In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio showed her Democratic colleagues a chart listing the congressional districts with the highest and lowest median incomes. The highest-income districts were virtually all Democratic, the lowest-income districts Republican. The chart was shocking to Kaptur and her colleagues, all of whom thought of their party as the natural representative of the working class. “How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle?” Kaptur wondered. “How is that possible?”
As Joan Williams observes in her recent book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, as recently as 2010 Democrats still represented a majority of working-class districts. But in the decades since, the two parties have traded their political bases, with Democrats increasingly becoming the party of the college-educated professional classes; the percentage of Democrats who are college grads almost doubled between 1996 and 2018.
This swap has proved disadvantageous for the Democratic Party. College-educated voters’ values and preferences have come to dominate the Democratic Party, alienating much of their former support in the working class, including increasing numbers of minority voters. And since noncollege voters comprise nearly two-thirds of the electorate, and are especially dominant in the rural areas and swing states that disproportionately determine election outcomes, Democrats will either have to win back some of their lost working-class support or resign themselves to near-permanent minority status.
Williams is a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and the cofounder of the Center for WorkLife Law, which is an advocacy and research organization focused on defending the legal rights of employees who are pregnant, have children, or are family caregivers. She is also a progressive who doesn’t believe that the Democratic Party should move toward the political center since, as she puts it, “the third way’s brand of neoliberal ‘moderation’ is precisely what got us into this mess.” But she does believe that Democrats will have to rediscover ways of communicating and connecting with the working class. And, more generally, she feels that progressives will have to decide if they prefer to approach the working class “with more disdain for the ‘deplorables’ or with genuine curiosity about why noncollege voters are unhappy with the Left.”
In this podcast interview, Williams discusses her experiences — including marriage to a man from a working-class background — that led her to consider the ways that class as well as factors like race and gender impact much of life in America. She considers the history of meritocracy — which she experienced as a member of one of the first classes of women at previously all-male Yale College — and the movement of college-educated women into professions that previously had been closed to them. And she describes how her research has shown that in politics, working-class voters “want to be talked to in the language that normal people talk to people. And they want to be shown how a candidate is going to improve their lives in very concrete ways. They don’t want fancy policy talk.”
Transcript
Joan Williams: What these folks want is, number one, economically progressive policies. Because the only way to counter right populism — “They’re looking down on you” — is left populism: “They’re robbing you blind” — for the simple reason that they’re robbing these folks blind.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m honored and delighted to be joined today by Joan C. Williams. She is a highly distinguished law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She is the co-founder of the Center for Work Life Law, based at the university, which is an advocacy and research organization focused on defending the legal rights of employees who are pregnant, have children, or are family caregivers. She’s the author of numerous books and is an extraordinarily prolific writer for both academic journals and popular media. And she is the author, most recently, of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, which was published by St. Martin’s Press last year and is due to be published in paperback this summer, I believe. Welcome, Joan!
Joan Williams: Delighted to be here, Geoff. I appreciate the invitation.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I’m really glad to be talking to you. Joan, your career has covered a wide range of subjects and areas, and it would be quite possible to have a dozen of these hour-long discussions with you that would cover entirely different aspects of your career. For example, nearly everyone in this country who is not fired from their job because they become pregnant or have family caregiving responsibilities owes something to you and to the legal strategies you pioneered.
But I do want to center our talk today about your book Outclassed, because it is first of all a terrifically interesting and brilliantly argued and engagingly written book. But it also is zeroing in on one of the central political facts of our time, which is that our two political parties have switched their class bases. The Democratic Party has gone from being a working-class party to being a party that is increasingly college-educated, urban, and affluent, and has little appeal to the working class — even though many Democrats have a hard time believing that this is the case. And the diploma divide helps drive the widening gap between prospering cities and the left-behind parts of the country, and this inequality is a principle factor behind the rise of populism. Meanwhile, the Republicans increasingly are becoming the party of the working class — even a multiracial, multi-ethnic working class, along with the struggling middle class, even though much of the party’s economic program has little to offer those groups.
And Joan, you and I are speaking at a time when President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are nearing record levels of unpopularity. And yet the Democratic Party has not experienced a corresponding upward bump in popularity, as all past patterns of politics suggest should have happened. In fact, the Democratic Party has a lower net favorability than the Republican Party right now and by some measures is more unpopular than it has been in virtually the entire history of polling.
And at the heart of the Democratic Party’s decline are its losses among working-class and lower- middle-class voters. This decline is particularly acute among white working-class voters. As you point out in your book, nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters in the 1990s were whites without college degrees, as compared to 27% of Joe Biden’s in 2020. The Democrats also lost significant numbers of nonwhite working-class voters in 2024, and you note that people of color without college degrees have trended away from the Democrats by 32 points since 2012.
Even many Democrats don’t appreciate the extent to which the party over these decades has become an affluent, college-educated party. The percentage of Democrats who are college graduates almost doubled between 1996 and 2018. So what in your view are the principle factors that have dealigned working class voters from the party that once was considered their natural home?
Joan Williams: Well, what a great introduction, I have to say, and thank you for your kind words. This really began with my generation of hippies. When my father was a liberal, the center of the liberal imagination was — and we saw this in the New Deal — creating a stable middle-class life for blue-collar families. And the alliance with unions was very, very central and the focus was on programs like Social Security, for example, that ensure that if you’d worked hard your whole life, that you wouldn’t fall into poverty when you were my age. And those programs were really, really effective; the elderly went from being the poorest class in the society to being solidly middle-class as a result of those New Deal programs.
