To the Editor:
Re “His Fake Populism,” by Farah Stockman (Sunday Review, Oct. 18):
Ms. Stockman has hit the political nail on the economic head. The election of Donald Trump four years ago was a working-class revolt against a despised globalist professional-managerial class that has taken over liberal parties worldwide, throwing them into crisis, the decline in unionism having detached workers from the structure that had long tied them to progressive politics.
Mr. Trump presented himself as a class traitor who would bring the billionaires to heel. That he did the opposite, while becoming obsessed with raw racial and ethnic animus, is why he now seems about to lose the office to Joe Biden, a man who can talk to working-class voters.
We Americans have not liked examining our society through a class-based lens, but the overwhelming success of the “1 percent” in hoarding our nation’s resources has forever changed that calculus. We are unfortunately no longer a classless society, but a plutocracy or an oligarchy.
And that is the breach that must be repaired.
Tim Sassoon
Venice, Calif.