White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author

by Mark Cuban

  But providing a solid future without college is important, because when people lose touch with their hopes, they give way to their fears. No one is at their best when they’re afraid. If you don’t like the ugly face of fear, the only effective antidote is to provide hope by providing opportunity.

  My own most fervent hope is to communicate one key message: if you care about climate change, or abortion rights, or immigrants, or mass incarceration, you’d better care, too, about good jobs and social dignity for Americans of all races without college degrees. Because if you don’t, racialized economic populism is what you get.

  Joan C. Williams

  Hangzhou, China

  March 2019

  WHITE WORKING CLASS

  CHAPTER 1

  Why Talk About Class?

  MY FATHER-IN-LAW GREW up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.

  He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side, but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in the 1970s, many blue-collar whites followed his example.

  Over the past 40-odd years, elites stopped connecting with the working class, whom prior generations had given a place of honor. Think of the idealized portrayals of noble blue-collar workers in post offices across the country, painted by artists of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. (My favorite WPA mural is in Coit Tower in San Francisco.) Or of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), or Terry Malloy in the film On the Waterfront (1954). Elites worked hard to understand working-class men’s striving and their pain.

  Class consciousness has been replaced by class cluelessness—and in some cases, even class callousness. Emblematic of this reversal is “All in the Family,” one of the most popular shows on television between 1971 and 1979. The central blue-collar character, Archie Bunker, represented a new and unflattering contrast to his long-haired, liberal, and enlightened college-going son-in-law. Archie was narrow-minded, coarse, ignorant, sexist, and racist. This image came from the core of the progressive elite: Norman Lear, the series producer, who later founded People for the American Way. The 1990s brought Al Bundy, the dimwitted women’s shoe salesman on “Married . . . With Children,” and Homer Simpson, who epitomized stereotypes of the working-class man as “crude, overweight, incompetent, clumsy, thoughtless and a borderline alcoholic” (to quote Wikipedia).1 He works as an inspector at a nuclear power plant, his laziness an ever-present danger to the environment.

  With rare exceptions—Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics come immediately to mind—this offensive portrait reigns today. It’s unbecoming for a country that prides itself on a commitment to equality.

  An entire book—a different one than mine—could seek to explain why this shift occurred. But the upshot is simply this: during an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the white working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked. The typical white working-class household income doubled in the three decades after World War II but has not risen appreciably since.2 The death rate for white working-class men—and women—aged 45-54 increased substantially between 1993 and 2013, a reversal from the decades before. In 1970, only a quarter of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 10%; by 2000, 40% did.3

  In an era when the economic fortunes of the white working class plummeted, elites wrote off their anger as racism, sexism, nativism—beneath our dignity to take seriously. This has led us to politics polarized by working-class fury. “We’re voting with our middle finger,” said a Trump supporter in South Carolina.4 If Trump fails to rejuvenate Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio—and he probably will—things could turn even uglier. That’s saying a lot.

  This book focuses on the class comprehension gap that is allowing the United States (and Europe) to drift toward authoritarian nationalism. To be clear, I do not focus on hollow-eyed towns gutted by unemployment and the opioid epidemic, or despair deaths of white men with high school educations or less.5 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. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss “the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,”6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites.

  I don’t like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened.

  A few words about me. Nearly 40 years ago, I married a class migrant: someone who has moved from one class to another. My husband was born in a blue-collar family but then went to Harvard Law School. Myself, I’m a silver spoon girl, born and bred. My WASP father was from an affluent family that made its money in Chicago before returning home to Vermont. My mother was the German Jewish daughter of a well-known reform rabbi. I grew up in Princeton, went to Yale College, Harvard Law School, and MIT, and have been a law professor for nearly 40 years. I now live in San Francisco.

  I still remember how, at 16, I fell madly in love with an Italian boy from Queens. I traveled to New York City from my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, every weekend to go out with him, staying with my beloved grandmother on the Upper East Side. When he finally took me home to Bay Ridge for dinner, it didn’t go well. His father seemed to hate me. His reaction: “She looked at us like a fucking anthropologist.” I was cut to the quick, because it was so true.

