Joan C Williams on Trump, elitism and the white working class

Joan C Williams and Hillary Clinton have a lot in common, though Williams is much the better speaker. “I’m a deference-challenged woman,” she says, in brisk authoritative tones. “So is Hillary. We’re just the same, this generation of white feminists.”

Both of them have spent their married lives with men who came from the white working class (WWC). Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump distressed Williams. But when I ask how the Democrats can win next time, Williams replies: “I tell you, I would not support another white woman. Why would I do that? I care too much about women to support a white woman for president.”

This is something a lifelong feminist is not supposed to say. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, now in her sixties, emphasises: “I’m a race-gender person. I’ve been working on race and gender for 40 years.” She is an expert on women in the workplace. But lately she has become something of an apostate among American progressives.

A few years ago she began to research a topic they had mostly ignored: class. She decided that America’s “culture wars” over everything from abortion to food were, in fact, class wars, albeit inflected by race. The biggest single group on the rightwing side was the white working class. These culture wars had got so out of hand that they often diverted the US from sensible policy.

On election night, when Williams realised Trump would win, she sat down and began writing an essay, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the US Working Class”. More than 3.2 million people have read it, a record for an article in the Harvard Business Review. (It helps that Williams is a hyperarticulate prose stylist.) Now she has expanded it into a book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

“There is a broken relationship between elite whites and working-class whites,” she writes. She offers a kind of national “family therapy”, telling American elites how to stop dismissing the WWC as an outdated class of fat, stupid, sexist racists, doomed for the dustbin of history.

We meet in a stereotypically elite setting: over good coffee on a café terrace beside a canal in a charming university town, which — to cap the insult to red America — is in Europe. Williams is spending the spring at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Gazing around the placid medieval townscape, she marvels at “the utter romance of a country where the ordinary working stiff has a fundamentally decent life”.

It’s true that there are no Dutch towns as poor and death-ridden as some of their US equivalents. Nonetheless, much of Williams’s analysis of the WWC applies in Europe too. Milder versions of the American culture wars fed into the UK’s vote for Brexit and propelled Marine Le Pen to the second round of the French presidential elections. Across the west, progressives who want to win elections now need to understand this class. The WWC shares the economic condition of the non-white working class but it votes differently.

Williams comes from the other end of the class spectrum. “I’m a silver-spoon girl,” she admits in her book. She was raised in Princeton, studied at Yale, Harvard and MIT, and now lives in San Francisco.

Yet she is WWC by marriage. She has read the relatively scant academic literature about this class but, like other gifted writers on the WWC, such as the French novelist Edouard Louis and the American venture capitalist JD Vance, Williams also draws insights from personal experience.

In the book’s acknowledgments she says of her husband James X Dempsey, with whom she attended Harvard Law School: “All of my thinking about the white working class reflects 40 years of conversations with him.”

“My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup,” is the opening line of her book. “Eventually, he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums.”

In short, her father-in-law belonged to a long-overlooked class. Williams wrote in her 2010 book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate (portions of which reappear almost intact in her new book, having suddenly become politically urgent): “The average educated American knows comparatively little about the nurses, secretaries, ticket agents, factory workers, mattress salesmen and X-ray technicians of the Missing Middle.”

Progressives often confuse them with the poor — an entirely separate class. Williams defines the working class as households that earn more than the country’s bottom third but less than the top 20 per cent, plus some slightly better-off families that include no college graduate. This group is “the middle 53 per cent of American families”, whose family incomes in 2015 ranged from $41,005 to $131,962.

Before 2016, Williams’s writings on class went almost unread. “My gender stuff — I just coined these phrases and they walked out the door into the culture. The class stuff fell into a black hole,” she says. And progressives rarely noticed WWC people except to laugh at them: “We call them hillbillies with plumber’s butt, living in flyover states.” Many stereotypes about WWC men came together in the hapless cartoon character Homer Simpson. American progressives showed respect to ethnic and sexual minorities, not to the WWC. But then the WWC made Trump president.

