As right-wing populism has surged globally in the past 10 years, the socialist left has advanced a distinctive explanation for its emergence and how to respond.

Their theory: President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders’ ascendance is a symptom of Democrats and other center-left parties betraying their working-class base. These parties’ embrace of free trade and neoliberal cuts to the welfare state cost them core supporters among low-income and non-college voters. When those policies produced painful job losses and stagnating wages, voters grew furious — anger that only mounted after the 2008 financial crisis and the worldwide rise of the billionaire class.

Far-right populists were able to channel that rage into electoral victory by promising to burn the system down. The only way to beat them is to turn sharply to the left — with political parties trying to win back the working class by promising them a bigger and more redistributive state.

Yet this “class-first” theory has repeatedly failed the test of reality. While some research finds economic roots for rising far-right support, studies that compare economic to cultural and ideological factors generally find that the latter two are far more important in both Europe and the United States. Socialist candidates, like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, failed spectacularly to win over either far-right or working-class voters when given a chance in national elections. And attempts by center-left politicians to tack left, like President Joe Biden’s “post-neoliberal” agenda on trade and antitrust, have failed to bring disaffected voters back from the right-wing cold.

Some of the left’s leading voices have, in short, consistently gotten the right’s roots wrong. I think there is a deep reason why: the left’s traditional commitment to a doctrine called materialism.

Materialism is a very old theory of human behavior, most strongly identified with Marx and Engels. In a recent essay defending the idea, NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber locates its core premise as the idea that “agents are acting on their objective interests — more specifically, their material or economic interests.” These........

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