by Mark Cuban
She also spoke with a man in Washington, whose “dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there’d been a mill for [the son] to go back to work in, he says, he’d have done that too.” But the mill had closed, so the son went on disability. In his 50s, he went to lots of meetings about retraining programs, but finally a staff member pulled him aside and advised: “There’s nobody gonna hire you. . . . Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you’re on your own.” The system lacks incentives for retraining and disincentives for relocation. It has become “a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills,” Joffe-Walt concluded, that consigns them to permanent poverty. It pays $13,000 a year. “Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work.”228
Yes, I get the irony: the white working class is outraged about welfare but benefiting from a different welfare program themselves. If we actually had a robust industrial policy and effective job retraining, we’d be far better off. But we also need something else: a new public understanding of government programs and who benefits from them.
One reason working-class whites associate the government only with subsidies for the poor is that many subsidies for the middle class are submerged—visible only to policy specialists (I learned this in grad school at MIT). These include the mortgage interest deduction, student loans, and tax exemptions for retirement and health benefits. In 2007, the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction cost taxpayers four times as much as Section 8 public housing subsidies,229 but knowing that is the province of specialists.
Many Americans don’t even know that Medicare is a federal program. A man stood up at a 2009 town hall held by Rep. Robert Inglis (R-SC) and told him to “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Inglis politely explained, “Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.’” Inglis told the Huffington Post, “But he wasn’t having any of it.”230 Similarly, when Trump took office, some celebrated the repeal of “Obamacare,” which they saw as a government welfare program, not realizing it was the same as the “Affordable Care Act.”231
Whose fault is that?
Conservatives have engaged in a sustained, decades-long effort to popularize negative attitudes toward government. They have been tragically successful. Only 19% of Americans say they can trust government always or most of the time, which is among the lowest levels in the past half century. Only 20% say government programs are well run. But when asked about programs one by one, Americans see a major role for government not only in keeping the country safe from terrorism (94%) and responding to natural disasters (88%) but also in ensuring safe food and medicine (87%), protecting the environment (75%), strengthening the economy (74%), and setting workplace standards (66%).232
How do those attitudes fit together? When Arlie Hochschild traveled to Louisiana to find out why Tea Party members were so hostile to government in one of the most polluted regions in the world, she found—no surprise—that hostility to government was fueled by programs for the poor. Nationwide, only 36% of Republicans say government should have a major role in addressing poverty.233
Publicizing to working-class Americans how they themselves benefit from government programs needs to be a major priority. Not just for liberals: my sense is that many moderate conservatives now feel that hostility to government has gone too far. We need a bipartisan campaign to educate the American public about the positive roles that government plays in their lives. There are two major themes that will appeal to the white working class (and many others): keeping them safe and ensuring economic stability.
Both white and black working-class men see protecting their families as a key part of keeping their world in moral order (see Table 1).234 Governments help them do this. Local and state governments supply police and firefighters, who protect their homes and families. The federal government protects citizens through the military and FBI. State and federal environmental agencies protect citizens from toxins and pollution. The Food and Drug Administration ensures food safety, which is no mean feat, and protects us from unsafe drugs.235 The Federal Trade Commission protects against identity theft and against those scammers who swindle grandmas. All this we take for granted; it makes news only when an agency messes up.
Federal and state governments also ensure economic stability for working-class families. Thanks to Social Security,236 Medicare,237 and (through Obamacare) prescription drug benefits,238 the elderly have the lowest poverty rate of any age group. (Children have the highest poverty rate.239)
Another fruitful theme is the way the federal government has helped make the United States uniquely prosperous and innovative. Nearly two-thirds of Americans own their homes thanks to the FHA, Fannie Mae, and other entities that are run, or were founded and nurtured, by the federal government.240 Our scientists make breakthroughs important for people throughout the world, due to support from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. The Agricultural Research Service developed strains of super-grains that have helped the poor the world over escape starvation, and the Cooperative Extension Service gives America’s extraordinarily productive farmers the know-how they need to produce abundant food.
Two-thirds of Americans say government has a negative effect on the ways things are going in this country. But 56% believe the same thing about large corporations.241 This suggests a potentially useful theme for people interested in restoring faith in government. Americans need government to protect them against overweening corporate power. Without the federal government, bankers would refuse affordable loans to working-class kids for college, and to vets who want to get an education or buy homes. Without government supervision, insurance companies refused to give health insurance to hardworking Americans with preexisting conditions. And banks jacked up secret fees until the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau required the banks to pay them back.242
The appetite for a fairer playing field is out there. Arlie Hochschild found that Louisiana Tea Party members were also outraged by what scholars call “regulatory capture”—when regulators become more favorable to the industries they’re supposed to be overseeing than the ordinary people they’re supposed to be protecting. Said a Tea Partier, “The health unit came down on my nephew for not keeping his hogs away from the bad water, but they didn’t do nothing about the bad water.” Said another, “The state always seems to come down on the little guy” while letting large corporations off the hook. Notes Hochschild, “It was becoming easier to understand why energy refugees were so furious at the state government.”243 (By energy refugees, she means Louisianans driven out of their homes due to pollution or other externalized costs of local energy industries.)
