Via Corey Robin
The fashionable fear in the media and academia of the working class as the bacillus of populist authoritarianism is very much in conflict with the empirical evidence of decades of history, including contemporary history:
"Many observers fear that [capitalist] democracy is currently at risk — including in the United States and some European countries. Some commentators blame less-educated members of the working classes for the democratic backlash....But are industrial workers really an anti-democratic force? In a new study, we systematically examine how citizens have sought to promote democracy in about 150 countries. Here’s what we find: Industrial workers have been key agents of democratization and, if anything, are even more important than the urban middle classes....We investigated all major mass protest movements around the world from 1900-2006, and recorded who dominated each movement — industrial workers, urban middle classes, rural laborers, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc. The strongest finding in our study is that protest movements dominated by industrial workers outperform all other protest campaigns in bringing about democracy."
—The Washington Post, 23 October 2019
(The article is behind a pay wall)
(The article is behind a pay wall)