An essay by Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, published in Harvard Business Review in November 2016 (and cited in the January 19, 2021, issue of Barron’s magazine), became one of the most widely read articles in HBR’s history. Read it here. The white working class estrangement from Democrats is about “culture gap,” she says. Excerpts below.
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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”….
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“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year [2016]. But to them, the Democrats are no better. Both parties have supported free-trade deals because of the net positive GDP gains, overlooking the blue-collar workers who lost work ….
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… both parties need an economic program that can deliver middle-class jobs. Republicans have one: Unleash American business. Democrats? They remain obsessed with cultural issues … [and that] infuriates many Americans whose chief concerns are economic. Back when blue-collar voters used to be solidly Democratic (1930–1970), good jobs were at the core of the progressive agenda.
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National debates about policing are fueling class tensions …. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. … For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
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Economic resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous … the biggest risk today … 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.