Review of WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
A one-sitting wake-up call that clarifies where we are today.
This is an arresting, timely and uneven book. Her facts will change how you think. Her insights into those “70 million” voters on November 3, 2020 and what they represent are empathetic and incredibly important. The takeaways will force fresh thinking by anyone with a reasonably open mind. In this brief book, there are no excuses for the worst of the Trump voter. There is no finger pointing. What there is, is a CENTRIST point of view that is so goddam rare in our polarized, self-righteous world that it feels almost radical. A friend with strong conservative tendencies that have been left in tatters by our 45th President and the last four years gave me this book. He is a thoughtful reader and an experienced voter and thinker who remains a Republican because he simply cannot live with the mindless thought police of the left. While a more moderate Democrat version, I share his deep aversion to both sides of our political life. He gave me this book and told me I would read it in a day. I did. So will you if you get it. It is a longer version of a Harvard Business School Review article Joan Williams wrote that went viral.
I decided to break this book down into a series of notes. Otherwise I am stuck trying to write a polemical response, which I prefer to avoid – certainly on this site. By the way, before you start on the lists below, Joan Williams combines the “working’ class with our ubiquitous “middle” class to create what she thinks is the real working class in America. If economic insecurity is the benchmark, she is right. Right there is a good place to start when you try to unpack that “70 million”. She also refers to the blue state, educated crowd as “professional elites”. You can decide where you fall in this. There is a lot of sunlight between and amidst her distinctions but she had to start somewhere.
Some FACTS:
only 12% of Trump’s 2016 voters earned less than $30,000 a year
50% to 70% of professionals get their jobs through connections
“working class” voters give 50% more of their income to charity than their professional counterparts
there are more students in the highly selective colleges from the top 1% of America than the bottom 60%.
56% of Americans claim they receive no help from the federal government while, in fact, 92% of them do
in small town America up to 40% of men aged 40-60 are on long term disability and will never get off it
29% of Latinos voted for Trump in 2016 and the percentage was higher in 2020
in 1970 35% of the private workforce was unionized while today it is 6%
Some ASSERTIONS:
The working class does not want to be examined like some tribe in a faraway land … They want respect for lives they have built through unrelenting hard work … They keep our power lines repaired, our sewers functioning, our trains running. They give the mammograms that save our lives and pick us off the street when we’ve been injured. They demand dignity – they deserve it.
For many in the working class, churches provide the kind of mental exercise, stability, hopefulness, future orientation, impulse control, and social safety net many in the professional elite get from families, their career potential, their therapists, and their bank accounts.
If working class networks are narrow and deep, professionals are broad and shallow … “I associate change with loss” said a working class migrant … For many in the professional elite, work becomes a totalizing experience … Working class men dismiss work devotion as narcissism.
Once white workers were placed outside liberals’ ambit of responsibility, they wrote off “those below” as lacking morals, grit and taste … “they should have understood that we don’t live in a ‘fly-over’ state; we live in our home.
I’m for all men of all classes developing new and healthier masculinities, but to have the elite telling working class men to abandon the breadwinner masculinity privileged men still enjoy … that’s not going to persuade working class men of anything except that they really, really, really hate feminism.
Conservatives have engaged in a sustained, decades-long effort to popularize negative attitudes toward the government. They have been tragically successful. Only 19% of Americans say they trust the government … But, when asked … Americans see a major role for government in keeping the country safe from terrorism (94%) and responding to natural disasters (88%), but also ensuring safe food and medicine (87%), protecting the environment (75%) … and setting workplace standards (66%).
If we are not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.
Once the elite cast the white working class outside of its ambit of responsibility, the elite did what elites do. They ignored those who print their New York Times, make their KitchenAides , tell them at the doctor’s to undress from the waist down. The professional class first stopped noticing and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness.
A few of my TAKEAWAYS:
We need a new, positive narrative about the role of government in our lives. We are utterly clueless how much it makes our lives possible and how much it has made our lives safer and more worthy. This is a scandal – the biggest crime of the past 50 years.
We need to teach civics again ..,. a real class based on hard facts and the documents that made this country.
The real responsibility for the madness of Trump and his followers rests at the feet of the failures and greed of the liberal elite.
We never came to grips with what I call THE GREAT ABERRATION when starting in 1945 America straddled the world as an economic colossus the likes of which had never before existed. Our people spent almost 30 years in a historic bubble and our expectations – in ALL classes – were warped. What we saw as a product of the American Dream, what we saw as the American Way of Life was very much a profoundly aberrant moment in history. The real stuff is now. MAGA is a fantasy rooted in loss.
Finally, Joan William’s book confirms that the finest book yet written on the subject of the metamorphosis of the conservative right in America was published in 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land (and the Mourning on the American Right) by Arlie Hochschild is that rare book that captures a paradigm while you are living in it. My wife read it and gave it to many of her nearest and dearest and she was dead right.
Read it.
White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
by Joan Williams (2020)
131 pages (paperback)