But then my generation came of age in the 1960s and we were focused on the Vietnam War, imperialism… We were focused on civil rights, feminism, and environmental issues — really what are called the post-materialist issues. The problem is that at exactly the same time that my generation was coming up and focusing on these post-materialist environmental and climate and culture issues, the working class, the people in the middle, was really being gutted. In the ‘40s, workers’ share of GDP was about 70%, now it’s about 53%. Over 90% of Americans used to do better than their parents in the decades after World War II, but if you were born in 1980, there’s just a 50-50 chance that you will. So we have seen the withering of the American Dream.
A lot of this was because of neoliberalism, where the theory was that if you just unfettered markets, markets would rise and raise all boats. And globalization would be awesome because every country would do what they could do most efficiently, and so goods would become cheaper and consumers would have more goods. And neoliberalism’s focus on consumers forgot about people as workers.
And so although Democrats continued to support unions, support for unions really got moved to the margin, and faith in the market took over not only the Republican Party but also the Democratic Party. It turned out that creating a zero-sum race between the poorest people on the planet and American workers meant that American workers really, really took a big hit. And meanwhile, the Democratic Party was talking about these post-materialist issues, and workers were not amused.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I’m tempted to do hippie-punching as much as the next person of Generation X. But there’s been a lot of debate over what drives populism, and many progressives will tell you that economics has nothing to do with the populist appeal since the lowest-income voters haven’t moved to the right since Donald Trump came on the scene. How would you explain that?
Joan Williams: That’s actually not true, Geoff. In 2024, there was a veer towards Trump, not only of the white working class — two-thirds of whom had voted for him pretty consistently — but these middle- status voters of color moved towards Trump, both Blacks and Latinos and also Asians, actually. But most shockingly, voters in households earning less than $50,000 also veered towards Trump.
And if you think about it… I mean, what did Kamala Harris put at the center of her campaign? Two issues that are really important to me: defense of democracy and abortion rights. I’m just finishing up research with Jared Abbott at the Center for Working Class Politics; we’ll have a new report coming out in a few weeks. And we found that defense of democracy was the number two priority for white college-educated liberals, but for most other groups — and especially for Black and white working-class people — it was way, way low. Support for abortion rights is higher among every single college-educated group, regardless of race, across race. And so that famous ad: “Kamala cares about they/them, Trump cares about you” — that was widely criticized as being transphobic, and it definitely appealed to transphobic people. But it also appealed to people who were really bent out of shape that the Democrats were still not talking about the economic issues that they prioritized. Because what we found again is that workers across race prioritize economic issues much more than liberal college grads do.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: You had mentioned the post-materialist concerns of the college-educated members of your generation. What role does culture play in populism’s appeal, in your view?
Joan Williams: The far right has flourished by weaponizing several different cultural tensions. First of all, college-educated elites, we tend to pride ourselves on our cosmopolitanism. For example, Andrea Dittman and I invented something we call the New Class Bubble Quiz; maybe you can connect it when you post this online. And the one question that is most predictive of whether you graduated from college or your parents graduated from college — and also strongly predicts 3 whether you’re a Democrat — is this question: “I would prefer a truly authentic ethnic restaurant” or “I would prefer a chain family-style restaurant like Olive Garden.” That is wildly predictive.
And why does my crowd prefer the truly authentic ethnic restaurant? Because part of the way we display our sophistication is by a taste for food, culture, and languages not our own. And that’s a cultural disposition that works for my crowd, because after all our job markets are global and our leisure preferences are global. But something like 58% of Trump voters live within a very short distance of where they grew up. People in the middle — and this is true actually of all non-elites, this is true of the poor too — they’re very, very rooted. And they’re very rooted for a complex series of reasons that all pull them in a rooted direction. Number one, that’s how they get childcare and elder care and help fixing the roof — things that my crowd buys. They don’t want to buy because they would end up with crappy childcare. They want to stay home, close to grandma, so they can make sure that they’re going to get high-quality childcare in a country that makes believe we don’t need childcare.
Also, that’s how you traditionally get non-elite jobs: You get them through family and friends — especially blue-collar jobs, which of course are the best jobs available to people in that middle group. And it’s also how you get social honor. If you’re the guy who sells tires or toilets, you don’t want to be just known as the tire guy. You want to stay near people who’ve known you since you were little, who know you’re a deacon at the church, who know you are a good solid family man, a person to be reckoned with.
And so for all of the reasons that pull us in the direction of cosmopolitanism, they pull these people in the middle, settled working-class families, towards rootedness. And this fuels fights over immigration, it fuels fights over patriotism. And that’s just one of five tensions that the far right has weaponized into support for the far right and disenchantment with Democrats.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Joan, you’ve done a signal service over the years in trying to educate people in your class about the working class and the middle class — and above all trying to get them to refrain from condescension in their discussion of class-related issues. I should add that your knowledge of working-class views and values comes not only through a close reading of sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, for example, but from your marriage to a man from a working-class background. And some of your stories in this book about the cultural misunderstandings between you and your in-laws are quite funny but also quite insightful.
Joan Williams: Yes. The one I start the book out with was when we were going to Harvard Law School, my husband and I. He grew up in a Rust-Belt Connecticut town: Waterbury, Connecticut. It used to be…
Geoffrey Kabaservice: “The Brass City.”
Joan Williams: The brass capital of the world in the nineteenth century, yes; now on hard times, definitely. And we were living in a triple-decker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his parents came to visit us. And I was totally weirded out by the whole experience. First of all, they stayed with us. As I say, I am a silver-spoon girl born and bred. My parents would never dream of staying with us. So they stayed with us. This freaked me out.
