The Left Has to Speak To Average American Values — Or Perish

Joan C. Williams argues that progressives and leftists aren’t doomed to keep losing working-class voters — if they can stop dismissing the cultural principles that grant average Americans’ lives dignity.

By Joan C. Williams, Jacobin

Meagan Day

Here at Jacobin, we make a major point to uncover the class basis of politics. Yet I can’t bring myself to say outright that the 2024 general election was solely “about economics,” if the implication is that people were just voting to get rid of inflation. To me, it seems obvious that something cultural was being communicated — not least by working-class Americans. What do you make of this question?

Joan C. Williams

First, the idea that culture is completely separate from economics is a mistake. Class is expressed through cultural differences as well as through power dynamics and economic position.

As far as the cultural differences go, one crucial observation is that non-elites turn servitude into honor. In elite circles, we feel entitled to self-development because it’s available to us, and we focus on self-development and maximizing our skills because that’s what succeeds in elite jobs. But if your best hope for stability is a blue- or pink-collar job where you need to show up reliably without attitude to a job that’s often not intellectually stimulating, you don’t feel entitled to self-development. What’s valuable instead is self-discipline, without which you and your family could end up homeless.

When elites go off the rails, either their parents bail them out or they pay for expensive therapy to develop a new narrative about their lives and find a new path. For working people, there are rarely second chances, even fewer than there were forty years ago. You need to keep your nose clean and stay disciplined. So non-elite culture places a high premium on self-discipline and the institutions that anchor it.

Another way to explain it involves different strategies in what I call the “scrum for social honor.” In elite circles, social honor comes from being articulate, intelligent, and from having an esteemed job — that’s why we’re so eager to tell people our professions immediately. But for blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality. That’s their card in the deck.

Traditional gender roles also matter. Middle-status people — meaning working Americans who occupy the middle 50 percent, sandwiched between elites above them and the poor below them — know they can’t achieve class ideals by becoming like Elon Musk or Barack Obama, but they can achieve gender ideals. When those gender ideals thrived in the 1960s, at least for whites, work life was far more manageable: a father in a blue-collar job, mother working part-time or at home. Compare that to working-class life today, where people often patch together multiple part-time jobs without benefits or childcare. It’s sometimes said they’re nostalgic for white privilege, which captures one dimension, but they’re also looking back to when working-class life functioned.