Think about the Covid-19 class divide. Affluent elites, who work in the knowledge economy or professions that easily translate into working from home, took their economic privilege – one that relied on the labour of essential workers who didn’t have the same luxury – and transformed it into a moral posture: Stay at home! Slow the spread! Anyone who opposed lockdowns and the devastating impact they were having on small businesses and school children was branded a moral pervert. Then these same elites cheered when the people they relied on to indulge their moral posturing were fired for refusing the elites’ chosen method for mitigating the pandemic.

Or think about the Defund the Police movement, so popular among white elites and so unpopular among the black Americans who actually live in areas that need better policing. This too was a version of class warfare dressed up as virtue, as people living in rich enclaves did their best to reduce the number of cops available to defend poor and working-class Americans from the criminals who operate primarily in poorer neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately, a lot of environmental activism and policy comes out of this same playbook. Climate change is real and should be mitigated. But there is a deep tension between the utopian environmental goals, in proposals like the Green New Deal, and the interests of the working class – not just in terms of the price of gas and electricity being forced upward, but also from the perspective of jobs.