Joan Williams: What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class

Scott Adams agrees mostly with what Joan C. Williams reveals about What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

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Williams seems to be saying that the WWC wants to be part of the petite-bourgeoisie. She also notes that there is very little contact between the working-class and the Capitalists. Indeed, the hated face of the current system is the professionals who are also part of the petite-bourgeoisie.

Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics. Policy makers of both parties — but particularly Democrats if they are to regain their majorities — need to remember five major points.

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Williams lists these points as:

1. Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
2. Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
3. Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
4. If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center
5. Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism

Williams concludes that:

Saying this is so unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the consequences could turn dangerous.

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One of the good things to come out of Trump's victory is demolition of identity politics. In its place, people should cultivate their class consciousness.

Workers have to understand how the Capitalist system works. Their dream of becoming self-directed workers is being crushed by Capitalism, and can only be realised through Communism.