Then we ate dinner, we cooked dinner together. So it’s like, whoa, this is different. And then we were washing dishes together — this was mind-blowing for me — and my mother-in-law walked up to me and said, “Joan, where do you keep the butter?” And I thought, “What does she think I am, a Martian?” I said, “Under the bed.” And she went and put it under the bed. And I thought, “She thinks I’m as weird as I think she is weird. This is a huge class gap.”
And I just realized that some of the things that I never ever would have thought to question were very class-local. And then I discovered Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction and I thought: “It’s not only me.” Class is expressed of course through economics, don’t get me wrong. But it’s also people develop a taste for the necessary — sort of a taste for what’s going to serve them well in their environment. And so you get this very tightly intertwined cultural outlook that combines cultural dispositions with your economic position. And it’s not, I have to say, because economics is the base and everything else is just the superstructure. It’s not because of that. It’s just because people raise their kids to thrive in the environments they’re going to live in. It’s very simple.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes. You have made the observation that blue-collar values fit blue-collar lives.
Joan Williams: Indeed.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And on the first page of your book, you wrote that “In those early days of my marriage, I learned that social class shapes everything. Class shapes everything from how you define a good cup of coffee to what you see as the purpose of life.” How did you and your husband come to meet and marry?
Joan Williams: Well, we have two completely different stories, as is not uncommon. We both went to Yale College and he was a year behind me. According to him, I walked into Yale College with my parents into Calhoun College, where we both were, and he carried my suitcase up to my room. I have no recall of this, Geoff. He’s an honest man. I’m sure it happened, but I didn’t really focus on him. He was quite focused on me though. And so by the time we got to Harvard Law School — we met in Harvard Law School a number of years later, both as first years — it turns out I was going out with him, Geoff, for six months before I ever knew I was going out with him. I was a little slow on the uptake. But we’ve been together now for fifty years next year.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Happy impending golden anniversary!
Joan Williams: Thank you.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I do like this whole cross-class dimension to your relationship. It’s sort of like the plot of Love Story but with the genders reversed and neither of you dying.
Joan Williams: Yes, a great summary that.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I was struck by how you managed in Outclassed to be both objective and also greatly empathetic in describing working-class perspectives on things like what you’ve been talking about, such as why working-class parents raise their children to value self-discipline as opposed to the value put on self-expression in college-educated families. Or the reasons why working-class people set such a high store on the institutions that anchor self-discipline like religion, the military, and traditional family values.
Joan Williams: You kindly mentioned my work at the beginning of my career on the rights of caregivers. For the last ten/fifteen years I’ve been a Diversity and Inclusion trainer, and I’ve done a series of eight studies on how racial and gender bias play out in organizations. It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t… I mean, I was interested in gender because I saw it determining the shape of my life in very profound ways, so it was very much “me-search.” But then I realized at a certain point I wasn’t actually interested in gender, I was interested in social inequality and especially how different vectors of social inequality interact.
I came up as a feminist very dissatisfied with traditional gender roles. I mean, I always say I come from New England WASPs on one side and German Jews on the other, so I’m kind of an Episcopalian twice over. So I came up very high status, and the gender constraints just seemed to me to be the be-all — because I was kind of erasing the fact that I was white and the fact that I was high class. People tend not to notice their axis of privilege, but they really notice their axis of disadvantage.
So I came up very, very down on traditional gender roles. It took me a long time to realize that for blue-collar families in my husband’s parents’ generation… I mean, my mother-in-law was a homemaker. Her husband never earned more than $12,000 a year, but she was a homemaker throughout the time the boys were growing up. And I have studied work-family issues very deeply, and brought a class perspective to that, and I realized quickly that blue-collar families look back onto the breadwinner/homemaker family with great nostalgia, partly because their lives are totally unworkable today — because we pretend that nobody needs childcare. But also, if you think about it, traditional masculinity and traditional femininity are social ideals that these middle-status people can attain, in a way that class ideals they can’t attain. And so it’s very natural that they would feel a deep affection for those traditional gender roles which to me felt so oppressive.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: You know, Joan, yours is a very nuanced understanding of the structures of discrimination of various kinds — along gender lines, along class lines, along racial lines. But I would imagine that you would run afoul of some of your fellow progressives in being able to distinguish among these things. This is, I think part of why you joked that your book should be subtitled “I’ll Never Have Lunch in San Francisco Again.” And just to give an example, you’ve described what you call the “hard work worship” of the working class and how Democrats can’t appeal to that value because they think it’s a racist term.
Joan Williams: There’s no doubt that a lot of racism has swirled around hard work, and the “hard work worship” is racist when the message is that white people are hard workers, for example, and Black people aren’t; Black people are, to quote the ugly stereotypes, “lazy and shiftless.” That’s racist. On the other hand, if you read JD Vance’s autobiography, he faults his white neighbors basically for being lazy and shiftless, and on welfare, and takers not makers. And that is a dynamic within this middle-status group that’s called the tension between “hard living” and “settled living.” “Hard living” is kind of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and “settled living” is self-discipline, raising your kids to be good kids who keep their noses clean, keeping yourself on the straight and narrow whether it’s through church or whether it’s through the military.
Those “settled living” families — after all, many of them are going to not-very-fulfilling jobs, where they are showing up every day, on time, without an attitude. And for them, redistribution programs, for example, they find really irritating: “Why should I have to be going to this unfulfilling job and they don’t have to go? And they get universal basic income just for breathing? That doesn’t seem fair.”
