I remember reading something maybe ten or fifteen years ago by a political scientist who writes about these things, Walter Dean Burnham. That's not impossible. People will find some ways of identifying themselves, becoming associated with others, taking part in something. They're going to do it some way or other. If they don't have the option to participate in labor unions, or in political organizations that actually function, they'll find other ways.
Religious fundamentalism is a classic example.
We see that happening in other parts of the world right now. The rise of what's called Islamic fundamentalism is, to a significant extent, a result of the collapse of secular nationalist alternatives that were either discredited internally or destroyed. The same thing happened in the early part of the industrial revolution in England. E.P. Thompson writes about it in his classic, The Making of the English Working Class. I don't know exactly what was in his mind, but the ideology is very straightforward.