The history of the workers' movement throughout the world is to a large extent written in blood. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers' struggles to win political and economic rights often resulted in violent clashes with employers and state authorities. Revolutionary political parties (like the Russian Bolsheviks) arose to threaten the social order the world over. Nowadays, however, the political landscape has been utterly transformed. Class conflict has receded from view. Yet the waning of class conflict has not led to an end of ideology, let alone political conflict. Instead, there has been a notable increase in conflict between groups defined on the basis of their cultural rather than economic affinities.

The increasing importance of cultural conflict is evidenced by the prominence of nationalism (Gurr 1994; Hechter 2000), radical right parties (Kitschelt 1995), and religious fundamentalism, which animates debates about issues such as abortion (Hunter 1991; Smith 2000; for a dissenting view about the American situation see Smelser and Alexander 1999). This essay offers a preliminary explanation of this metamorphosis in the social bases of political conflict in the developed world. Section 1 outlines three of the leading explanations in the literature, and introduces a new one based on the theory of group solidarity. That theory is discussed in section 2. Section 3 presents the argument.