On Class and Average American Values (Whatever They May Be)

I have long criticized Jacobin, Then I ignored it for years at it has become utterly irrelevant. Seriously, when is the last time you read anything there? But I thought this interview with Joan Williams really nailed some truths about messaging and positions on the left that are just as applicable to more mainstream Democrats. And honestly, there’s not that much difference anyway; the left in this country is both irrelevant and for the most part just kinda lefty New Deal on domestic policy. Anyway, here’s some useful excerpts:

Joan C. Williams

First, the idea that culture is completely separate from economics is a mistake. Class is expressed through cultural differences as well as through power dynamics and economic position.

As far as the cultural differences go, one crucial observation is that non-elites turn servitude into honor. In elite circles, we feel entitled to self-development because it’s available to us, and we focus on self-development and maximizing our skills because that’s what succeeds in elite jobs. But if your best hope for stability is a blue- or pink-collar job where you need to show up reliably without attitude to a job that’s often not intellectually stimulating, you don’t feel entitled to self-development. What’s valuable instead is self-discipline, without which you and your family could end up homeless.

When elites go off the rails, either their parents bail them out or they pay for expensive therapy to develop a new narrative about their lives and find a new path. For working people, there are rarely second chances, even fewer than there were forty years ago. You need to keep your nose clean and stay disciplined. So non-elite culture places a high premium on self-discipline and the institutions that anchor it.

Another way to explain it involves different strategies in what I call the “scrum for social honor.” In elite circles, social honor comes from being articulate, intelligent, and from having an esteemed job — that’s why we’re so eager to tell people our professions immediately. But for blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality. That’s their card in the deck.

Traditional gender roles also matter. Middle-status people — meaning working Americans who occupy the middle 50 percent, sandwiched between elites above them and the poor below them — know they can’t achieve class ideals by becoming like Elon Musk or Barack Obama, but they can achieve gender ideals. When those gender ideals thrived in the 1960s, at least for whites, work life was far more manageable: a father in a blue-collar job, mother working part-time or at home. Compare that to working-class life today, where people often patch together multiple part-time jobs without benefits or childcare. It’s sometimes said they’re nostalgic for white privilege, which captures one dimension, but they’re also looking back to when working-class life functioned.

Meagan Day

But working-class life didn’t function better because of traditional gender roles. That was incidental to the fact that a single income could support a whole family.

Joan C. Williams

That’s right. It was because of wages. But the correlation is powerful, even if causation isn’t there. And that distinction isn’t necessarily obvious to people. What they know is that their parents’ or grandparents’ families looked quite different from theirs, and everything seemed to work then. Now nothing seems to work.

Meagan Day

You said something interesting in Outclassed: that precarity is a stronger predictor of support for the Right than poverty. Can you explain the difference?

Joan C. Williams

Middle-status people are desperately holding on to a stable life. Life thus consists of working, coming home, caring for your family day after day, holding it together. Self-discipline means not talking back, controlling impulses, and keeping your nose to the grindstone, because there’s a lot to lose. This is where you get clichés like “making a religion of hard work.” The Left doesn’t understand the politics of hard work. This applies equally to men and women.

But the poor are, in certain respects, more like the rich. For the poor, stability seems impossible, so self-discipline doesn’t seem worth it, since it won’t improve things much anyway. In that sense, elites who aren’t focused on self-discipline are actually more like the bottom quarter than the middle half. They share an adrift quality that makes their cultures markedly different from that of middle-status people.

A couple of things here:

First, it feels very much to me like Democrats have lost the first principle of organizing–you have to meet people where they are at, not where you are at. We see this all time–in the battles over language, in the battle over the economy and its future, etc. Democrats–and we very much see this in our comments here–love to tell people what they should do. They should get over their traditional ideas about gender or about work. They should learn to code. They should move to where the jobs are at. They should understand that globalization is good for them. But none of this is actually asking people what they want in their lives. You know, the New Deal was also an elite program, but it brought in and channeled mass politics. When workers struck in 1934, FDR and Robert Wagner saw the National Labor Relations Act through in 1935. There’s a lot of examples like this.

Second, the emphasis on work in the working classes is really critical. How have Democrats stopped being the party of work? And as Day admits in the interview, this is also a problem on the self-described left. There’s an entire “post-work” literature out there that basically says that traditional work is dead and people need to change their positions on work. This gets related to the Universal Basic Income on a policy front. I have no particular problem with UBI except for one thing–ideas of welfare are repulsive to Americans and workers don’t want it. They want to work. And they are going to act and vote based on those principles.

These are realities we have to face. If we keep laughing at workers that the “manly man jobs” aren’t coming back, well, why wouldn’t they tell us to fuck off and just go ahead and vote for Trump? Because we support some obscure policies that have no politics about them? Even if those are good for the working class–and they usually are!!–Democrats have to get over the idea that education and good policy are tickets to winning elections. They are not.

