Much has been written on the rise of white working class (WWC) “populist” movements in the United States and elsewhere. These movements are difficult to define but are generally considered to be comprised mostly of white citizens with low incomes and no college degree, who are skeptical of globalization, free trade, and large corporations but also fiercely anti-immigrant and fearful of widespread cultural change. These movements have made shockwaves globally, culminating in the election of Donald Trump to the U.S presidency.

These movements have succeeded, in part, because they have shunned “establishment” candidates and policies in favor of inexperienced and often extreme outsiders who threaten to disrupt the established political system. But this fact leads to an interesting political question: Although the economic and cultural power of WWC communities is declining, they still constitute a significant portion of the electorate (depending on how the phrase is defined, roughly one-third of U.S. voters are WWC). Why is a group so large becoming more interested in rebelling against the political system instead of using their seemingly significant political power to change it from within?

In this well-researched and powerful book, Justin Gest makes the argument that the rise of the sometimes extreme, anti-system politics embraced by WWC communities has its roots not only in economic and cultural change but also in a deeper political cause: a sense of marginalization from a political system that no longer cares about their needs and interests.

Gest’s argument stems from a theory of marginality in democratic politics that holds that those whose expectations of political power do not match their current political realities are less likely to want to work within the system to effect change that would serve their interests. Instead, they become likely to either withdraw from the political sphere altogether or to advocate for radical policies and seek to work outside the traditional system to get them. Variants of this theory have been applied before to explain the behavior of traditionally marginalized or underrepresented groups. But Gest argues that it also can be used to explain the behavior of the WWC, who feel a growing sense of exclusion from governmental and cultural power, and feel prejudice against them from both nonwhites and wealthier, college-educated whites.

Much of Gest’s argument engages with what has been written in other places: that working class whites, worried about both declining economic opportunity and declining cultural power, become attracted to policies that seek to punish “outgroups” (economic and cultural elites, immigrants, and nonwhites). But the author goes beyond this, making a sophisticated argument about political representation and alienation from the political system itself: as a result of feeling as if their needs and interests are not represented, the WWC engages in “anti-system” (p. 32) political behavior.

Gest explores this theory though both novel survey research and intensive fieldwork in two WWC communities (Youngstown, Ohio, and East London, England). He uses these cases as exemplars of what he calls “post-traumatic” cities, places that lost signature industries (and large numbers of WWC jobs) over the past few decades and have experienced steady economic decline and an expanding social malaise of crime and addiction.

Quantitatively, Gest finds that those with a high sense of relative political and social “deprivation”— a survey-based measure of how people perceive the economic and social power of people like them today—have a particularly strong desire to support unconventional or even extreme far-right politicians. He suggests that such politicians—regardless of their ability to work within the political system or even to keep their promises—are attractive to such voters because of their ability to “speak truth to power” and to challenge those who they perceive are alienating them.

This quantitative work is supplemented with rich qualitative accounts based on interviews with WWC voters in these two cities. A story of how Youngstown citizens view former Congress member Jim Traficant—the longtime Ohio representative who was convicted of taking bribes, racketeering, and filing false tax returns, and who was one of only a handful of representatives in the past century to be expelled from Congress—illustrates the point. The Youngstown WWC recognized Traficant’s corruption but still strongly supported him, largely because of his “us against them” message: In the words of one Democratic staffer: “He made people feel like they were pushing back, despite the fact that he was one of the least effective congressmen in the history of the chamber. The guy was corrupt as the day is long, but Jimbo could get away with almost anything because no one here would say that the emperor had no clothes” (p. 85).

Importantly, Gest also finds that the WWC cannot be treated as a monolithic block. He works to understand why some WWC citizens disengage from the political system entirely while others find an attraction to outside-the-system movements. He finds that local political contexts and institutions play a role in helping to determine whether the WWC will work within existing political channels or try to work outside of them.

The research in this book began several years ago, but Gest presciently notes the changing political conditions that led to “disrupt[ing] the complacency of white working class voters” (p. 122). The mixed-method approach employed allows him to make his argument in a particularly nuanced and sophisticated fashion. The book is an example of rigorous social science that also tells an important human story. This story—along with Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (2016), which is written in a similar fashion—also adds important nuance to what leads WWC voters to support far-right movements. It is not simple overt racial prejudice, xenophobia, or fear of cultural change that motivates these voters (also these attitudes undoubtedly exist for some), but rather something more complicated: a feeling of declining social relevance combined with a profound sense of political alienation.

Gest also makes an important point about the consequences of unequal political representation. The sense of alienation on the part of the WWC is driven in part by the difficulty of adjusting to their place in a country that is more diverse and no longer views their interests as absolutely central. This feeling is exacerbated, to be sure, by cultural fears and no small amount of racial prejudice. But it is also driven by a feeling—supported by most of the decade-plus-long research program into political inequality—that the political system is significantly less likely to attend to the interests and values of lower-income citizens than those of the wealthy, and significantly less likely to attend to the interests and values of lower-income citizens than it used to be. The WWC is not wrong to think that mainstream policymakers, in some contexts, are writing them off. Given this, it stands to reason that outside-the-mainstream movements will be appealing.

The lessons here are applied to WWC voters, and the WWC is admittedly a somewhat unique case study, since many groups that feel alienated from the political system also tend to have long-standing legacies of disadvantage that the WWC does not. But it is not a stretch to see that Gest’s theory could be applied to the study of any group whose interests are neglected or marginalized by policymakers.

That said, there are a couple of places where the book leaves open avenues for future work that might build on or challenge some of the arguments made here. The focus on the WWC alone is interesting, and Gest displays admirable nuance in making it clear that the rise of far-right protest movements is not just about race, and is not just about cultural anxiety. But in doing so, the book might have downplayed the issue of race more generally, and how racial attitudes might affect WWC voters and more well-off white voters in similar (or different) ways. After all, in the United States, Trump voters in the general election had incomes significantly higher than the national average. And even in the Republican primary—where, given Gest’s theory, well-off whites would have had several more appealing options—Trump supporters were still fairly well-to-do. Many of the arguments in this book—declining levels of political representation, for example—apply most clearly to the WWC. But many others—a perceived sense of declining centrality in cultural life—might apply to white citizens more generally. The book implies that well-off white voters will react to these pressures in different ways, and that far-right, “anti-system” movements would be far more appealing to more economically secure and politically better-represented whites. But it is not entirely clear how true that is.

Although it offers some possible recommendations at the end, the book also says little about how policymakers might channel the behavior of WWC voters in more productive ways. Gest suggests, correctly, that the white working class needs to be viewed as rational, and that it will work within the political system to have its needs met if such an option is available. The book provides a framework for explaining when it will do so, as opposed to withdrawing from or trying to work outside established systems.

At the same time, many (if not all) of the conditions that created this sense of political alienation—in particular, growing cultural diversity and displacement of traditionally WWC industries—are not going away, due to larger structural factors that are (at least in large part) outside the realm of realistic policy change. How do parties appeal to WWC voters in these conditions? The author’s suggestions—most notably, getting parties to recruit more WWC candidates—are interesting, but this is a complex problem in need of a complex solution.

Despite these minor flaws, though, Gest has written an important and readable book that provides a much-needed scholarly perspective on the rise of far-right politics and the changing political conditions of the WWC. The New Minority is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand our current political time, and anyone wanting to understand the real struggles and interests of the white working class in Western democracies.