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Scott Shafer: I wanna begin by asking you for a definition. Like, when you say working class, the working class, who are you talking about exactly?
Joan Williams: Well, you know, it’s a really confusing term because progressives, when they talk about the working class, often talk about the poor, low income people, the bottom thirty percent of households. But, when I talk about the working class, it’s really the middle class. It’s really the middle fifty three percent of Americans. And then when I talk about elites, it’s the top twenty percent of Americans in households where there’s at least one college grad.
Joan Williams: And really, the class conflict that’s driving politics both in Europe and the US is the conflict between that middle, what I’m gonna call the missing middle, and college educated elites.
Scott Shafer: And describe it demographically. Is it racially diverse? Does it differ depending on where you are in the country in terms of the makeup and the, you know, the details of who’s in that group?
Joan Williams: We could wonk out, Scott, but we would probably bore people to tears. You know, class is the only thing that is important in determining whom you vote for. Region is also important. But what has become really dazzlingly clear is that in the age of far right populism, it’s the diploma divide that’s really driving politics. And I’ll just give you a couple of examples. In the last three elections, Democrats gained in fewer than two percent of American counties, overwhelmingly wealthy counties. But Republicans gained in about half of counties. Again, triple trended in each of the last three elections. These counties, predominantly working class, veered towards Republicans. And so Democrats have really become the party, predominantly of college grads. And the Republicans have the non-college grads.
Scott Shafer: Yeah. And that is not the way things were. Certainly, when I was growing up, it tended to be the more educated voters, leaned Republican, while working class voters with high school degrees, no college education tended to vote Democratic, you know, union members, union households. Is there when you look back on this, is there a year or a moment that you can describe where these sort of political tectonic plates began to shift?
Joan Williams: Yeah. It’s my generation of hippies. That’s what we did. You know, I moved to San Francisco, and I thought, like, finally, I’d come home. So before, the New Deal Coalition was really a coalition that centered the concerns of blue collar, families, chiefly blue collar men. And then, my generation came of age, and we really shifted the attention of liberals away from blue collar men onto issues that meant more to us. Opposition to the war in Vietnam, environmentalism, and then, projects of racial and gender equality. So it began around 1970 where you had a real shift in the issues that the Democrats really considered the highest priority issues.
Scott Shafer: And, yeah, it does seem I mean, you know, there were many elections even where the Republican, like George W Bush, you know, got elected in two thousand over Al Gore. But, you know, Democrats were very competitive. In many cases, you know, either won the popular votes or, you know, came close, kept the Republicans under fifty percent. I mean, that Donald Trump this past election was different in that he did know, actually got more votes than Kamala Harris, and he got more I think he just barely got half or more. And so why is it that Democrats, in spite of what you just said going back to 1970, you know, they elected a bunch of people president during that time? They held control of the house and often the senate as well.
Joan Williams: What we have is a very split electorate. But what has really gained my attention, and I think the attention, unfortunately, of all of us is the success of far right populism in the United States in the form of Donald Trump. That is, really the ultimate peak of a strategy that began, oh, I don’t know, when about 1980, where the the merchant right, as Thomas Piketty calls him, like the top one percent economic elites, realized that they could forge an alliance with this missing middle over cultural issues, turning, every battle, including climate change, into a culture war. And so what you have is they, the top one percent roughly understood that there was a lot of anger in the country, and they could take that anger and make sure it wasn’t expressed towards economic elites by focusing the anger on cultural elites. So the one percent decided they were gonna focus the anger on the top twenty percent. And that is the dynamic that brought us to where we are today.
Scott Shafer: And give us an early example, like an issue where that worked well.
Joan Williams: Oh, you name it. I mean, this is kind of right as a one trick pony, but it’s a very powerful trick. Climate change, which is, of course, a very important issue to me being kind of a typical typical San Francisco progressive, it began as a bipartisan issue, Scott. I mean, president Nixon, if I remember correctly, signed the Clean Water Act.
Scott Shafer: Clean Air Act as well. Clean Air Act. Yeah. And I think they formed the EPA under Yeah. Earth Day. Yeah. All kinds of things.
Joan Williams: And then, the right figured out how to turn environmentalism first and then climate change into a culture war, which means that the support for climate change initiatives is lower in the US than it is abroad, and it’s much more starkly divided by class than it is in the US. For example, climate change, and environmentalism and climate change are priorities one, two, and three of college grads. But they are priorities fourteen and seventeen among non college grads.
Scott Shafer: And how much of that is the both the success of the right at, you know, kinda harnessing that issue to create resentment? And how much of it is, you know, the fault of Democrats in the way they have talked about issues like climate change or gun gun violence, that kind of thing?
Joan Williams: Unfortunately, I think it’s a lot of both. But one of those we have control over as progressives and the other we don’t. In climate change, first of all, we think about the language of climate deniers. And that is, that reinforces the far right narrative that populism, it really consists of cultural elites looking down on you. Because we’re calling people stupid. Right? And so that the other thing that happened is that, rich people of all political persuasions began to use environmentalism as a way to signal social virtue. So I always think of, like, there’s this amazing hotel, which I’ve never stayed at, it’s too expensive, in Mendocino. But it’s eco-friendly and it costs fifteen hundred dollars a night. So if you don’t put your towel on the floor in that hotel, you are a very virtuous person because you have helped the environment. So, all of this has made it very easy for the right to associate environmentalism with elitism and reinforce that populist anger of elites are looking down on you. Mhmm. How do we flip that? Well, instead of talking about climate deniers, tap really deep middle class values. For example, patriotism. Non college grads are much more patriotic than college grads are. And for a really simple reason, every group stresses what makes them look good. And so, college grads stress that they’re members of a global elite. They stress their class. But middle status people, they don’t have that. And so they stress one of the only high status categories they belong to, and they’re very proud of being Americans. So it’s really important to develop that class competence to understand that, develop what W. E. B. Du Bois called a double consciousness to understand how things look from our point of view and their point of view. So patriotism, for example, Are we gonna let China steal from us something we invented, which is the development of solar cells. Is the same thing gonna happen to EVs? That is an example of how you focus, how you connect with blue collar values, on the issue of climate change. And there are a lot of others.
Scott Shafer: Well, so many things that promote green energy, like electric vehicles, for example, are very expensive. I mean, they’re not really within, you know, within the range of most working class folks’ budget. So that also must kinda fuel this resentment.
Joan Williams: Absolutely. And you know the old joke that Whole Foods is called Whole Paycheck.
Scott Shafer: Yeah. That’s an old joke.
Joan Williams: Yeah. Sorry, Whole Foods.