Williams’s book is a cultural anatomy both of the WWC and of her own class — “the professional-managerial elite”, as she calls it.

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The only recent Democratic leader who understood both class codes, says Williams, was Bill Clinton. “Bill is one of the geniuses of my generation, kind of a prick but a genius.” Clinton is what Williams calls a “class migrant”. He was raised WWC in a small town in Arkansas (his mother was a nurse, his stepfather a violent, alcoholic car salesman) but then joined the progressive elite.

His autobiography describes the clashes between Chicago police and hippies at the Democratic National Convention in 1968: “The kids and their supporters saw the mayor [Richard Daley] and the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft, upper-class kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam.” Clinton said he spent much of his public life trying to bridge this “cultural and psychological divide”.

But his Democratic successors couldn’t. Barack Obama famously talked about “bitter” people in Midwestern small towns who “cling to guns or religion”. A quick learner about other people’s cultures, Obama later admitted he had been mortified by his “Bittergate” blunder: “That kind of condescension has to be purged from our vocabulary.”

Then Hillary Clinton walked back into the culture wars. Much of the American argument about women’s roles had been fought out through her. “Hillary was not a talented candidate,” says Williams. “However, the kinds of gender bias she faced, without which she would have won, are shocking but not surprising.”

Hillary’s career exemplified what Williams calls “tightrope bias”, one of her best-known phrases: a woman must choose between acting traditionally feminine, in which case she’s not seen as competent, or acting competent, in which case she’s not seen as feminine. It’s the “bimbo” or “bitch” dilemma (Williams’s words). Clinton also laboured under the “prove-it-again-bias” (another Williams phrase), which haunts competent women. That’s why she was always reciting her résumé.

Fatally, Clinton lacked the patience to act what Williams calls “femmy”. As First Lady, she had mocked the notion of “baking cookies”. Williams explains: “White feminists of my generation, we wanted to distance ourselves from femininity because we kind of knew that was a set-up to be shafted, so we even dressed masculine.” Hence Clinton’s pantsuits. You sense that if Hillary hadn’t had to pander to an electorate, she might have presented herself rather as Williams does: grey hair, no make-up, unapologetically assertive statements.

To the WWC, Clinton seemed the epitome of an out-of-touch, condescending, PC-spouting professional. Female professionals aspire to successful careers, so Clinton talked about smashing the “glass ceiling”. But Williams thinks the glass ceiling meant little to WWC women, who knew they couldn’t reach the top even if they were WWC men.

These women tend to be loyal to their class rather than to the sisterhood, says Williams. Shockingly to feminists, many of them want to be housewives. “Women like me thought this was the ultimate in oppression, and white working-class women thought this was the ultimate in freedom,” says Williams. If a WWC woman is a housewife, her family doesn’t have to juggle childcare without a babysitter, and it validates her husband as a successful breadwinner.

Unlike Clinton, Trump ticked most WWC boxes. One of the most quoted dicta in Williams’s Harvard essay is: “The white working class resents professionals but admires the rich.” (She likes bold generalisations, while knowing that they are generalisations.) She explains: “The [WWC] fantasy is to become an order-giver rather than an order-taker. Trump is an order-giver. That’s the brilliance of ‘You’re fired!’” — the keynote phrase of his long-running TV show The Apprentice.

Trump has some WWC tastes (in food, for instance), but with more money. He made himself into the class’s de facto spokesman.

“How do you get this spoiled rich boy who can channel white working-class fury?” asks Williams. “This spoiled rich boy who spent his career screwing blue-collar guys? Trump is basically a boy from Queens who has been belittled by New York elites his entire life. I think that’s why he is so good at this. Trump really, really hates the cultural elites.

“I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. Say ‘Queens’ in Princeton, New Jersey, and people’s noses went higher in the air. If you think how he made his initial fortune in casinos, it was basically building pleasure palaces for the working class. People in Princeton would drive 50 miles out of our way to avoid Atlantic City; it’s the ultimate in ‘garish bad taste’.”