Yes, government regulation can be a pain. If you run a small business, which many working-class people do, regulations can pose a bewildering series of hoops you have to jump through, administered by those professionals the working class often resents. And corporations will always loudly blame government regulation for an unpopular product (energy-efficient lightbulbs) or to deflect attention from corporate failures. Americans are going to hear, and experience first-hand, ways in which government regulation is vexing. But this makes it all the more important to have a counter-narrative. Because if we have none, well, then there’s no counter-narrative. People will only see the downside of regulation and not the upside.
There’s another counter-narrative to the “common knowledge” that the government screws up everything. The military, a highly respected institution among working-class whites, does a good job of providing many services that government supposedly cannot provide well, notably child care.244 (Alas, the waiting time fiascos at the VA are not helping the agency’s reputation.)
It will take a sustained effort to change Americans’ attitude toward government—but then it took a long time to get where we are today.245 Millions of dollars have been spent teaching Americans to distrust their government. It’s time for some spending to poi
nt out all the ways government at every level, and particularly the federal government, helps the have-a-littles, not just the have-nots. Changing working-class attitudes will require a mind shift for progressives whose instinct has been to highlight the benefits of government help for the poor. Again, that strategy only hurts the poor—and everyone else—in the long run.
A little information goes a long way. Mettler describes a 2007 study in which Americans were given information about which groups benefited from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Afterwards, 68% of respondents said that the program should be expanded.246 (It’s important to remember that the EITC helps families who are working. I doubt the same result would have been reached if people were asked about TANF and food stamps.)
Mettler argues against tax expenditures—subsidies delivered through the tax code—and for direct government provisioning. She also suggests redesigning government procedures that make government subsides more salient. I think it was great that the Obama administration shifted student loans away from banks to the government,247 and that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been active in advocating on students’ behalf.248 But tax expenditures and privatization are here to stay, alas, because both make it easier to assemble a legislative coalition.249
A while back, I floated the idea of an internet campaign modeled on the highly influential “It Gets Better” Project, in which people post short videos about their own lives designed to reassure gay youth that they have a future worth living for. I proposed to have Americans make short videos of their daily lives, thanking the government for some service or benefit that makes those lives possible—highways, the internet, sewer systems, schools, etc., and ending with the phrase, “Thank you, Uncle Sam!” No funding’s come through yet, but I still think this has potential.250
The final thing we need to do is reinstitute civics. When I was growing up, everyone took a civics course. It gave a distinctly celebratory view of American institutions: the Constitution and separation of powers, the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom of speech and religion, the presumption of innocence, and trial by jury. By the time I got to college, the new social history shifted to social movements and oppressed groups. That shaped the way American school children are taught history. Celebrating our democracy went out of fashion.
When Trump railed that he was going to put Hillary in jail, that didn’t sound un-American to many voters. Having a president summarily jail a defeated opponent violates separation of powers, trial by jury, and the presumption of innocence. The fact that more voters were not repulsed by Trump’s statements is linked, I believe, to the demise of civics. It’s time to bring back the teaching of American values. We can do so without descending into jingoism or nationalism.
I have devoted my life to gender and race issues; I’m not suggesting that we abandon the social history curriculum completely. But we need to make sure all Americans know not only the ways our system has failed but also the ways it’s succeeded—if progressives want to keep the social gains we’ve made in the past 50 years.
Part of the reason I’m convinced that we can improve Americans’ views of government is because patriotism is so important to the white working class. J. D. Vance notes that his grandmother “always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else we knew.”251 Patriotism is out of fashion in the PME, especially among liberals, but remains robust in working-class circles. Being American is one of the only high-status categories they belong to.252 We all stress the high-status social categories we belong to. I remember discussing this with a feminist friend, who smiled as she recalled showing up at an important job interview “dripping with pearls.”253 She may have been a less plausible candidate as a woman, but she made sure her prospective employers knew she was connected to the kind of people who bought pearls. Lots of them.
CHAPTER 13
Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values and Allies?
