… There is, of course, tremendous resistance among social scientists and historians to the idea that American white workers can be said to have anything like a “class consciousness” at all. While it is considered acceptable to use the term to describe, for example, the attitudes of British working class voters and their support for the Labor Party after World War II, or British coal miners during the Thatcher era, it is almost never used in discussions of American workers. In most social commentators’ minds, the term “class consciousness” can only refer to a radical mode of thought that sees society in Marxist terms as sharply and fundamentally divided between labor and capital.
But from the point of view of white working class Americans themselves, there is a quite different sense in which the terms class consciousness, class resentment and class antagonism are very deeply and powerfully meaningful. It is that from their perspective, society is indeed sharply divided between, on the one hand, “people like them” and on the other hand three distinct and separate elites who in different ways “screw” them. While this distinction does not have a clear terminology in American politics, in Mexican slang there has always been a distinct set of terms for this very specific type of class consciousness—it is between “los chingones”—“the people with power who screw others” and “los chingados”—“the ones who get screwed” .
This is a different form of class consciousness than the traditional radical conception but it meets the key characteristic of the term—a perception of society as sharply divided between ordinary people and elites and a sense of resentment those below feel at the treatment they receive from those above. CONT. – pdf
Andrew Levison, The Democratic Strategist