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 “material” concerns are not just one set of interests among many, but the primary ones — the most fundamental and basic forces in shaping human decisions.
“If I wish to be a successful artist, I have to first earn a living; in order to pursue my religious ends, I have to keep my body and soul together,” Chibber explains. “It is not that we don’t value anything else. It’s that there is no other value that acts as a precondition for satisfying higher-order values.”
Chibber is correct to put materialism in this sense at the center of a distinctively socialist analytic, one that profoundly shapes the modern left’s approach to politics. This approach has produced brilliant works of analysis and contributed vitally to left-wing social movements in the past.
However, that does not mean it is (as Chibber claims) a “universal” analytic tool or a “necessary foundation” of left-wing politics. Rather, there are cases where trying to fit a situation into a materialist lens can lead one astray.
The rise of the far right is one such case — and the implications of this particular error are profound.
The materialist dilemma
The typical knock on materialism is that it is “reductionist.” This means, in brief, that materialism reduces humans to simple consumption machines, ignoring all the other things — like love, religion, or ideology — that really matter to people.
This reductionism is, I think, a serious problem for left analysis of the far right.
Because so many on the left are wedded to a materialist account of human behavior, they begin with the assumption that far-right voting has to have some ultimate materialist cause. Voters’ right-wing beliefs on race or religion must ultimately trace back to a material factor (like rage at factory closures being displaced onto immigrants).
There is no room, in this theory, for the possibility that people arrive at beliefs for other reasons. The notion that ideas, values, and religions may have independent causal force — motivating people for their own reasons — is dismissed by some leftists on ideological grounds, even though there’s ample evidence that it’s the case today.
Many leftists, Chibber included, protest that this is an unfair critique: an attack on a vulgar strawman rather than a more sophisticated materialist theory. But such sophistication trades greater intellectual coherence for lesser practical utility.
Chibber describes material interests less as necessary ultimate causes than constraints. He admits there are plenty of cases where people care about non-material interests, but argues that people are only likely to pursue such interests when they experience limited physical constraints.
“As long as agents can satisfy their basic needs, it’s perfectly consistent with materialism for them to abjure further economic gain in order to pursue different ends,” Chibber explains. “But there will be limits to how far they are willing to go, and this is not just the limit of physical viability. Long before viability comes into question, simple physical hardship is often enough to incline social actors to return to the mundane reality of their material interests.”
Such a concession fundamentally weakens materialism’s ability to serve as a guide to understanding modern politics. It shifts the location of analysis away from “objective” material interests to people’s perceptions of those interests — whether they actually believe that their physical security is at stake in any given election, and whether they’re right about those perceptions. These beliefs could all be influenced by non-material factors: a partisan Republican, for example, is more likely to have a favorable view of a GOP tax bill than a Democrat in a similar tax bracket.
Any materialist theory of voting is caught in a dilemma. Either it advances a distinctive, yet wrong, reductionism, or else it is a theory broad enough to provide little distinctive insight. The left’s errors when it comes to the far right generally stem from choosing the former over the latter.
How the materialist dilemma looks in practice
To understand how the materialist dilemma can hamper understanding of the far right, it’s helpful to look at a particular case — Chibber’s analysis of the declining relevance of class in democratic politics.
Voting across advanced democracies is increasingly less connected to class. More wealthy citizens are voting to raise their own taxes, while certain segments of the poor and working class vote for right-wing parties willing to cut benefits they depend on.
Surely this would be an instance of ideological or identity factors trumping material self-interest?
Chibber’s broad materialism allows for such a move. He could simply say that the rise of the welfare state has created a floor of material comfort for everyone, meaning there is not enough “physical hardship” at stake for voters to prioritize economic concerns over ideological ones.
But to do so would be to betray his own purpose in writing. Chibber’s central argument is that materialism remains the best lens to understand modern politics and guide left-wing movements going forward. If he concedes voting behavior is no longer driven primarily by material concerns, then that claim is fatally undermined.
So he goes a more reductionist route — positing that “rather than an example of workers acting against their interests, [voting for right-wing parties] is an example of workers trying to pursue them.”
