Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.

Once upon a time, the working class was understood as people in capitalist economies who don’t own the means of production and must sell their labor to owners. But as economies grew more complex, anomalies piled up. What about managers who aren’t owners but make lots of money doing the bidding of owners? What about technical employees whose specialized skills give them bargaining power? What about small-business owners of modest means who hire employees? Turns out there are lots of “contradictory class locations.”

I’ve never been a manager, had any specialized technical skills, owned a business, or made big money, but my class status is rife with contradictions and conundrums.

My paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was a blacksmith in a small town in North Dakota, but my father had no interest in the family trade. After a lackluster college career on the GI Bill, he got a job as an insurance adjuster—a white-collar working-class job for which he wore a shirt and tie to the office but got paid like a laborer. My mother, whose family had a similar trajectory, stayed at home with four kids until we were all in school and then took a series of low-paid office jobs.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, money was tight in our family. I didn’t get shiny new things, and family vacations were low-budget affairs that involved staying with relatives or in a borrowed camper. We always had a house and ate regularly, and I didn’t feel poor, but I knew the difference between myself and the affluent kids at school.

By the time I was in high school, my father had moved into a sales job and was making more money—enough that he could join the cheaper of the two country clubs in town. He quit bowling in a league (a working-class activity) and focused on golf (the appropriate middle-class game). In modest ways, he transcended his working-class roots, financially and socially.

Our family’s class status changed but not our working-class respect for hard work. As soon as we were old enough, my siblings and I earned money. In North Dakota before snow blowers were common, I had ample opportunities to shovel snow profitably. In the summer, I carried golf bags at the fancier country club in Fargo. Once I turned 16, I bagged groceries and worked in a building supply warehouse unloading trucks. To pay college tuition, I bused dishes and set up tables for hotel banquets.

After college, I worked as a journalist, starting at a small weekly newspaper that paid poorly. While covering a county government meeting at which the income levels for subsidized housing were set, I realized that on my “professional” journalist’s salary, I qualified. Eventually, I worked my way up to bigger newspapers and better pay, and after graduate school I settled into a comfortable middle-class life as a professor.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people. I was a working-class guy, sort of, but one with a Ph.D. and more autonomy than most.

Whatever my class status, I retained a sense of obligation to work as hard as I could at whatever job I had. During my 26 years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I never took a sabbatical. UT didn’t offer the regular research leaves common at other universities, and I never chased the outside grants that allow professors to take time off. I taught a full load, sometimes with a........

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