White Working Class

by Joan C. Williams

Class consciousness has been replaced by class cluelessness—and in some cases, even class callousness.

The typical white working-class household income doubled in the three decades after World War II but has not risen appreciably since.

To focus on white working-class despair will lead well-meaning people to approach the white working class as they traditionally have approached the poor—as those “we have a moral and ethical obligation to help,” to quote a well-meaning colleague. This attitude will infuriate them and only widen a societally unhealthy class divide.

Instead, I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice.

don’t either; different topic.) They want respect for the lives they’ve built through unrelenting hard work. They want recognition for their contributions and their way of life. They keep our power lines repaired, our sewers functioning, our trains running. They give the mammograms that save our lives and pick us up off the street when we’ve been injured. They demand dignity—and they deserve it.

We need to change destructive organizational cultures in both the military and the police, but at the same time we must respect the women and men who do the difficult and dangerous jobs that keep the rest of us

safe. One message with the potential to enlist white working-class support to end police violence against unarmed civilians is this: Police work is hard and dangerous work most of us aren’t qualified to do. Having the courage, the composure, and the self-discipline to defuse potentially violent situations rather than escalating them—that’s rare. Most people don’t have what it takes. This argument also may help avoid situations where white juries side with the police even when the evidence suggests police have violated their own rules of engagement and constitutional norms.271

The bottom line is this. Business-as-usual in American politics means that class conflict is driving the country further and further from the mainstream, into deep wells of swirling fury. We need to d...

Why can’t Democrats just ignore this group and count on their coalition of professional-class whites and minorities to deliver elections? That didn’t work in 2016 and here’s why: the Electoral College gives the white working class outsized political power. The Electoral College was designed to overweight the rural vote—today, that means working-class whites. We’ve all seen the electoral maps that show that vast interior of rural red rimmed by the thin blue lines of the East and West coasts. Unless hipsters move to Iowa, an infuriated rural electorate will continue to hold disproportionate power. For the 112 years of American history prior to the 2000 election, the candidate who won the popular vote also won the Electoral College vote.285 In the five elections since, two Democratic candidates who won the popular vote have lost the Electoral College. The system is flawed, but it’s the one we have.

The white working class is important not only for strategic but also for ethical reasons. Ideally, no politician should ignore whole swaths of the country. And the left professes to care about diversity and level playing fields. But they can barely look class issues in the eye.

Is this just “false consciousness?” Not really. The working class just wants what the professional elite already has: jobs that sustain them in their vision of a middle-class life. “The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend wrote me right after Trump was elected. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Nor is minimum wage. Working-class men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15/hour instead of $9.50. What they want is a job that paves the way to a modest middle-class standard of living. Trump was the first politician in a long time to promise that. Many voters deeply appreciated the fact that at least he understood what they need.