But this distinction between “hard living” and “settled living” not only shapes attitudes towards redistribution. According to one study, Democrats’ shift from focusing on “settled living” families to redistribution to the poor accounts for fully half of Democrats’ loss of working-class voters. But I was very shocked to learn that working-class people of all races support work requirements at higher levels than college-educated elites do. That’s “hard living”/“settled living” again.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I remember the work that my reporter friend Alec MacGillis with ProPublica did a few years ago when he would go into places like those where J.D. Vance came from in Appalachia and try to get at this question. And what he realized was that the attitudes towards the “lazy and shiftless” were sharpest among people who were living in precarious circumstances themselves, just one step up the class ladder from the people at the bottom. It was easy for them to point to family dissolution, and bad attitudes with regard to work and discipline and respect for authority. And this in many ways predicted their support for Trump.
Joan Williams: Yes. I’ve thought a lot about this. As I always say on Fox News, it’s like I’m a caricature of a San Francisco progressive. Of course I believe that the causes of poverty are deeply structural, but that’s not inconsistent with understanding that someone just one step ahead above poverty, who has kept their nose clean and their nose to the grindstone their whole life, doesn’t see other people around them who have lacked that self-discipline and fallen into poverty.
Now, the fact that if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth — you could have many bumps in the road and somehow the road rises to meet you anyway. That’s the structural element. But I believe both that poverty is deeply structural and I completely understand why programs that are means-tested programs targeted to the poor feel very irritating to this settled middle- status voter who has felt their lives become more and more precarious and has kept their nose to the grindstone regardless.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And just again, an attitude of class condescension that I’ve come across… Many academics have described the kind of parenting styles of working-class/pink-collar workers, even to some extent lower-white-collar workers, as “authoritarian.”
Joan Williams: I know. So irritating. And if you look at those “authoritarian scales,” they say things like, “I believe it’s important to follow the rules.” Well, if you’re a bro-trepreneur, being disruptive can make you a billion dollars. But if you are disruptive in a blue-collar or pink-collar job, you know what you are? Fired. Fired. And they know that, and they raise their children to respect the rules.
This affects attitudes towards immigration. The far right has raised a lot of hay by asking, “What don’t you get about ‘It’s illegal’ to immigrants without papers? It’s true that Trump’s immigration policies have been so outlandishly cruel that his support on immigration has really sharply dropped. But on this new study, we actually asked people, “If you had to choose today between Trump’s immigration policies and Biden’s, whose would you choose?” And check out the study, Geoff, when it comes out to find out the results.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Okay, although I have my own guesses.
Joan Williams: I can imagine.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: We will get in a bit to the discussion of how exactly the Democrats should try to appeal to working-class voters. But as I mentioned before, many progressives reject the view that Democrats should engage in any kind of effort at understanding and outreach to working-class voters, particularly the white working-class voters who you’ve been describing. There’s a piece I saw circulating on social media recently that was written by Peter Birkenhead, who has called consistently over the years for Democrats to basically write off the white working-class vote.
Joan Williams: Because that’s worked so well, to write off two-thirds of American voters. I mean, some people can’t do math.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: He had a piece published in The Daily Beast back in 2016 under the title “Democrats: The White Working Class Isn’t Voting for You, So Stop Pandering to Them.” And in this piece that I saw on Facebook, he wrote in a long screed: “The demand that we cater to the needs of white working class men when they have shown over and over again that they are far more invested in increasing the suffering of Black people than alleviating their own — when so much of that suffering is imaginary and self-inflicted… is beyond exhausting.” And “catering to those voters… always means compromising on policies in ways that materially harm Black, Brown and queer people and women. It always means shoving so-called ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ or ‘identity’ issues like reproductive rights, voting rights, affirmative action, SNAP benefits, and a thousand other life-and-death issues to the back burner… And I’m tired of foisting ever more suffering on Black people or trans people or Latinos in return for NOTHING — because that’s what it always ends up getting us. Nothing.” How would you respond to that?
Joan Williams: Well, I mean… I’m in this weird position right now where I would respond to that: “How’s that working for you, buddy?” I find that really irritating because that is just playing into the hands of the far right. What it’s doing is reinforcing the script of right populism. The message of right populism is that “Elites are looking down on you.” There’s an elite looking down on working-class people. Who does he think he’s helping? He is helping Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, and the lot of them.
And even the sharp veer of working-class Black and Latino voters in 2024 doesn’t seem to have made any impression on him. Now, there has been a sharp veer back away from Trump by Black and Latino working class voters, but that just means they’re really swingy. And if all that was going on was racism, it’s hard to explain why Trump really did much better than prior candidates among Black and Latino working-class voters in 2024.
So it’s just ignoring the evidence. And to someone who is very much a data girl, I find people, intellectuals who ignore the evidence to be pretty inconsistent. And this is why I thought when I was publishing the book, “I’ll never have lunch in San Francisco again,” although that hasn’t turned out to be the case actually, interestingly enough. So I think that that particular progressive position is at this point downright ignorant and impervious to facts.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people initially who assumed that because that was my position that I saw myself as a moderate and a centrist — and I actually don’t. I mean, it was the sort of Third Way model of being a moderate that embraced neoliberalism that got us into this mess in the first place.
And the studies that show that most Americans are liberals or moderates… You have to watch out. I mean, that’s to some extent a coding artifact. It is not accurate to say that most Americans are centrist. What most of the political science shows is that this middle-status group of voters that is voting for the far right, both in Europe and the United States, they tend to be economically progressive but socially somewhat more conservative or inconsistently progressive.
And so I have problems with the strain of progressivism that is represented by the quote that you read. But I also think that there’s a very unhelpful dynamic in which one group of people is going, “We can’t compromise our principles and we have to be consistent progressives” and the other is saying, “No, no, we should be moderates.” You’re both wrong. What these folks want is, number one, economically progressive policies, because the only way to counter right populism — “They’re looking down on you” — is left populism — “They’re robbing you blind.” For the simple reason that they are robbing these folks blind.