His sexist and racist “straight talk” didn’t only appeal to sexists and racists, says Williams. Each outrageous remark felt like a jab in the PC elite’s eye. Downwardly mobile people, for whom “American” was one of the last high-status categories they could claim, liked his attacks on immigrants. (Williams thinks the British WWC mostly voted Brexit for similar reasons.) Since the 1960s, Democrats had inadvertently split the working class along racial lines, attracting non-whites but pushing most whites towards the Republicans. Trump perpetuated the split deliberately.

He also promised WWC men the masculine factory jobs that progressives said had gone for ever. This is how Williams sums up the two parties’ offerings to the WWC in recent decades:

Republicans: We’re going to deliver you jobs.

WWC: How? 

Republicans: Give money to rich people.

WWC: How are you going to give us jobs, Democrats?

Democrats: Oh, we’re going to give more money to poor people, we’re going to create equality for women. 

And so Trump prolonged the alliance between the WWC and the Republican business elite.

When I ask what he has delivered to the WWC since his election, Williams cuts me off: “Dignity! He delivered the biggest FU to my crowd that they have seen in decades.”

And how does Trump keep the WWC behind him? “I think Trump just needs to keep on being Trump. That’s the sobering fact. The irony is that Trump is the most hysterical, emotional president in living memory, he’s like a caricature of a woman out of control, but following his gut connects him to the white working class. His continuing gestures of disrespect to cultural elites, through Twitter and other means, are just inestimably delicious.”

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Judging by Williams’s map of class attitudes, and the detail of Trump’s favourability ratings, most of his actions so far have pleased the WWC. His “fierce scary talk” has driven down immigration, says Williams. His favouring of his apparently unqualified daughter and son-in-law over experienced bureaucrats accords with core WWC values: he trusts family and rich people, not “phony” professionals.

And his plans to slash taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor sync with WWC views of these two groups. Williams sees very little “buyer’s remorse among Trump voters”, even as Trump has shifted towards “pretty standard country-club Republicanism” complete with “a subway from Goldman Sachs to the West Wing”.

Yet she says she remains “ultimately pretty hopeful”. Why? “You can fool some of the people, some of the time, but history’s long.” She was encouraged by Trump’s initial failure in March to overturn Obama’s healthcare plan. Obamacare includes a typically Democratic programme for the poor: the expansion of healthcare to 20 million people. “That’s all Obama talked about,” says Williams. “But Obamacare also had universal benefits — the kids on your insurance until age 26 and prohibition of pre-existing condition policies.” The WWC liked those bits. Some Republicans ran scared of scrapping them.

However, Williams said all this before the House of Representatives voted on May 4 to gut Obamacare. Now the question is whether the Republican-dominated Senate will dare take away healthcare from many WWC voters. If enough of these people rally to help save the programme, then the Republican attempt to repeal it will have done more than Obama ever could to remind the WWC that sometimes government spending is useful.

Williams warns that Republican errors alone won’t give Democrats back the WWC. While she agrees that the Democrats have mobilised their base since Trump’s election, she has “one simple message” for the party: it needs to show the WWC respect, “in a tone suitable for grown-ups”. Democrats must say: “We regret that we have disrespected you, we now hear you.” She asks: “Is this so hard? Although the risk is that the response will be, ‘Oh, those poor little white people with their opioid epidemics, let’s open our hearts in compassion to them.’ That’s going to infuriate them. They don’t want compassion, they want respect.”

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So far she’s unimpressed. “Just read the frigging New York Times, listen to NPR [National Public Radio], key outlets of the progressive elite: story after story of an outpouring of compassion for immigrants.

“Do I feel sorry for immigrants? Yes. But that’s not the point. An outpouring of compassion for immigrants, in the absence of offering dignity to the white working class, will hurt immigrants because it’s just another expression that elites have ‘feeling rules’ — who you should feel sorry for.”

Elite “feeling rules” ordain compassion for ethnic and sexual minorities and “perhaps women”, she says, “but the white working class are just ‘fat, stupid and ignorant’. So the elites are saying, ‘Oh, my God, we just heard this cri de coeur from the white working class, let’s express sympathy for immigrants!’ Talk about a recipe for Trump’s second term.

