This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Exit polls from the U.S. presidential election indicated an approximate 15-point swing toward Donald Trump among voters earning less than $50,000 a year, the poorest block of voters in the United States. For the first time since the 1960s, a majority of Americans in that low-income bracket voted Republican. At the other end of the scale, the most affluent voters shifted to the Democrats. According to voter surveys and exit polls, Vice President Kamala Harris scored a majority of votes from those making above $100,000 a year—the top third of the income distribution.

One might wonder whether this means that the materialist class analysis of the classic kind has been turned on its head. Are we witnessing a fundamental realignment? Or is it even helpful to think in terms of “classes” voting? As the historian Tim Barker has remarked about last year’s election, “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”

Exit polls from the U.S. presidential election indicated an approximate 15-point swing toward Donald Trump among voters earning less than $50,000 a year, the poorest block of voters in the United States. For the first time since the 1960s, a majority of Americans in that low-income bracket voted Republican. At the other end of the scale, the most affluent voters shifted to the Democrats. According to voter surveys and exit polls, Vice President Kamala Harris scored a majority of votes from those making above $100,000 a year—the top third of the income distribution.

One might wonder whether this means that the materialist class analysis of the classic kind has been turned on its head. Are we witnessing a fundamental realignment? Or is it even helpful to think in terms of “classes” voting? As the historian Tim Barker has remarked about last year’s election, “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”

Clearly, there is a blurring of once established social and political boundaries. But does this mean that we have to abandon class analysis altogether? I think not. All too often when materialist analysis is applied, it is a byword for crude simplification. What is actually called for to fulfill the promise of materialist analysis is almost painstaking attention to detail and something akin to a novelist’s flair for atmosphere.

At the very least, in analyzing the........

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