marcela

the traditional working class is gone in developed countries

I understand that, but there is a kind of modern-day proletariat. Super market cashiers are working class in that sense.

At the same time a lot of the left is made up of the massively grown academic middle class.

I was about to reach to that. The contradiction now might be more about being "educated professional class" versus "non-educated workforce, specialized laborers etc" (let alone gender). And not other distinctions that might have been meaningful in the past, since you mentioned already that people don't work in factories as much as they did before.

These are more meaningful for explaining politics, but the truth is the vast majority of people wants living wages, social welfare and public healthcare. Americans are heavily brainwashed against these ideas, and perhaps some neoliberal Europeans as well.

This is called "watching as the Overton window moves" in real time.

The working class is always a low-hanging fruit for the far-right rhetoric. That is why you need an "aggressive" democracy to keep the fash in their place. If you don't, the rate of expansion for fascist ideas is faster than for socialist ideas, because the first is regressive and the latter progressive. Any democracy that is not actively fighting fascism is doomed to destroy itself. This is how we got here. AGAIN.

WTF happened for "The Left" to have to "win back" the working class? Are post-post-modern enough already?

Bring back anarchosyndicalism ASAP.

They want to undo the making of the modern world because it came to allow the public existence of trans people. The horrors of Nazi rule on Europe dies out of living memory, and the rhetoric has a profound appeal to the human animal base instincts. So, yes, here we are.