For these folks, their fathers and grandfathers used to be able to deliver a stable middle-class life with one family wage. And now you have families with five jobs and no childcare, and leaving children home alone, and the opioid epidemic… There’s one chapter in the book that’s titled, “There’s Nothing as Dangerous as a Man Without a Future.” And that explains a lot of far-right populism.
So this group really wants what elites by and large (at least until AI guts elites) have, which is a stable middle-class life. That is a very central value. And it’s going to be the candidates who talk about that, and place that priority at the center, who gain the votes of non-elites. And that’s what we saw for Trump in 2024. Kamala Harris was talking about defense of democracy and abortion rights, Trump was talking about economics. Now, in my humble opinion, he was lying, and he has not delivered that for anyone. But he heard what they cared about.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Before we get to this question of populism and moderation, you had mentioned math. And I would point out the statistic in your book that 63% of people in this country do not have college degrees. And therefore, if you’re actually polarizing the election along educational lines, that is a losing proposition for Democrats, even after accounting for a higher propensity for turnout for college educated voters.
Joan Williams: Absolutely. I mean, that’s what Chuck Schumer said all those years ago: “For every blue-collar worker we lose in Pittsburgh, we’re going to get two suburban voters in Westchester.” Well, it didn’t work. This is where we are. The math doesn’t work. And also geography matters in the U.S. We don’t have popular voting, so the Electoral college, the Senate, House races — geography matters. And neoliberalism not only increased inequality between individuals, it increased inequality between regions. When Hillary Clinton lost, the counties that represented two-thirds of GDP voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, and those that had been left behind voted for Trump.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: It’s true. You do mention rural voters and the fact that they are predominantly working-class voters as well.
Joan Williams: There used to be no difference between rural and urban voters in terms of vote share among the
parties, and now it’s wildly different.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: But it’s also true that in a country like the United States with an Electoral College in which relatively unpopulated states like Wyoming get two senators — the same as California, which has 50 times as many people — it’s a losing proposition for Democrats to lose those rural and working-class votes.
Joan Williams: Yes. And then again, you go back to the quote… I just don’t understand how intellectuals fail to do very simple math.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Let’s shift gears a little bit. As you know, I always ask the authors who come on my podcast to tell me something about themselves, and your story is perhaps even more interesting than most. So where did you grow up?
Joan Williams: I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. We summered back then in Woodstock, Vermont, where my father’s family was from since the seventeenth century. One of the things that really influenced me was that my father, who was planning director of New York City for many years until he was fired by Robert Moses — when he was fired, we moved to Venezuela for two years, from the time I was eight to the time I was 10. And I just loved Venezuela, I loved it. I still speak Spanish. I’ve spoken Spanish ever since. I have a lot of ties to Latin America.
But I remember two things very vividly. As an eight-year-old, entering Caracas for the first time, I remember being on the superhighway and looking up at the mountains and seeing what were called then (and I assume they still are) the barrios — which is just a Spanish word that means neighborhood. But it was used to mean the poor peoples’ shacks that were made out of things like cardboard and chalkboards and pieces of corrugated steel, with no running water, no electricity, no sewers… I was so… I mean, I had grown up in Princeton, New Jersey. I was so shocked.
And then another crucial moment was a year later, when I was visiting Peru with my dad and my brother. We were looking across this beautiful, lush valley, and I noticed all of these terraces high up on the hills. And I said, “Why don’t people just farm the valley?” And my dad said, “The church and the rich people own the valley. That’s the Indians up there.” And I remember later that day going into a church and seeing an altar completely covered in gold and thinking, “This just isn’t right.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Important early influences. As you’d mentioned, your father and your mother were from quite different backgrounds. Your father was from that old Vermont WASP family. He went to the St. Mark’s school, Yale College, Yale Law School. Your mother was the daughter of a rabbi from Brooklyn. That must have been an interesting marital dynamic.
Joan Williams: And they married in 1946, Geoff. I mean, can you imagine the scandal on both sides?
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Absolutely. I’ve seen an essay by your father, though, in which he commented that three of his great-grandfathers operated stations on the Underground Railroad, helping escapees from Southern slavery get to freedom in Canada. So there were progressive strains in your family history, even on your father’s side.
Joan Williams: Progressive strains — but I mean, that was his self-image, God bless his soul. But one of my great-greats founded the law firm of Sidley & Austin as one of the first early railroad lawyers. Another founded the Allis-Chalmers Company, the heavy machinery company. And another founded the Pinkerton Detective Agency. So my father, bless his heart, liked to stress the progressive roots, but let’s just say it was a little bit more complicated than that. And my Jewish ancestors, they fought in the Civil War on the side of the South. So my family has always crossed boundaries.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: A complicated history. Of course, Allan Pinkerton, who founded the Pinkerton Detective Agency, also used that agency to crush labor unrest at various points in the nineteenth century.
Joan Williams: He did indeed. When my brother got married, his future wife’s mother-in-law insisted that in the wedding announcement the Pinkertons not be mentioned in any way, shape, or form.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: This legacy lives on in you, of course, because Allan Pinkerton’s daughter, Joan, married William Chalmers of the Allis-Chalmers industrial machinery company. I believe that Chalmers is your middle name.
Joan Williams: Joan Chalmers Williams. Yes, I was named after the woman who was born Joan Pinkerton Chalmers.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I also recall, however, that your grandmother Irma was one of the first women to attend Johns Hopkins Medical School. But before graduating, she married and moved with her husband to New Haven. And then when she tried to enroll at the Yale Medical School to complete her medical education, a dean told her that a wife and mother should be ashamed of such ambitions.
