Left Behind by the Left: Identity Politics, Semantic Drift, and the Working-Class Voter Realignment in Contemporary Democracies

This paper examines the growing ideological dissonance between the contemporary political left and the working-class constituencies it historically claimed to represent. Drawing on sociological and political science literature alongside comparative evidence from Brazil, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, we argue that the left’s progressive drift toward university-incubated identity politics—including debates over linguistic norms, gender categories, and minority group identity—has produced a profound semantic and cultural rupture with lower-income voters whose priorities remain rooted in economic security, family cohesion, and social conservatism. Simultaneously, right-wing and populist movements have strategically occupied the abandoned terrain of class-based discourse, reframing their appeal in the language of workers, families, and everyday material hardship. We analyze the semantic transformation of the terms left and right, the phenomenon of cancel culture as a mechanism of epistemic coercion, the paradox of conservative sociality among the poor, and the structural conditions that produce what we term displacement populism—the rightward migration of voters who were once natural constituents of progressive politics. We conclude with reflections on the prospects for political realignment and the conditions under which left-wing movements might recover their original social mandate.