"Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism... 'color-blindness.'"

"Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be 'color blind' pol like Sanders who focused on 'class-not-race' was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism. As the use of 'working class' on its own began to carry more penalties even for politicians like Sanders whose entire raison d’etre was supposedly class politics, new entrants to the electoral scene were encouraged to refer instead to the 'white working class,' perjoratively. This was soon described as a voting bloc that basically existed to make irrational/moronic demands.... Most importantly, it votes for Donald Trump, which means whatever it thinks about anything can safely be ignored... [A] phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only 'working class' that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. White working class, black working class, Latinx working class (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!"

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of 'Deep State' and 'Working Class'/When left/liberal fixations fall out of establishment favor, they're re-christened as conservative menaces" (Substack).