Joan Williams: He said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, Irma. You already have a job. You have a husband and two children.” I always say that I came to work-family conflict honestly, two generations before I was born.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes. Your father, as you say, was an urban planner who served as New York City’s planning director during the 1950s. But he also was a lawyer and a professor, and also a pioneer in demonstrating how local zoning boards frequently manipulated zoning rules to prevent affordable housing construction and keep out low- and moderate-income people. As you know, that has been one of the central themes of the abundance movement.
Joan Williams: Absolutely. He was one of the early exclusionary zoning people, and was one of the forces behind a famous legal case called the Serrano case. And I in fact taught property law for forty years. I was a chip off the old block in that particular way.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Your father and your grandfather had gone to Yale, and you graduated from Yale with the Class of 1974…
Joan Williams: And my daughter graduated from Yale.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Congratulations to you all.
Joan Williams: We’re in a bit of a rut.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Maybe, but a good one. But your class was only the second class in which women went through all four years as undergraduates. Women were first admitted to Yale College in 1969, but half of them came in as junior and sophomore transfers. Do you have any particular stories about that time that you share with young women who want to know how different things were then?
Joan Williams: It was pretty awful. It was pretty awful. I mean, I’ll just give one story… This is actually a story from Princeton where I audited a course in sociology in my senior year. And I’m actually forgetting the unbelievably sexist thing that the professor said, but it was one of the things that just kind of seared itself into my imagination. And then when I went to Yale, there was a lot of… And even when I went to Harvard Law School, where I graduated in 1980, there was still: “Why should we spend a third of the slots at a glorious school like Harvard Law School for women who aren’t going to have full careers?” I thought about this a lot. The reason that I thought that gender was the force that shaped the universe is that it was the force that shaped mine, that’s for sure. When I went to Yale College, it was an eight-to-one ratio. And I was so unhappy that I almost transferred after the first year. I ended up loving it. But it was a vivid experience.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I was just rereading Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s book “Keep the Damned Women Out,” which is about coeducation…
Joan Williams: That was my generation.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes, that’s right. And there are plenty of horror stories, although also plenty of women who like yourself also ended up loving their experiences. There are a lot of things I would like to ask on this general subject. But since you are one of the nation’s leading experts on women and work, I can’t resist asking you about my particular interest in meritocracy.
The coeducation of elite colleges like Yale was an important chapter in the history of meritocracy, but I think we underestimate how confusing it was in many ways both for the people who set it in motion and for the women like you who experienced it. I suspect that’s true of the early stages in nearly every major social change. Many things that people think will happen don’t, and many things that people aren’t anticipating do.
So in the case of coeducation, Kingman Brewster, who was the president of Yale in those years, had no idea that the women Yale was admitting would ever go on to high-class, high-status professional careers along similar lines as male undergraduates. Brewster was interviewed by one of the main television networks after coeducation was announced, and he was asked if Yale wasn’t doing a disservice to the women it admitted. Because, the interviewer said, “of course these women are not going to get serious professional jobs after graduation, because those jobs are for men only. But they will have this load of college debt that will act as a ‘negative dowry.’ And then what man will want to marry them?” And Brewster’s rather weak answer was, “Well, the men who do want to marry them will assume that they’re worth it.” But I think that was just one instance of the many ways in which Yale admitted women without being prepared for what that would mean.
Joan Williams: I think they admitted… I mean, the only reason that either my husband or I were at Yale was because of the man who I only know by the name of Inky Clark. He was the admissions director at Yale who both was central in the transition to admitting women, and also felt very passionately about admitting a more diverse group of people based on social class. It lasted a relatively short period at Yale, because Inky Clark left and things went back more and felt more status quo-ish, even by the time I was a senior in college.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So let me return to this question though about what happened to your classmates who were women after you graduated. Did you in fact anticipate that a significant fraction of the women in your class would go on to the same kinds of careers and responsibilities that male students historically pursued?
Joan Williams: Oh, absolutely, we were. I subsequently studied this. I studied women’s progress in professional jobs for the past roughly fifteen years and wrote a book — actually with my daughter, the one who went to Yale College and Yale Law School — called What Works for Women at Work. And what we documented there, and I subsequently developed a whole bunch of social science tools to document very rigorously, is that the women who survive and thrive in professional jobs are just like us Yale girls. We were smarter than the boys, and more driven in every way. Each one of us was just a little idiosyncratic, crazy powerhouse. Some of the women did end up being homemakers, but most of us were so driven, and we were frankly pretty smart. And we ended up having very high-powered careers.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Your book with your daughter Rachel, What Works for Women at Work, is particularly interesting to me in that the National Science Foundation gave you a grant to interview 60 women scientists of color, which is a sort of a fascinating cross-section. Of course, you and your early generation of women at these elite universities were dubbed “the superwomen” for your talent and drive.
Joan Williams: We were pretty fierce.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Absolutely. But I came across an article in Time magazine from January 1979, in more or less this period, which is about women with economics training beginning to get more jobs in business, government, and academia. And it begins: “Not long ago, prominent women economists were almost as scarce as generals in skirts. Today, though they must still battle prejudice, more and more women are scaling the heights of the profession. One reason: the increasing complexity of figuring out what is really happening on today’s business scene has created a demand for trained economists that often makes ability outweigh gender. In short, discrimination is no longer affordable. Equally important, the rising confidence and assertiveness of women is felt in economics as in most other fields.” So there’s sort of an economy of supply and demand at work here in the entrance of women into those professions in greater numbers.
