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

by Mark Cuban

  Understanding working-class resentment of the poor needs to begin by looking at everyday life for working-class Americans of all races. Their rigid, highly supervised jobs often are boring, repetitive, or both, which makes the work psychologically challenging: think of medical technicians, factory workers, bus drivers. Men’s jobs, and some women’s, are physically demanding: consider construction workers, long-haul truck drivers, physicians’ assistants. Women’s jobs—in nursing, customer service, managing small stores—can be emotionally demanding, too.

  Job demands are compounded by those of child care. Many couples tag team, with parents working different shifts to minimize child care costs. Here’s what that looks like:

  Mike drives a cab and I work in a hospital, so we figure one of us could transfer to nights. We talked it over and decided it would be best if I was here during the day and he was here at night. He controls the kids, especially my son, better than I do. So now Mike works day and I work graveyard. I hate it, but it’s the only answer: at least this way somebody’s here all the time. I get home at 8:30 in the morning. The kids and Mike are gone. I clean up the house a little, do the shopping and the laundry and whatever, then I go to sleep for a couple of hours before the kids get home from school. Mike gets home at 5, we eat, then he takes over for the night, and I go back to sleep for a couple of hours. I try to get up at 9:00 so we can have a little time together, but I’m so tired that I don’t make it a lot of times. And by 10:00, he’s sleeping because he has to get up at 6:00 in the morning. It’s hard, it’s very hard. There’s no time to live or anything.24

  That’s the face of working-class life today. Not easy. And it shouldn’t be surprising that many—women as well as men—look back with nostalgia to their parents’ generation, when women worked only intermittently or part time.

  Working-class people may not know the exact statistics, but they understand the differences between their families and those of the poor. Poor married mothers (60%) are more than twice as likely to be at home full time as married mothers in the middle (23%). Nearly 60% of working-class mothers work full time; only 42% of poor moms do. In families with children in center care, 30% of poor families get subsidies; very few working-class families do (about 3%).25

  I know, but only because I study such things, that child care subsidies for the poor are sporadic and pathetically low (sometimes $2.00 an hour).26 I know that poor moms stay home because the minimum wage is so low they would lose money by working. And that poor men have trouble finding full-time work because part-time jobs allow employers to avoid paying health insurance.

  Mike’s family doesn’t know any of that, or if they do, they may not care. All they see is their stressed-out daily lives, and they resent the subsidies and sympathy available to the poor. This resentment reflects the realities of working-class lives combined with a woeful lack of graduate-level training in policy analysis. (Joke.)

  For working-class Americans, maintaining two full-time jobs and a settled life is a significant achievement, one that takes unrelenting drive and rigorous self-discipline. So when asked what traits they admire, both black and white working-class Americans mention moral traits, in contrast to elites, who derive self-worth more from merit than morality.† Working-class whites like “people who care,” “who are clean,” “not disruptive,” “stand-up kind of people.” They dislike “irresponsible people who live for the moment.” The values most admired are “honesty,” “being responsible,” “having integrity,” and “being hardworking.” Those most despised are “dishonesty,” “being irresponsible,” and “being lazy” (see Table 1).27

  “My father made a religion of responsibility,” noted the son of a bricklayer who became a reporter; his father had “a well-developed work ethic, the kind that gets you up early and keeps you locked in until the job is done, regardless of how odious or personally distasteful the task.”28 “Sometimes I wish I could be more carefree,” a printer told Michèle Lamont, the sociologist who wrote the single best book on working-class Americans. “And then I say no, I like the way I am . . . I like people who are responsible.”29 Makes sense: if he were a free spirit, he might soon be homeless. So he’s disciplined and looks down on “hard-living” people who aren’t.

  For an example of “hard living,” we can look to Vance’s mother. She falls into addiction and has serious impulse-control issues and a series of unsavory boyfriends. Vance was raised chiefly by his grandmother, a classic pattern in hard-living families. His father, who plays a minor role in the book and his life, represents “settled living”: he owns “a modest house,” has a stable marriage and a family life of “an almost jarring serenity.” He doesn’t drink and runs a highly religious family with strict rules of behavior. Vance didn’t want to live with him, because Led Zeppelin was not accepted. Vance escaped his mother’s hard-living life by joining the military, which gave him what his upbringing failed to provide. For kids from hard-living families, the military provides a reset button—a proxy for being brought up in a stable and ordered environment.30

  TABLE 1

  Dimensions of morality most salient to white and black workers and to professionals and managers

  Source: The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration by Michèle Lamont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, copyright © 2000 by the Russell Sage Foundation).

  +Frequent

  ++Very frequent

  A study of California’s Central Valley found that in settled-living families, typically both parents are high school graduates, with at least one stable job between them and health insurance.31 They maintain strict control over their children and expect them to finish high school,32 keep their nose clean, and not run wild. The working class values responsibility “because they are highly dependent on the actions of others. . . . The physical conditions in which they work and live and their limited financial resources make it difficult for them to buffer themselves from the actions of neighbors, coworkers, kin, and friends,” notes Lamont.33 A friend from Atlanta remarks, “Why did people vote for Trump? All they want is a three-bedroom, two-bath cinderblock house. But now they’re losing those homes.” The working class worries that opportunities for a settled life are slipping away.

