Jamelle Bouie - Opinion
Aug. 23, 2025
But if held too tightly, justified disdain for particularism — for rejecting the appeal to general interest so that one can cut the electorate into thin slices — can be counterproductive. “Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial,” Michael McCarthy, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in Hammer and Hope magazine. “But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base.”
It’s important to remember, McCarthy argues, that the American working class isn’t unitary. Workers are segmented by familiar identities such as race, gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as by immigration status, education and the many ways that capitalism generates difference and differentiation across the system. “Similar to the way a city can have both food deserts and extraordinary food waste,” McCarthy notes, “the working class encompasses credentialed workers who have job protections and good wages, people in rural and urban areas with concentrated poverty whose work is poorly paid and precarious and undocumented workers in the shadows earning below the minimum wage because of their citizenship status.”