  The working class doesn’t want to be examined like some tribe in a faraway land. They don’t want the kind of pious solicitude the wealthy offer to the poor. (Perhaps the poor 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.

  In the half-century since that painful dinner in Bay Ridge, I’ve come to understand that analyzing any group is best handled with extreme caution. And even then, it can easily leave the analyzed feeling condescended to. Empathy—something well-heeled and well-intentioned liberals often call for as a way to cross the class divide—often reads as condescension. The hidden injuries of class are like a sunburn: even a gentle touch can make you jump with outrage
d pain.

  But we have to try. Or we will keep making the same mistakes that have helped foster the populist, anti-establishment anger that welled up in the 2016 election. A good place to start is with the common working-class phrase: “Born on third base; thinks he hit a triple.” Elites often pride ourselves on merit, and point out we work very hard. But so do hotel housekeepers. Let’s not forget that.

  Does renewed attention to the white working class mean we should shift away from identity politics in favor of a “post-identity liberalism”?8 That’s a silly idea: politics is always about identity, no less so for Donald Trump than Jesse Jackson. One of the goals of this book is to help broaden the conversation of identity to more deftly include class.

  I’ve arranged the book around the kinds of questions people tend to ask me, in blunt, private moments. Questions like, “Why doesn’t the working class get with it and go to college?” and “Why don’t they just move to where the jobs are?”

  This book stems from a Harvard Business Review essay I started on election night when I realized that Trump was about to win the presidency. That essay, parts of which have been woven into this book, has now been read millions of times, and I’ve received hundreds of comments and emails about it, many from people who had never written an author before. It was positively received by policymakers both on the left and on the right. Some of what they shared with me I’ve quoted in this book.† I have heard from people in Sweden, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Ireland, and Chile telling me that my comments about the U.S. white working class also describe something going on in their countries.

  A friend wrote, “My working-class family expected Trump to win and for the most part, are quite hopeful about his presidency. My professional-class in-laws have written several emails about their immense grief over Clinton’s loss. . . . I have found the difference in reactions astounding—and I think your article explains the reasons for it perfectly.” I hope this book will help, too.

  †Comments from the HBR website have a star (*). All comments are attributed using the handles used online. Quotations without citations are from personal emails or from conversations in which the person asked not to be identified. All quotations are used with permission.

  CHAPTER 2

  Who Is the Working Class?

  PRESUMABLY ON THE THEORY that no tree falls if no ear hears it, Americans curry a convenient deafness when it comes to class. A central way we make class disappear is to describe virtually everyone as “middle class.” A recent Bloomberg story quoted an amusement park worker earning $22,000 a year and a lawyer with an annual income of $200,000, both calling themselves middle class.9

  I still remember my shock when a close friend, a professor married to a partner in a major D.C. law firm, referred to herself as middle class. At the time, she undoubtedly belonged to the top 1%. And that lawyer who earns $200,000 a year? His income places him in the top 6% of American earners.10 The working class is wise to such people: to working-class minds, lawyers (and doctors and bankers) aren’t middle class. They are simply rich.

  Objectively, the working class has a much better claim to middle-class standing. This becomes clearer when we seek out empirical data. In a study I coauthored with economist Heather Boushey of the Center for Equitable Growth, we defined Americans who are neither rich nor poor as those with household incomes above the bottom 30% but below the top 20%; then we added families with higher incomes but no college graduate.11 This is the middle 53% of American families: the true middle class. As of 2015, these families had incomes ranging from $41,005 to $131,962. Their median income was $75,144. 12 At the high end are married families of, for example, a radiation therapist (median pay $70,010)13 and a police officer (median pay $60,270).14

  I had a lively discussion with my editor about what to call various groups in this book. I wanted to call the group in the middle the middle class, because, well, they are. My editor wisely pointed out that readers would be confused by that, if “middle class” is a term that we all use to describe ourselves regardless of whether it reflects reality. So I agreed to call those Americans in the middle—the ones who are neither rich nor poor—the “working class.” But as part of the deal, I got to refer to the people at the top as an “elite.” It’s not a term many Americans are comfortable with, but if you are part of the professional-managerial class, well, you’re an elite. Who composes this group? Americans with household incomes in the top 20% and at least one member who is a college graduate. The 2015 median income of such families was $173,175. Roughly 16.65% of American households fit this definition of the professional-managerial elite (PME).15