Joan Williams: That’s a little self-congratulatory. You said that was 1979? There is still a huge amount of very well-documented sexism in economics to this day. And supply and demand… I mean, that’s part of the neoliberalism of that era, that the market is going to solve everything. The market is not very good at solving issues of social inequality. The market is awesome at many things — I’m a material girl and I do believe in markets — but the markets suck at solving racial and gender inequality, to use a technical term.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: A technical term, yes. But nonetheless, do you see meritocracy as part of the overall dynamic of neoliberalism?
Joan Williams: Well, meritocracy is fascinating. Inky Clark was a good example. First of all, it was invented, as you know, as a term of derision. But it used to be… This was no longer the case in my time, but in my grandfather’s time at Yale — he graduated in 1906 — there was such a thing as the Gentleman’s C. And so at Yale, at the time of my grandfather, you didn’t have to be very smart to go to Yale. You didn’t have to work very hard to go to Yale. And by the time I showed up, neither of those things was at all true to the same extent. It certainly wasn’t true for women, and it wasn’t even true for men because there had been a shift towards just accepting into Yale people for whom it was appropriate to go to Yale. Then you had to be pretty smart. You had the SATs and you had high school grades and you had to be smart.
So meritocracy was invented and for a certain period, and even contemporaneously, has been a very important tool for eliminating class disadvantage and racial disadvantage and gender disadvantage. But somewhere along the line — I think this happened roughly in the 1990s, beginning in the 1990s — meritocracy turned into the new rationale for the class structure. I haven’t looked at the recent figures — you may be aware of them — but at one point I think it was 60% of undergraduates at Yale or Harvard were from families in the top 1%.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Some horrifyingly large proportion, yes.
Joan Williams: Something horrifying. And what happened is that… This goes back to the self-discipline versus self-development ethic. As it became necessary to become accomplished academically in order to get into Yale, Harvard, and the rest of them, the elites responded by putting hydraulic pressure on their kids, so that every child was above average. And the colleges became very focused on whether you gave back to your community — and whether you “gave back to your community” as a high schooler meant: “Did you go to Nicaragua to build houses for poor people at great expense to your parents? And by the way, didn’t earn a dime?” And so meritocracy became a way to rationalize the continuation of elite privilege translated through the Yales, Harvards, MITs of the world through this hydraulic performance pressure, and by valuing things that only rich kids could do.
So meritocracy is such a force for good and meritocracy is such a force for evil. It’s kind of like every other human institution. It channels some really idealistic strains in human nature and it also channels the desire of people who have it all to keep it all.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So continuing on with this theme of elites… In suggesting that the Democratic Party adopt a left populist approach to the working class, you mentioned that there are two large blocks of voters inside the Trump voting camp. One of them are “American Preservationists,” but the other are the “Anti-Elites.” And you think it’s the latter group that offers opportunity for Democrats. Can you explain the difference between these two groups?
Joan Williams: Yeah, this was a wonderful 2017 study by Emily Ekins — I wish that we had a more recent update of it. She differentiated five different kinds of Trump voters. Two of them were economically very progressive — so that’s the intersection with that political science literature I was talking about earlier that showed that the people who have flocked to the far right are middle-status voters who are economically progressive but culturally conservative.
There were two groups of economically progressive Trump voters in 2016, almost 40% of Trump voters. 20% were American Preservationists. Being white and Christian was very central to their identity, and they had very cold feelings towards people of color and were extremely adamant on immigration, extremely negative on immigration. The left is probably not going to forge a coalition with those people — just saying.
On the other hand, there were 19% of Trump voters who were also economically very progressive, and their feelings towards people of color didn’t differ from those of non-Trump voters. And they had some liberal positions on climate change, gay marriage, and certain other cultural issues. And what this forthcoming report that I’m writing with Jared Abbott does, in a data-driven way, is be very precise about how to forge an alliance between college-educated liberals and these Anti-Elites.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: So in reaching out to these Anti-Elites… Part of what bothers them about the elite is its progressive cultural attitudes. And yet you have rejected the idea that Democrats should move toward the center on cultural issues. Why?
Joan Williams: Well, I didn’t reject that. I said they shouldn’t assume that the answer is just generally to move towards the center. Because you need to move towards the left on cultural issues, and you need either to move towards… You need to sincerely engage with the working class’ views on culture and climate issues and see if you can persuade them rather than just insulting them, calling them things like climate deniers, or depicting the liberal-progressive elites as defenders of democracy against the forces of evil — namely Trump voters. Those kinds of things… That’s disrespectful. That’s not going to lead to coalition, folks. It just ain’t. It’s going to further empower Trump, Vance, and the rest of them.
So on cultural issues, again, the answer is not just go right, go left. It’s that you have to sincerely engage with people, understand why they feel differently than you on these culture and climate issues, try to persuade them using working-class-resonant values, and also be willing to compromise with them. Because if you are inviting somebody into coalition and saying, “It’s always my way or the highway,” that’s not inviting them into coalition. After all, that’s not what the right did. The right gave in on all the cultural issues in order to keep hold of the economic issues — which is what they really cared about, tax cuts and the rest of it.
If you want to build a coalition with people, you have to listen to them respectfully and be willing to compromise when you can’t persuade them. So that’s a little bit different than just going to the center on cultural issues, although sometimes that will be the result.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: I think these are complicated issues to discuss even in terms of moderation or non-moderation. Donald Trump backed away from Paul Ryan’s kind of economic conservatism by saying that he would preserve Social Security and Medicare.
Joan Williams: Yes, he did. He went to the left economically. I just saw an article, I can’t remember where it was… Oh, it was Mike Pence. He just wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump and the far right were not true economic conservatives. And you know what? He’s right, at least in terms of how they talk.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes. Are there any Democratic politicians who it seems to you strike the correct balance, either now or maybe past examples of politicians you could point to?
