Wokeism's Weird Contempt For The Working Class

How elite idealism became a war on reality, and on the people who keep the lights on

In medieval Europe, society relied on a caste of people known as "knackers". They were those who performed the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs that others refused to do. They collected and disposed of animal carcasses, cleared waste, cleaned out sewage, and dealt with the dead when plague or famine struck. Their work was essential. Without them, disease would spread, food would spoil, and cities would collapse under the weight of their own filth. And yet, these same knackers were reviled.

They were viewed as impure and even heretical. They were socially ostracized, made to live apart from other citizens. Even in church (one of the only public spaces where all were supposedly equal under God) they were forced to sit separately. People understood that their work was indispensable, but they wanted nothing to do with the people who actually did it. It was a strange paradox: a society dependent on the labor of a despised class that it refused to acknowledge with any dignity.

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The rise of pseudo-marxism

Fast forward several centuries, and we find ourselves in a similarly strange moment. The rise of woke ideology in the West has brought with it a curious form of elitist disdain for today's working class. In a world where "equity" and "justice" are shouted from every podium, the truck driver, the plumber, the welder, the factory worker—these people are often treated as cultural pariahs, clinging to outdated values, wrong opinions, and unrefined manners.

One might expect that a movement rooted in what it claims is social justice would naturally champion the working class. After all, if wokeism were the child of Marxism, as it sometimes claims to be, its concerns would logically revolve around material conditions, labor rights, and class struggle. But it does not. Instead, wokeism has largely abandoned class analysis in favor of a different axis of oppression. One of race, gender, and identity. Class, when it is mentioned, is often subordinated to more fashionable grievances.

The working class has not just been neglected but also vilified. Their economic anxieties are dismissed as covert racism. Their cultural values are labeled as backward. Their skepticism of elite narratives is brushed off as misinformation or conspiracy thinking. In the world of woke discourse, they have been rebranded as the modern-day knackers: necessary, but shameful. Tolerated at best, but never admired. If anything, they are resented for standing in the way of the ideological utopia the elite imagines for itself.

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Luxury beliefs and make-believe morality

This contempt is all the more ironic when one considers where wokeism actually comes from. It did not bubble up from below, born of working-class struggle. It emerged from the ivory towers of elite academia, far from the dirt and danger of manual labor. Wokeism is not neo-Marxism—it is pseudo-Marxism, developed not by revolutionaries but by theorists whose lives have been sheltered from the consequences of their own ideas.

The very language of woke culture: terms like "heteronormativity," "toxic whiteness," or "intersectionality", reflects its academic pedigree. It is a jargon-heavy ideology, and like all elite dialects, it functions as a class signifier. To speak it fluently is to signal belonging to a certain cultural echelon. Those who don’t speak it (or worse, who question it) are simply marked as ignorant or morally suspect.

Rob Henderson, a rising voice in cultural criticism, coined the term "luxury beliefs" to describe this phenomenon. These are ideas and values that confer social status on the elite while imposing costs on the rest of society. For instance, advocating to "defund the police" might earn applause at a Brooklyn dinner party, but it creates chaos in the very neighborhoods that can’t afford private security or gated communities.

Another example is the casual elite promotion of "non-traditional families" or "deconstructing masculinity". These are ideals that, in practice, disproportionately hurt the stability of working-class communities (or just any community at all). The people who preach these doctrines rarely live by them. They are not the ones facing the fallout. Instead, their ideas are performative. Their virtue is cosmetic. Their empathy, curated for likes and retweets.

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more vividly illustrated than in the story of Marie Antoinette and her infamous peasant play. In the 1780s, the French queen built a fake rustic hamlet at Versailles where she and her courtiers would dress up as milkmaids and shepherds, pretending to live the humble life. They saw it as charming, even progressive. Meanwhile, real peasants starved outside the palace gates. This grotesque simulation of hardship by the most privileged class in France feels eerily familiar today. Today’s elite dons the costume of the oppressed, using hashtags and slogans instead of smocks and wooden pails, but the charade is exactly the same.

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Real-world disasters from woke experiments

The problem is not just theoretical, it is deeply practical. When ideology detaches from reality, bad policy follows. We have seen this pattern play out repeatedly in the last decade, often with disastrous consequences. In San Francisco, progressive prosecutors implemented a radically lenient approach to crime, guided by woke ideas of systemic injustice. Petty theft skyrocketed. Retail chains closed. The very neighborhoods that were supposed to be "liberated" became more dangerous and less livable.

In Seattle, the infamous CHAZ autonomous zone was allowed to fester under the delusion that community policing would flourish if the oppressive institutions of the state were removed. It ended with shootings, emergency calls ignored, and the avoidable death of a teenager. The experiment was eventually dismantled, but not before revealing just how disconnected woke idealism is from human nature.

In education, countless institutions have lowered standards in the name of "equity"—removing standardized tests, canceling gifted programs, and promoting "anti-racist math." These decisions are often made by wealthy administrators who send their own children to private schools with rigorous expectations. Meanwhile, working-class children are left with degraded curriculums and less opportunity, all in the name of progress.

I could go on and on.

The most galling part about all of this is the fact that the people who make these decisions rarely suffer the consequences. If their ideas fail, society pays the price. If their utopias collapse, they simply pivot to the next one. There is no cost to being wrong when your ideology is a costume rather than a conviction. The game is to be seen as morally enlightened, and not to build a world that actually works.

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From working class to “wokeing class”

As we look to the future, the signs are troubling. The ranks of the working class are shrinking, not just because of automation or globalization, but because society is being reshaped around a new kind of professional: not the working class, but the "wokeing class." These are the graduates of elite institutions who are trained not to produce or repair or build, but to critique, disrupt, and reimagine. Their talents lie in language, grievance, and optics. They do not sweat. They do not dig. They do not lift. And increasingly, they do not tolerate those who do.

This is not, however, just a question of wealth. There are many wealthy people who are deeply reasonable, grounded, and respectful of the trades and traditions that sustain our lives. The deeper problem lies within our educational institutions—those prestige factories that mold the opinions of the ruling class and saturate them with ideology that has little grounding in the world as it actually is.

The contempt for the working class, much like that suffered by the medieval knackers, is born from a bizarre combination of dependence and disdain. Our society still runs on truckers, electricians, miners, construction workers, and janitors. But the people in power are now increasingly regarding them not as fellow citizens, but as cultural embarrassments. And until that contradiction is addressed, no amount of hashtags or activism will bring about the justice that wokeism claims to seek.

We don’t need more virtue. We need more respect for reality, for work, and for the people who still know how to do it.