Chibber argues, reasonably, that it is very hard for voters to accurately assess the likely consequences of policy actions. They have to rely on trusted sources, most notably the media and political leaders, to make such judgments. And Chibber’s view is that these sources have simply misled the working class for their own (nefarious) material reasons:
If it turns out that the experts on whom I rely are media outlets, political leaders, and community leaders that have interests of their own and benefit from misleading me, then it is very likely that, even though I am acting rationally and trying to defend my interests, I might end up giving my vote to somebody who promulgates policies that are suboptimal or even harmful to me. And in the United States, media and political parties are thoroughly captured by economic elites. The information they provide to citizens is overwhelmingly partisan, even though it is presented in a language designed to appear neutral and concerned. It should be no surprise that people end up voting for parties that do not cater to their interests when the information they receive is systematically biased.
This is preposterous.
In the United States, mainstream media and cultural figures were overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump all three times he ran for president. They provided no end of information about how his policy proposals would harm the working class, and how his opponents’ ideas would benefit them. He won two out of three times anyway, with an increasing percentage of votes among lower-income and non-college voters.
A more sophisticated version of the argument might blame Fox News and other right-wing outlets specifically for deceiving these voters. But why do people trust Fox more than mainstream outlets with more objective descriptions of policy? To explain that, we need to rely on factors — most notably partisan and cultural identities — so far afield from anything reasonably termed “materialist” that we are no longer operating in Chibber’s universe.
And when you look beyond the United States, to other countries experiencing similar rises in support for far-right parties, the story makes even less sense. No one could seriously claim that the media and cultural landscape across the European Union is systematically biased in favor of far-right parties.
In theory, then, Chibber’s materialism is broad enough to avoid the charge of reductionism. But in practice, his efforts to apply materialism as a theory of voting behavior falls into a reductionist trap.
Beyond materialism
This is not to deny that voters care about material concerns. It’s obvious that inflation was a central reason for Trump’s 2024 victory (inflation that was, in part, caused by Biden’s post-neoliberal policies).
But the issue here is not whether material factors are in any way relevant to modern politics. Individual elections can turn on all sorts of specific factors, ranging from scandals to wars to elderly candidates.
What we’re discussing here is more fundamental. It is the question of why the party system in so many countries has changed, with far-right factions consistently commanding enough support that they are now a viable option for swing voters. This was not the case for most of the post-World War II era; it clearly is now. What changed?
The left continues to favor various poorly evidenced explanations for this, like a revolt against neoliberalism, because it still wants to insist on a distinctively materialist theory of politics. If you believe that, at bottom, the roots of political behavior can ultimately trace back to material interests — that ideas and identities are secondary causal factors — you will always end up looking for material explanations.
Doing so causes many on the left to dismiss what is, to my mind, the best explanation of the far right’s rise — one that focuses on a change to the ideological structure of global politics.
Across the world, an egalitarian vision of democracy and social order has beaten its competitors — leading to the decline of formal hierarchies along racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and caste lines. This manifested in concrete social changes, like the entry of women into the workforce or the end of racially discriminatory immigration regimes, that profoundly unsettled certain traditionally-minded segments of the global population. Far-right parties became their champions.
This is a fundamentally postmaterial account of far-right politics. It argues that the right wins not by channeling people’s displaced economic anger, but by articulating ideas that match their deeply held beliefs, values, and identities.
They did not arrive at said beliefs because of their place in the class structure or assessment of self-interest, but rather because ideas and identity are social facts in their own right. When people go to church or talk to their parents about culture, they listen. And that defines who they are as human beings every bit as much as their role as economic producers, especially in a world where the average voter in a wealthy democracy is orders of magnitude more materially secure than the workers of Marx’s day.
Adopting a postmaterial analytic framework does not require abandoning left-wing politics. You can see voters as driven on ideas without abandoning normative commitments to improving the lot of workers, to bolstering the too-weak welfare state, or even to seeing the existence of billionaires as a crime against democracy and human decency.
In fact, I’d argue, doing so is essential for the left to succeed.
As long as the left insists on materialism as its most fundamental theory of politics, not just one possible account of human behavior but always the primary one, it will continue to misunderstand the sources of its far-right enemy’s power. It will continue proposing the same old slogans, regardless of their political efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that materialism is in some important political sense no longer true.
