Once at the middle of British and American societies, today white working class people have drifted to the margins and are transforming their countries’ politics. How did this happen? And what could possibly lead a group with such enduring numerical power to, in many instances, consider themselves a “minority” in the countries they once defined? In The New Minority, Justin Gest reports findings from original surveys and full-immersion fieldwork among the white working class people of once thriving industrial cities to draw impactful conclusions about their political behavior. In this daring and compelling book, he makes the case that tension between the vestiges of white working class power and its perceived loss have produced the unique phenomenon of their radicalization.
Justin Gest is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, and the co-founder and deputy director of the Migration Studies Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His teaching and research interests include minority political behavior, immigration policy, and demographic change. He is also the author of Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in Times of Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2017).