“SHOULD THE PARTY continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?” asked The New York Times.254 In anxious emails with my friends, the most common fears are that all the talk about the white working class will come at the expense of groups who have been at the center of the progressive imagination: people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, women. A class migrant who made a career as a partner in a large law firm wrote that after Trump’s election, her younger brother and others were “thrilled that they do not need to be PC in public anymore.” When she got “very upset,” her brother said, “boy, you really do live in a very different world.”
My strongest message is this: business-as-usual isn’t working. Is the LGBTQ community better off with Jeff Sessions as attorney general, who as a senator received a 0% rating from the Human Rights Campaign?255 Are people of color better off with a president who was endorsed by the official newspaper of the KKK?256 Are immigrants better off with a president who has described them as criminals and rapists? Are women better off in a world with a president that sexually assaults women and brags about it?
This is where class cluelessness has brought us.
It’s inaccurate to assume that connecting with working-class whites necessarily entails abandoning progressives’ traditional allies. Take people of color. In the 2016 election, communities of color split. Only 8% of African-Americans voted for Trump, but 29% of Latinos did,257 and the Hispanic voting bloc keeps expanding.258 Why did almost a third of Latinos vote for Trump, more than voted for Romney in 2012?
Many Latinos are “values voters,” offended by the shock-the-bourgeois avant-garde element of elite culture. “For many Hispanic Americans, the cultural changes of the past 15 years have been very hard. Trump, for many, is a return to the mother’s womb,” said Roberto Rodríguez Tejera, who runs a Spanish-language talk show in South Florida. Some Latino citizens fear that undocumented immigrants will take their jobs; roughly a quarter of Latinos favor Trump’s wall. Polls show that Latino voters care about many of the issues the white working class cares about, notably jobs and terrorism.259 Learning how to talk respectfully with the white working class will help Democrats reach Latino voters, too.
Ending class cluelessness also would help Democrats better connect with working-class black people. Working-class black people share with professional-class liberals the view that social disadvantage is deeply structural, but in most ways they are more similar to working-class whites. When sociologist Michèle Lamont made a table comparing black and white working-class men, most values overlapped: Hardworking, Responsible, Providing, Protecting, Personal Integrity, Straightforwardness/Sincerity, and Traditional Morality (see Table 1).
The guiding principles of the progressive coalition reflect what the PME wants, not what the broad range of African-Americans want. Wrote a friend, “The truth is most blacks are pretty conservative socially—something that is seldom discussed. But I think our history is such that while we may not support abortion, LGBT and other social issues, we believe that liberals will hurt us less than other groups. Sad but true.”
Ending class cluelessness will also help a small but important group of people of color: class migrants. While on a book tour in 2010, I discussed how education can drive a painful wedge between upwardly mobile class migrants and their families. The students who came up to me after my talks at universities, some in tears, were chiefly students of color. “No one’s ever recognized this about me,” was the general sentiment. Of course, if you think about it, many students of color at elite schools are undergoing the angst-filled process of choosing between the traditions of their families and those of the professional elite. Ending class cluelessness will make it easier for class migrants of all races to get their share of the American dream.
Many challenges lie ahead, including tensions between the goals and values of the white worki
ng class and the existing progressive coalition. Let’s begin with an important principle: a coalition is not a mind meld. We can work together without agreeing on every single thing.
During one of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, I went to help get out the vote for the Democratic candidate in Ohio, where substantial tensions existed between African-Americans and the LGBTQ community. Many black churches were urging voters to vote against ordinances prohibiting discrimination against gays. Democrats, of course, did not throw black voters out of their coalition because many are social conservatives. The party supported both gay rights and African-American rights. In Ohio, we did not back down from gay rights. But neither did we rub gay rights in African-Americans’ faces at every turn.
A coalition is like a family in two ways. First, it involves trading. If you get your way on this, I’ll get my way on that. That’s the glue that keeps a coalition together. A coalition’s like a family in another way, too. We need to cut one another some slack. When you show up for Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t shove your political views down Aunt Josie’s throat; that would signal to her that you don’t value your relationship with her. And it would signal to your family that you don’t value your relationship with them.
I recognize that it’s hard to cut anyone slack when what you’re arguing about is perceived as a human rights issue. This is true in the abortion debate (for both sides); the debates over LGBTQ rights; the debates over race and religion and gender and so many other debates in American life today. While framing these debates as human rights issues has been effective in many ways, it has also come at a cost. Human rights rhetoric was invented originally as a language to communicate that genocide and crimes against humanity are always immoral.260 That’s what gave the rhetoric its “there’s no compromise possible here” tone and carried the message that human rights should always have top priority.
