptive.

A side effect of this connection between taste and identity is the Left’s blank affirmation of the collapse of privacy and, with it, individuality – we now have to confess what we enjoy and contextualize it in front of everyone. This is a position (one of many instances) in which progressive ideas now tailgate contemporary corporate capitalism. It was Mark Zuckerberg, after all, who ended the idea of online privacy with his "you have one identity" speech in 2009, ushering out the possibility of having friends and pastimes that were safe from the panoptic eyes of the workplace. Being able to bitch and grouse, to be perverse, to simply laugh and safely experiment (a bit of Joe Rogan or Love Island without searching for toxic men, say) with ideas and personae with our friends, lovers, and family without society breathing down our necks has become a major achievement. Now, success at work, romantic relationships, and family are experienced as a depoliticization (bolstered by the sense they affirm the notion that one grows conservative with age). Some of the "abolish the family" discourse from these circles would even have us wondering: can we even enjoy our girlfriends (let alone our husbands), unapologetically and still be part of "the Left" or does this mark us off as somehow unwelcome in it?

In other words, association with certain writers, or even certain people - as insignificant as enjoying someone’s company - or with publications (a writer was recently accused of being “Compact adjacent” for taking part in some discussions that intersected with those in the magazine of that name) pre-determines the kind of engagement the content or ideas receive. It is individuals, rather than ideas, that are revealed, we seem to believe, by their taste. It was, of course, the first logic of Facebook to suggest friends and connections based on likes and this would go much further with the development of demographics analytics and targeted content. Of course, we have always benefitted from meeting people with shared interests and from communities based on taste, but in the time of Bourdieu it was the position of the Left to remind us of how ideologically and misleading this fact is, whereas today’s left blindly affirm this situation and refuse to interrogate their disgust toward the taste of others that is rooted in class prejudice.

The idea of adjacency, as I have argued elsewhere, is something of a counterpoint to the self-affirming filter bubble network that has come to constitute social life. The structure of the internet, and by extension of social life as such, is to organize us into communities of mutual recognition that reinforce the identities of creeds and demographics and keep them separate from others. This was famously the logic of Cambridge Analytica, which provides a clearcut example - while some bubbles were adamant that Brexit was an impossibility, others galvanized the widespread support that helped make it happen. Being distinct from - rather than adjacent to - each other, is what opens us up to exploitation by the digital tools that are most common on the large platforms that dominate our social spaces. Adjacency, then, ought to be the aim of our thinking but it has become a mechanism for purification, routing out the bad eggs to reassert the differences and divides between the wholesome and the poisoned. Perhaps to cover up this classism, the liberal-left often hold up certain fetishised working class subjects as beautiful souls while being disgusted by the others.

The term “red-brown” would be a useful example here. It is often deployed by those who claim to have identified a fascism hidden within liberal or Leftist thinking in order to root out a perceived toxicity hidden in the mask of the pure Left (but, in fact, more often applied to moments where contradiction becomes visible). By turning contradiction into opposition, calling something “red-brown” casts out the politics of the other in an attempt to continue the endless purification of our social world. Because of the connection between taste and identity, it’s no coincidence that the term is applied to individuals rather than ideas.

Until the Left can – as Bourdieu and Freud were able to – see its own taste as ideological and classist, there will be no hope for a workers party to develop out of the limping remains of its project. One of the reasons why the strength of repulsion to the working class on the part of a more education liberal class is so strong today is precisely because the gap between those groups is slighter than ever. As Helen Rollins points out, as a result of a decline in job opportunities and a surplus of graduates (pumped into education in the Blair years), there can often be little economic difference between graduates and non-graduates. In the UK for example:

According to HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey of 2020/21, graduates in full-time employment earned an average of £27,340 15 months after graduation. Those same students had an average debt of £45,000. The average plumber in the UK earns £38,282 and has no student debt. And a full-time minimum wage job in Britain from April 2025 (based on a 40-hour work week) will be £25,397.

The interests of the educated class have never been more aligned with those of non-graduate workers, but those in the left-liberal tradition seem unable to embrace this as an opportunity for revolutionary potential. Instead, their disgust at their own proximity to the working class - from which they have barely lifted themselves - and their desire to reassert their differences by moralising taste ensures a divide between workers and the parties expected to represent them.

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Alfie Bown is Editor of Everyday Analysis