  Maria Kefalas’s study of working-class Chicago described houses set very close together, with “elaborate lawn decorations, manicured grass, color-coordinated kitchens, [and] American-made cars.”34 And owners house-proud and insistent on upkeep; “[m]uch more is at stake than dust bunnies.”35 Well-kept homes are “an outward manifestation of work ethics,”36 notes Jennifer Sherman’s study of a rural community in California.

  The professional elite also values hard work, of course—but it’s different. To working-class members of all races, valuing hard work means having the rigid self-discipline to do a menial job you hate for 40 years, and reining yourself in so you don’t “have an attitude” (i.e., so that you can submit to authority). Hard work for elites is associated with self-actualization; “disruption” means founding a successful start-up. Disruption, in working-class jobs, just gets you fired.

  Free spirits born working class can’t count on the second chances available to elites. That’s why blue-collar families are so big on stability and self-discipline, and they embrace institutions that support these traits. Chief among these is religion. The devout have greater impulse control and “tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.”37 “Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.”38 Churchgoing can also provide a financial safety net: when Vance’s father had financial troubles, people in his church bought him a used car so he could get back on his feet.39

  And going to church regularly is not just correlated with good actions; it seems to prompt people to be their best selves.40 One class migra
nt recalled her struggles in high school: “Learnedness itself was suspect, and making a display of learning was simply not done; in school as elsewhere, the worst failure of character was to get a ‘swelled head.’ You could do intellectual work, though, if you called it something else. We called it religion.”41 For many in the working class, churches provide the kind of mental exercise, stability, hopefulness, future orientation, impulse control, and social safety net many in the professional elite get from their families, their career potential, their therapists, and their bank accounts.

  Tea Party members believe the “federal government was taking money from . . . people of good character and giving to people of bad character,”42 found a 2016 study. Researchers have found the same belief time and again. Means-tested programs inadvertently set the “have-a-littles” against the “have-nots,” noted an Italian lawyer interviewed by Jonathan Rieder in his 1985 book.43 In his high school job at a grocery, Vance “learned how people gamed the welfare system.” They’d buy sodas with food stamps and then sell them, or use food stamps for food and their own money for beer, wine, and cigarettes. He’d see them going through the checkout lines using cell phones. How could they afford cell phones? “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle,” wrote Vance of his own family, “while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”44

  Government benefits tied to work are seen quite differently. Unemployment is seen “as income that a person deserves and has basically worked for.” Disability is seen as symbolizing past hard, dangerous work. In sharp contrast, means-tested benefits were stigmatized. In rural California, Sherman found that food stamps and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) triggered “strong social disgrace.” One family drove an hour or more from home to use their food stamps when the husband was unemployed. “I don’t want to be considered lazy or a freeloader or something like that,” the wife explained. “You want people to think you’re a hard worker—and, you know, we pride ourselves on that,” she added. The stigma associated with welfare and food stamps has concrete economic consequences. In the community Sherman studied, only those in good moral standing were considered for the few cherished job openings. Those without good moral standing also jeopardized their access to community-level charity.45

  I spoke with Lisa McCorkell, who worked as a financial counselor, who told me, “When I spoke with working-class people across the country about their financial issues, whether it be crippling debt, impending foreclosure, unemployment, or all three, I found that they were much more likely than the poor to reject the government benefits they were eligible for, at least until it was absolutely necessary to survive. They saw it as an affront to their dignity. I heard so often things like, ‘I don’t want a government handout; I can do this on my own.’ So even when they were aware of the government benefits they were entitled to, they did not accept them.”

  When it comes to attitudes toward government programs, working-class African-Americans differ from whites in an important way: African-Americans understand the structural nature of inequality. Working-class African-Americans are more like the French (and unlike white working-class Americans) in their nonjudgmental “there but for the grace of God go I” attitude toward the poor, and their felt need for solidarity.46

  All this explains why Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president to truly understand the white working class, ended “welfare as we know it.” He understood it was political poison to allow poor women to remain stay-at-home moms while Mike’s family tag-teamed its way to exhaustion. What went deeply wrong was that the replacement TANF program failed to provide the kind of support necessary for working families. By 2006, in poor familes, 7.5% of children aged 5–8 were home alone; nearly 14% of kids 9–11 were.47

  If America’s policymakers better understood white working-class anger against the social safety net, they might have a shot at creating programs that don’t get gutted in this way. Far from abandoning the poor, we’d be doing a better job of helping them.

  †Lamont’s study gives percentages of the white (and black) working class who embrace the dominant values. To make the text more readable throughout this book, I have made blanket statements that actually reflect tendencies, not absolutes.

  CHAPTER 4

  Why Does the Working Class Resent Professionals but Admire the Rich?