“On the other hand, there is a major effort to imaginatively engage with the white working class for the first time in a couple of generations. It’s important for elites to realise: this anger is entirely justified. These people were abandoned 50 years ago and elites haven’t given them much of a thought since, while elaborately proclaiming themselves extremely virtuous for being attentive to social inequality. The hypocrisy there is just breathtaking, and these people aren’t stupid and they see it.” American universities are guilty too, she adds: “Open insults to students of working-class origin.”

Her advocacy for the WWC has angered some progressives. Samir Chopra, philosophy professor at the City University of New York, said her HBR essay merely confirmed his impression that the class were “racist and ignorant and resentful and, unsurprisingly, they voted for someone who encapsulated their Know-Nothing resentment”. Frank Rich argued in New York magazine that it is “a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hardcore . . . If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.”

Williams has got used to progressives telling her: “You’re defending racist people.” “Yes, I’m defending racist people,” she responds. “White people are racist people. You think the white working class is racist? How about the elite, have you ever looked at who are CEOs?” She now has a new initiative, Bias Interrupters, to encourage corporations to hire and promote more women, minorities and WWC people.

There’s one job, though, where she doesn’t want to interrupt bias yet. Just to infuriate progressives even more, here’s her recommendation for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020: “A white man is the safe bet.” Running a woman would be “too much of a risk”, she says.

I email her afterwards to check that she really wants to say that. Yes, she replies. “When men feel threatened, the backlash against strong, assertive women gains strength. Running another woman candidate in 2020 seems unwise: sometimes the best way to help women is to shift the focus away from gender. What women need foremost is to avoid a Trump second term. His election already is hurting women, with his boasting about sexual assault, the likely overruling of Roe v Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalising abortion], the gutting of workers’ rights initiatives that will disproportionately hurt women, and the likely gutting of anti-discrimination initiatives.”

Generally, says Williams, progressives need to tone down the PC talk. They can still fight (albeit more quietly) for women and minorities, but they will achieve nothing unless they can build the black-and-white working-class coalition that Martin Luther King wanted.

What are the chances? Williams shrugs: “Who knows? We could have a war with North Korea and then you [in Europe] would be alive and I would be dead.” Or, she says, Trump might quit politics, like the WWC’s previous champion, Sarah Palin. “I think Trump is having no fun, and for someone as narcissistic as Trump this is a major life issue.”

If he abandons or fails the WWC, what then? “One of the things that my husband persuaded me to take out of the book was that I think that at that point you’re going to have a lot more Timothy McVeighs. Do you think that’s nuts?” McVeigh was the anti-government fanatic who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.

“If you have these humiliated, dispossessed white working-class guys, the anger is going to come out somewhere,” she says. “Dignity is a powerful human need. If you don’t give it to people, they take it.”

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Further reading

The key cultural contrasts identified by Williams between the white working class and the professional managerial-elite (in Simon Kuper’s words)

Food

WWC: Familiar comfort foods, served in abundance

PME: Tiny helpings of exotic new foods

Talk

WWC: Straight talk

PME: Sophisticated – the key skills for professionals such as lawyers, journalists, academics

Location

WWC: Loyal to community where they live

PME: Mobile, often live far from family

Work

WWC: Often boring and demeaning

PME: Their identity, to which they sacrifice family time

Treasured quality

WWC: Discipline – essential for ‘order-takers’

PME: Self-expression – essential for shaping elite lives

Abortion

WWC: A consequence of undisciplined living

PME: A right that enables women to lead lives of self-expression

Race

WWC: Sometimes use racist language

PME: Never uses racist language yet excludes most non-whites from elite universities and jobs

Sexism

WWC: Many WWC men talk sexist but do a lot of childcare

PME: Elite men don’t talk sexist but do little childcare because too busy working

Political correctness

WWC: No

PME: A key tribal marker

Economic status

WWC: Downwardly mobile

PME: Upwardly mobile

Views on benefits

WWC: Throwing away hard-earned money on lazy hard-living people

PME: A sign of compassion to the poor