Image by Laura Seaman.

For nearly four decades, American political discourse worked assiduously to sideline the subject of class. This was not because economic inequality had somehow receded. On the contrary, it deepened dramatically. Rather, the language with which to name it grew impoverished. Structural disparities were recast as the neutral outcomes of market mechanisms, wrapped in the agreeable vocabulary of growth, competition, and aspirational mobility. The chasms remained, stark and undeniable, yet mainstream politics proceeded as though they were not open to meaningful contestation.

In that cultivated silence, speaking seriously about class came to seem almost anachronistic, even faintly embarrassing. Liberal discourse, in particular, gravitated toward questions of culture, race, and gender, matters of profound importance, to be sure, but in doing so it often nudged class analysis to the margins. Without an overarching framework capable of connecting these disparate injuries, politics fragmented into a collection of discrete grievances that never quite cohered into a lucid account of power and who bears its costs.

Then came Trump. Suddenly, class was back in the conversation, albeit in a raw and often distorted register. He did not invent the anger or the inequality, but he gave them a public voice. By positioning himself as the champion of the “forgotten,” Trumpism hauled a visceral rhetoric of “us” against “them” back to the center of American life. It sounded hostile to elites, and in its performative fury it was. Yet underneath the spectacle, it left the economic architecture largely undisturbed.

The peculiarity was that what Trump said and what he actually did stood leagues apart. In his speeches, he cast himself as the scourge of entrenched interests and a rigged system. In practice, his tax cuts flowed disproportionately to the wealthy, deregulation eased the path for corporate power, and labor protections eroded. That chasm, between populist theater and plutocratic policy, unexpectedly made class feel politically alive again. The contradiction itself became an education.

Class politics tends to awaken when people stop experiencing hardship as a diffuse, fateful misfortune and begin to trace it to specific decisions made by identifiable actors. During the Trump years, a growing number of citizens started to connect these dots, recognizing that this is not simply “the economy” operating by its own impersonal laws, but the consequence of choices. And once that shift in perception takes hold, it alters everything.

For class is not only a matter of income. It is, fundamentally, about power, meaning who wields it, who is denied it, and how that distribution shapes an entire existence. When enough people begin to think in these terms, the older, richer vocabulary of class rushes back with force. This is why movements like “May Day Strong” feel qualitatively different from mere spasms of discontent. They are not only expressions of frustration; they are attempts to reconstruct a shared language of power relations that people can actually recognize in their own lives.

Of course, language does not revive in a vacuum. The material ground beneath it has shifted. The comfortable postwar story that cast most Americans as securely “middle class” no longer holds for millions. Precarity has spread through gig work, frayed employment contracts, weakened unions, and costs that ceaselessly outpace wages. The result is a pervasive sense of standing one bad month away from catastrophe. That shared insecurity lends class talk a gravity it had lost.

“May Day Strong” seeks to gather those atomized anxieties and weave them into something collective. Slogans like “workers versus billionaires” can sound simplistic, but they represent an effort to impose clarity on confusion, to transform scattered private pain into a story that is legible enough to sustain action.

Still, a palpable tension runs through this revival. The words have returned, but the institutions that once carried them, such as unions with genuine density and parties unafraid of class language, have been hollowed out in many places. So we find ourselves with a rhetoric that has outrun its organizational containers. That mismatch may account for a good deal of the turbulence now shaping American public life.

Trumpism sits uneasily at the center of this predicament. It did not create the underlying fractures, but it helped tear away the polite veil. Even when his administration’s actions contradicted its populist pose, they so exaggerated inequality that it became impossible to ignore decorously.

In a sense, the Trump era functioned as a kind of structural reveal. It did not so much engineer new crises as force the nation to confront those that had been quietly compounding for decades. Movements like “May Day Strong” are not simply reacting to the immediate political spectacle; they are the delayed eruption of something that had been buried beneath layers of euphemism and managed consensus.

So class politics, it seems, has resurfaced, whether we welcome it or not. We are entering a period in which economic realities are being translated back into political language. What that will ultimately look like, whether organized and durable or chaotic and explosive, remains unsettled.

One thing, however, feels increasingly certain. It is no longer possible to pretend that the economy is a neutral, apolitical machine. Trumpism’s most lasting legacy may not be any particular statute or executive order, but the blunt, uncomfortable reminder that economic life has always been a theater of power. We had simply become exceedingly skilled at pretending otherwise.