  One reason the terms here are confusing is that when progressives use the phrase “the working class,” they’re often (though not always) using it as a euphemism for “poor.” But the poor—in the bottom 30% of American families—are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle of the income distribution. With a median household income (in 2015) of $22,500,16 low-income families typically have different family structures, different types of jobs, and different political beliefs from Americans in the middle. Only 12% of Trump voters have incomes below $30,000 a year—and Republicans are relatively rare among this group—something that bumps up the median income of Trump voters overall.17

  Americans’ failure to share a language to talk about class can leave us literally speechless on the topic. Or just plain wrong. Consider an influential article on the well-known website FiveThirtyEight in May 2016 titled, “The Mythology of Trump’s Working Class Support.” “It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a ‘working-class’ rebellion against Republican elites,” wrote Nate Silver. “His voters are better off economically compared with most Americans.” While conceding “elements of truth” to the view that the working class was going for Trump, Silver attempted to disprove it by pointing out that the median income of Trump primary voters was $72,000, well above the national median of $56,000. But a household income of $72,000 is just a bit below the median working-class income, assuming you’re using that term to refer to “working class” as neither rich nor poor.18

  After the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight gradually caught on. For statisticians, the best simple proxy for class is education. The strongest indicator of a Trump victory was a concentration of high-school-educated voters. Clinton’s margin surged in the 50 most-educated counties and “collapsed” in the 50 least-educated, as compared with Obama’s.19

  Class cluelessness afflicts politicians as well as pundits. When progressive policymakers talk about guaranteeing things like paid sick leave or a higher minimum wage, they often frame them as issues that would help “working families.” But neither offers what my father-in-law had: a steady job that yielded his vision of a middle-class life. That’s what the working class still wants.

  The reason I (and, increasingly, analysts at data-driven places like FiveThirtyEight) don’t define class solely with reference to income is that class is not just about money. Nor is class an abiding characteristic of individuals. As I’ll explain, it’s more like a cultural tradition that people riff off as they shape their everyday behavior and make sense of their lives. And so to better understand the white working class, readers in the elite will need to understand not only the parochial folkways of the white working class. They will also need to understand their own assumptions and truths as parochial folkways—traditions, behaviors, and ways of life—that make no sense to the white working class, because they make no sense outside the context of elite lives.

  CHAPTER 3

  Why Does the Working Class Resent the Poor?

  REMEMBER WHEN PRESIDENT OBAMA sold Obamacare by constantly stressing that it delivered health care to 20 million people? To many in the working class, this made it sound like just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor. And in some cases that’s proved true: the poor got health insurance, while some Americans just a tiny bit better off
saw their premiums rise.20

  Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century, devising social programs targeting them. Because America is particularly testy about the kinds of taxes that many European countries take for granted, these programs are not universal. Instead, they are limited to those below a certain income level, which means they exclude those just a notch above. This is a recipe for class conflict.

  Is it any wonder the working class feels “totally forgotten,” to quote Annette Norris?* “I raised three children on [$40,000 a year]. . . . But we didn’t get any assistance because we did not qualify.” Annette is not wrong, or alone: although about 30% of poor families using center-based child care receive subsidies, subsidies are largely nonexistent for the middle class.21 My sister-in-law worked full time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from the local mall. My sister-in-law was livid.

  J. D. Vance’s much-heralded Hillbilly Elegy captures this resentment.22 Hard-living families like that of his mother live alongside settled families like that of his biological father. While the hard-living succumb to despair, drugs, or alcohol, settled families keep to the straight and narrow, like my parents-in-law, who owned their home and sent both sons to college. To accomplish that, they lived a life of rigorous thrift and self-discipline. Vance’s book passes harsh judgment on his hard-living relatives and neighbors, which is not uncommon among people from families who kept their nose clean through sheer force of will.23