If Democrats want to win elections–or if the self-described left wants to organize people, they have to listen to the people. Those people believe in work. They believe in American Dream stuff. They believe in certain ideas of gender. Democrats are getting destroyed increasingly among working classes of all races. Look at this Times thing on counties that have moved right in three straight elections–they are universally all working class counties that go from white counties in Pennsylvania to Mexican countries in California to Black counties in New York City. So racism might be part of the appeal for some people but it by no means explains the entirety of the problem and we focus on that to the detriment of actually listening to Americans.

I’d also like to point out the appeal of Trump to a lot of working class people, going back to Williams.

Meagan Day

Let’s back up to the masculinity thing. In Outclassed, you emphasize that both women’s and men’s endorsement of traditional masculinity predict right-wing electoral support. So this isn’t just appealing to men and off-putting to women. Men and women of a similar social demographic agree on this.

Joan C. Williams

Yes, and the masculine style in question can be summed up as “I tell it like it is.” I think of plumbers and electricians embodying this style. They have highly valued technical skills and don’t need to be nice to anyone — and, in my experience, they aren’t. The attitude is “I’m authentic and independent, I don’t sugarcoat anything.” This expression of masculinity brings honor to men in the eyes of both men and women. Studies show that embracing this masculine style strongly predicts voting for Trump across genders.

From the blue-collar perspective, professionals and managers seem pathetic — constantly sucking up, politicking, never saying what they actually think. We call this “political savvy”; they call it “phony.” In the competition for social honor, blue-collar men claim superiority on account of being authentic and direct.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in this world, but this stuff matters a lot to a lot of people. And Democratic focus group messaging is the opposite of all of this. This is one very strong reason why Trump was so effective in pulling low-information voters. They respond very much to this kind of language.

Finally, let’s hate the Boomers, because I think almost everything from late 60s/early 70s politics has backfired tremendously. I’ll start with one–the Democratic Party was better off when George Meany and William Daley controlled the Party and things were decided in back rooms. People point to George McGovern as this revolutionary movement when the people took over the party in 72. Yeah, the revolution was getting destroyed in a historically terrible election. What sums up left-liberalism more than rejoicing in getting your asses handed to you by Richard Nixon?

So let me just say that I agree with everything here:

Joan C. Williams

The Democrats’ coalition used to center on stable lives for blue-collar families. That’s what the New Deal was about. Universal programs fit perfectly with middle-status values: stability and “earning” benefits through hard work and paying in.

Then my generation of hippies arrived with antiwar, abortion rights, and environmental concerns, followed quickly by race and gender issues. They were all noble causes, but what’s missing? If you already have a stable middle-class life, you can worry about the end of the world. If you don’t, you’re worried about the end of the month, as the yellow vest protesters in France put it.

By the 1970s, the issues salient to influential Democrats were those important to people who already had stable careers. These issues matter — they’re all my issues as a typical San Francisco lefty — but this approach doesn’t advance them. Unless we ensure a stable middle-class future for anyone who works hard, we won’t get action on climate change, and we’ll lose abortion rights.

Democrats were seduced away from the politics of the New Deal coalition by neoliberalism: self-regulating free markets, consumers benefiting from globalization. What a vision! But the consummation wasn’t what they had hoped. After World War II, productivity and wages grew together — then, with the introduction of neoliberalism, wages stalled while productivity grew eight times faster. If wages had maintained that growth line, they’d be 43 percent higher today. Three-fourths of that decline happened in the fifteen years after 2000.

People are angry because they got screwed. The economy is rigged. They have legitimate reasons for anger, even if they’re not directing it at those responsible.

I actually think neoliberalism is dead, thanks to Donald Trump. He accomplished what the Left couldn’t — killing neoliberalism in just four or eight years, depending how you count.

We brought the superb historian Jefferson Cowie to campus this spring and he basically said the thing–the neoliberal era is dead and Trump killed it. But Democrats and their love of policy seem to want to reeembrace the ideas rather than respond to the anger of Americans. Seems like a hell of a good way to keep losing to me.

This is also why I completely, 100%, reject the ideas that sometimes float around here that in 2025, we all need to come together and just oppose the orange guy. That might make sense when it comes to the midterm elections, but this does nothing to break the cycles of American pathology that has led to Donald Trump being the Republican candidate three times and winning twice. We need to rethink everything about how we conduct politics. Because Democrats now have a small base that continues to dwindle as the party is less popular with the general public than any party in polling history. That’s not going to win. That’s not going to stop fascism.

And let me say this–you can’t do anything–protect refugees, protect trans people, fight climate change, etc–if you lose power. Democrats seem to believe that principle is more important than power. That’s another legacy of thinking George McGovern in 72 was a good and necessary thing. And we are living the consequences of liberals’ disastrous politics every day now.