I consider this an anti-intellectualist take. I don’t agree this is the root cause.
There is professionalization of the sciences in the context of capitalism, and other forces driving academic endeavours. Including military funding for example. But being educated means also understand the principles of constitutional democracy. This is the main reason anti-intellectualism is the breeding ground for authoritarianism, the very reason this thread exists.
the traditional working class is gone in developed countries
I understand that, but there is a kind of modern-day proletariat. Super market cashiers are working class in that sense.
At the same time a lot of the left is made up of the massively grown academic middle class.
I was about to reach to that. The contradiction now might be more about being “educated professional class” versus “non-educated workforce, specialized laborers etc” (let alone gender). And not other distinctions that might have been meaningful in the past, since you mentioned already that people don’t work in factories as much as they did before.
These are more meaningful for explaining politics, but the truth is the vast majority of people wants living wages, social welfare and public healthcare. Americans are heavily brainwashed against these ideas, and perhaps some neoliberal Europeans as well.
This is called “watching as the Overton window moves” in real time.
The working class is always a low-hanging fruit for the far-right rhetoric. That is why you need an “aggressive” democracy to keep the fash in their place. If you don’t, the rate of expansion for fascist ideas is faster than for socialist ideas, because the first is regressive and the latter progressive. Any democracy that is not actively fighting fascism is doomed to destroy itself. This is how we got here. AGAIN.
WTF happened for “The Left” to have to “win back” the working class? Are post-post-modern enough already?
Bring back anarchosyndicalism ASAP.
They want to undo the making of the modern world because it came to allow the public existence of trans people. The horrors of Nazi rule on Europe dies out of living memory, and the rhetoric has a profound appeal to the human animal base instincts. So, yes, here we are.
This is just from the top of my head, but I suppose that it goes back to first principles: gender essentialism is a key ideology organizing society and extending to sexism, homophobia, genderism and transphobia. Then gender essentialism dictates broad sets of behaviors that are based on cisgender and heterosexual expectations, including sex temperament.
It may not come up often, but as long as it is visible as a distinct “thing” then it can get you in trouble. A cis-passing trans person might not get everyday harassment etc, but that does not mean there is no murderous transphobia. Similarly, a demisexual cis man can get in trouble because not being enthusiastic about women can have him pegged as gay etc, so he has to pretend he is consumed by sex drive to fit it. Then there is all the social BS asexual people get which includes negative stereotypes (like being repressed latent homosexuals and/or SA survivors) and overall diminishing their voice, like “it must be …anything else” except for you not genuinely want sex or being attracted to people of any gender.
There might not be pogroms against asexual people, but that doesn’t mean there is not invisibility and discrimination once you scratch the surface. It can go as far as life and family benefits that are structured around the expectation that people get sexually and romantically involved, form core families, bring up kids. Not only parents and relatives might get nosy if you are not dating or have a family by a certain age, but there might be salary and welfare adjustments that also make these assumptions.
Being asexual is connected to the main oppressions queer and trans people face and there is no reason to take asexual oppression less seriously than sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, because it is interacting with those.