Since 1976, the proportion of Americans voting in presidential elections who are working-class whites has dropped from 70 percent to 44 percent. Contrary to media analyses, though, this group’s place on the cultural stage is being yielded not so much to gloriously vibrant minorities but to college-educated whites, who now compose 29 percent of the electorate but populate and rule virtually every media and entertainment institution from the level of the city desk reporter to the heads of the major movie studios. When mentioned at all in the arts and in the papers, the white working-class plurality is treated with bemused curiosity or outright scorn. Even the voting power of this still potent group has been written off by what Joseph Schumpeter prophetically called “the new class” of bureaucrats and intellectuals: The bienpensants have concluded that blue-collar whites are racists, hence too vile even to be attended, much less wooed, and anyway no longer needed to form any part of a majority coalition. That view will be shattered amid much amusing agony should Hillary Clinton fail to be elected president next year.

The ongoing, because forever extended by progressives, culture war is in large part a class war, but the New Class hesitates to say so: Even as the elites strive, and gradually succeed, to Europeanize the United States, it sounds snobbish and old-world to ruminate upon one’s social (though not necessarily economic!) inferiors. Ah, but what of class divisions that occur within a single nuclear family,