Joan Williams: You know, my husband was on Capitol Hill for ten years. And when I was talking to people in Congress, I said, “I know too much about being a Hill staffer to answer that question.” But just let me give you some examples of people who know how to do this well. Gretchen Whitmer, I always think of her. One of her campaign slogans was, “Fix the Roads.” And I always contrast that with a candidate who I just loved, Elizabeth Warren. Her answer was, “Oh, I have a policy for that.”
Geoffrey Kabaservice: A plan.
Joan Williams: “I have a plan for that.” And “I have a plan for that” epitomizes the way elites like to be spoken to. It’s like, “I’m an intelligent person talking to you, an intelligent person, about complex policy matters. Here is what I have to say.” That is actually an elite bonding activity that leaves non- elites feeling very left out at best, dissed at worst. Whereas — and we found this again in our research, and we’ll say a lot more about this in a few weeks — non-elites want to be talked to in the language that normal people talk to people. And they want to be shown how a candidate is going to improve their lives in very concrete ways. They don’t want fancy policy talk. These Democratic platforms that go on for 17,000 pages and delight all the twenty-odd-year-olds who graduated from Yale and the Kennedy School and flocked to DC to enlighten the world, having been treated their entire lives as if they were the most brilliant things that ever walked the earth — turns out working-class people find that really irritating.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: It’s true. On the other hand, if we’re talking about the biggest social change that has occurred during my lifetime, it has been the widespread public acceptance across social classes of gay marriage. And this is where language gets slippery, but I think of gay marriage in many ways as having been a quintessentially moderate movement. It worked slowly through persuasion. As you say in your book of the people who were gay movement advocates, “Gay marriage is a rare social movement that actually listened to non-elites and tapped the moral issues of ordinary people.” And it seems that most progressive issues do not resemble the gay marriage movement, whether through impatience or a desire to lecture or tap into more abstract concepts about rights.
Joan Williams: Again, your self-description is as a moderate, my self-description is as a progressive, so of course we have very different lenses on this. I mean, we got gay marriage through elites convincing other elites, including those on the Supreme Court, that all reasonable upright people believed in gay marriage. And the Supreme Court, epitome of an elite, decreed we were going to have gay marriage.
And yet what you’re saying — there’s really an important element of truth to what you’re saying. And I hold up gay marriage, you’re exactly right, as a rare instance where a progressive social movement listened to non-elites, tapped working-class values, deferred to working-class priorities. Because when I was coming up as a feminist in the ‘90s, the cool girls were completely uninterested in marriage: done, dusted, patriarchal. Why would we want that lame institution anywhere near our lives?
And I talked to a colleague of mine, Matt Coles, who ultimately led the ACLU’s Gay Marriage Equality Project. And we hadn’t been thinking about what he had done through a class lens until we had this conversation. But he told the story of how when he and other advocates had gotten domestic partnership in California — mind you, domestic partnership. They were not interested in marriage because they wanted a broad range of intimacies recognized, they wanted a broad range of genders and sexualities recognized. That was where the gatekeepers were.
But he said that the Alameda County Court clerk invited him to be there the first day people were coming to get hitched in Alameda County after the law was passed. And she set up tables with little heart balloons, and she led a procession down the grand staircase. And as he was looking at that procession, he said, “Oh, I get it now. These people aren’t doctors and lawyers. These are ordinary, average people. And for them, this is everything. This is the prom, this is the wedding. And now they can go home and say, ‘Yeah, Mom, I got married.’”
And I said to him, “Matt, what you’re saying is these were ‘ordinary, average, middle-status people.’ They wanted to access the social honor of traditional family roles because the social honor of being a doctor and lawyer was never going to be on offer to them. They wanted to access the kind of social honor that was on offer. And so what you were doing was connecting with working-class values and listening to non-elites. Not only speaking their language” — because then he ran a series of focus groups and found that people talked about commitment all the time; again, stability, settled living. This is deeply connecting with working-class values.
But then the movement also changed priorities. Instead of domestic partnership and embrace of a broad range of sexualities, they started talking about marriage. That was ceding power in a very big way, and it was very controversial within the movement and felt to be giving into moderation — which in my crowd was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible.” But that is really the model. If you want to connect with people, you’ve got to connect with people. If you want to build a coalition with people, you can’t always have everything your own way.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Hearing you describe the attitudes of judges reminds me that your father went to Yale Law School when it was the hotbed of Legal Realism, which was very focused on what judges actually believed and sometimes would go so far as to say that law is what the judges believe. But I’m also interested to hear you describe the push toward moderation that came with acceptance of gay marriage. And the language you’re using to describe it — of give-and-take, of what you call in the book the need to see yourself honestly, as in family therapy — is itself the kind of moderation that I’m thinking about.
Joan Williams: I was talking to the New Dems in Congress and the head of the New Dems said to me, “Joan, moderation isn’t a set of policies, it’s an attitude.” That’s the sense in which I’m a moderate.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Yes. And your invoking the metaphor of marriage is also interesting, because marriage ultimately is about reconciliation, a commitment to shared unity rather than division, a give and take.
Joan Williams: Indeed. If you want to be in relationship to somebody, you can’t always get your own way. And you can’t get your own way even if you say, “I have to get my own way because my way represents the only path of virtue in the universe.” That’s actually called not being in relationship.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: Absolutely. Well, one might hope for a closer union of some kind between America’s divided classes, and maybe this is likelier to come about if more people read your excellent book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Joan Williams, thank you so much again for joining me today.
Joan Williams: It’s really been a pleasure, Geoff. I really appreciate it.
Geoffrey Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