  MEMBERS OF THE ELITE tend to assume that working-class people want to join their ranks. This is not always true.

  Professionals aren’t necessarily admired. Many are seen as suspect. Managers are seen as college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything, but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job.”48 Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters . . . and professors were without exception phonies.”49 Sociologist Annette Lareau also found mistrust of doctors and other health professionals. She also found resentment against teachers by working-class parents, who perceived their children’s educators as condescending and unhelpful50—a resentment that perhaps fuels working-class support for conservatives’ assault on teachers’ unions.51

  However, this resentment of professionals does not extend to the rich. “There’s an almost mystical desire among the working class to see a rich person from the upper class reach out to them,” commented class migrant Eric Sansoni* (remember, a class migrant is someone who starts in one class but moves to another—in this case, out of the working class and into a professional job). “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told Lamont. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk.52 “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” said a machine operator. The ideal is to own a business. “The dream of self-employment is one expression of class consciousness, not a denial of it,” noted an influential book on class.53

  Daily life reinforces admiration of the rich but resentment of professionals. Most working-class people have little contact with the truly rich outside of “The Apprentice” or “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” but they suffer class affronts from professionals every day: the doctor who unthinkingly patronizes the medical technician, the harried office worker who treats the security guard as invisible, the overbooked business traveler who snaps at the TSA agent.

  Remember: class isn’t just about money. Everything we do is class-marked. Especially today. Although my family was wealthy, my mom shopped at Sears and the A&P, I went to public school, and everyone watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Today, the professional elite sends their kids to private schools, shops at Whole Foods, and reads Slate instead of watching Fox. Floods of ink cover the increased segmentation of the American media market, but almost no one makes the obvious point that the segmentation is shaped by social class. My circle of friends would no more send a Hallmark card than eat at TGI Friday’s. We all know what’s classy, though we wouldn’t be so gauche as to admit it.

  Or consider coffee, a daily part of most Americans’ lives. When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were two kinds of coffee: decent and burnt. But over the past 30 years, a class structure of coffee has emerged. In the Rust Belt city where my in-laws live, you still go to Dunkin’ Donuts for a good cup. Not where I live in San Francisco: it’s all local coffee shops, with pour-overs starting at $6 a cup. And what of Starbucks? As Starbucks has democratized, and its drinks made sweeter and fattier, my PME friends wouldn’t think of setting foot in a Starbucks. Seeking to recapture that market, the ubiquitous chain recently announced a new premium coffee for $12 a cup.54

  Not only the mundane is class-marked. So is the sublime. Among the elite, we proudly announce we are “spiritual but not religious” and invent some unique blend. Developing one’s own personal mélange of world religions reflects our taste for novelty and our penchant for sel
f-development. Conventional religion? So down market.

  Looking down on religion is a commonplace form of modern snobbery. I think it’s silly. Personally, I don’t believe in God but I do believe in religion. Religion helps me sit quietly, listening to beautiful music, among a group of people trying to be their best selves. I’m offended by the likes of Richard Dawkins—so dismissive of sincerely held beliefs.55 Some believe God exists, while others see religion as a metaphorical structure that gives shape to their deepest aspirations and griefs. Ontological questions don’t interest me.

  Why do elites seek out novelty while the working class seeks out stability? For one thing, elites can afford it—star fruit costs more than bananas—but there’s more to it than that. The elite gains social honor by displaying their sophistication; the white working class has different fish to fry.

  The contrast is most vivid at dinner parties. Anthropologist Arlie Hochschild, for her book Strangers in Their Own Land, traveled to Louisiana where she interviewed and got to know locals who identified as members of the Tea Party. For Hochschild’s Tea Party friends, a good party typically consisted of extended family getting together for “steaming roast beef, gravy, potatoes, okra, green beans, corn bread, and sweetened ice tea”56—large portions of familiar favorites and familiar faces, signaling comforting stability. For my crowd, a good party means a day of intensive cooking, often not for people we know well already, but for “people we’d like to know better.” What’s on display? Novelty is meant to signal sophistication; cultural capital, sociologists would call it. It’s important to impress, all the more so because the dinner party often serves a work purpose as well as a social one; it’s designed to cement relationships that will be helpful in developing a career—colleagues or potential clients or customers.

  If food and religion are deep class divides, so is the role of talk. Elite families talk with their children far more than non-elite ones do.57 “While working-class people are not without self-insight and concern about their inward states, nevertheless they are not typically occupied with their ‘innards’ on the scale of the middle class,” noted a class migrant, now a professor.58 J. D. Vance tried going to a therapist but “talking with some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit.”59 This response also reflects the high value placed on privacy, on not “spilling your guts.” Noted one class migrant who grew up in North Dakota, “In my family, a conversation about one’s work typically consumed only six words. (‘How was your day?’ ‘Oh, fine.’) Speaking otherwise, in detail or with enthusiasm, was to risk display of the dreaded swelled head.”60 So much for discussing that amazing book you’re reading.