Can the Left Win Back Working-Class Voters?
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Scott Schaefer in for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, is there a single shift in our politics that could protect democracy, move climate policy forward, address gun violence and rebuild trust in government?

Author Joan Williams argues, yes, but it'll take bridging America's deepening class divide. In her new book, Outclassed, Williams shows how cultural and class resentment, not just economic anxiety, is driving working class voters toward the far right. She says progressives often signal superiority without realizing it, alienating voters. We'll talk with Williams about what it would take to build a multiracial, cross-class coalition. That's next after this news.

This is Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer in for Mina Kim. Well, when it comes to voters in this country, stereotypes don't tell the whole story. For example, there are voters who drive pickup trucks with country music on the radio, who also quietly support Medicaid expansion. Voters whose policy instincts lean left, but whose cultural cues pull them to the right.

Author Joan C. Williams says this tension stems from a deepening cultural and class divide between college graduates and non-college voters, a diploma divide that's not just shifting American politics, but

helping power the far right. In her new book, Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Williams argues that liberals often alienate working class voters without meaning to through tone, language, and assumptions about merit and morality. She joins us to trace how we got here and talk about what it might take to close the gap. Joan Williams, welcome to the show.

Many thanks for the invitation, Scott. I'm a big fan of Political Breakdown. Oh, great. Good to know. I should also mention, by the way, that you are a distinguished professor of law emerita at UC Law San Francisco. And I want to begin by asking you for a definition. Like when you say working class, the working class, who are you talking about exactly?

Well, you know, it's a really confusing term because progressives, when they talk about the working class, often talk about the poor, low-income people, the bottom 30% of households. But when I talk about working class, it's really the middle class. It's really the middle 53% of Americans working.

And then when I talk about elites, it's the top 20% of Americans in households where there's at least one college grad. And really the class conflict that's driving politics both in Europe and the U.S. is the conflict between that middle, what I'm going to call the missing middle, and college-educated elites.

And describe it demographically. Is it racially diverse? Does it differ depending on where you are in the country in terms of the makeup and the details of who's in that group?

Boy, we could wonk out, Scott, but we would probably bore people to tears. You know, class is the only thing that is important in determining whom you vote for. Region is also important. But what has become really dazzlingly clear is that in the age of far-right populism, it's the diploma divide that's really driving politics today.

And I'll just give you a couple of examples. In the last three elections, Democrats gained in fewer than 2% of American counties, overwhelmingly wealthy counties. But Republicans gained in about half of counties. Again, triple trended. In each of the last three elections, these counties gained.

predominantly working class veered towards Republicans. And so Democrats have really become the party predominantly of college grads. And Republicans have the non-college grads. Yeah, and that is not the way things were. Certainly when I was growing up, it tended to be the more educated voters leaned Republican, while working class voters with high school degrees, no college education, tended to vote Democratic.

you know, union members, union households. Is there, when you look back on this, is there a year or a moment that you can describe where these sort of political tectonic plates began to shift?

Yeah, it's my generation of hippies. That's what we did. You know, I moved to San Francisco and I thought, like, finally I'd come home. So before, the New Deal coalition was really a coalition that centered the concerns of blue-collar families, chiefly blue-collar men. And

And then my generation came of age and we really shifted the attention of liberals away from blue-collar men onto issues that meant more to us, opposition to the war in Vietnam,

environmentalism, and then projects of racial and gender equality. So it began around 1970, where you had a real shift in the issues that the Democrats really considered the highest priority issues. And yet it does seem, I mean, you know, there were many elections, even where the Republican like George W. Bush was

got elected in 2000 over Al Gore. But, you know, Democrats were very competitive in many cases, you know, either won the popular vote or, you know, came close, kept the Republicans under 50 percent. I mean, that was Donald Trump this past election was different in that he did, you know, actually get more votes than Kamala Harris. And he got more. I think he just barely got half or more.

And so why is it that Democrats, in spite of what you just said, going back to 1970, you know, they elected a bunch of people president during that time. They held control of the House and often the Senate as well.

What we have is a very split electorate. But what has really gained my attention, and I think the attention, unfortunately, of all of us, is the success of far-right populism in the United States in the form of Donald Trump. That is really the...

ultimate peak of a strategy that began, oh, I don't know, when about 1980, where the merchant right, as Thomas Piketty calls them, like the top 1% economic elites, realized that they could forge an alliance with this missing middle over cultural issues, turning every battle, including climate change, into a culture war.

And so what you have is the top 1%, roughly, understood that there was a lot of anger in the country. And they could take that anger and make sure it wasn't expressed towards economic elites by focusing the anger on cultural elites. So the 1% decided they were going to focus the anger on the top 20%. And that is the dynamic that brought us to where we are today. Okay.

And give us an early example, like an issue where that worked well. Oh, you name it. I mean, this is a it's kind of the right as a one trick pony, but it's a very powerful trick. Climate change, which is, of course, a very important issue to me being kind of a typical typical San Francisco progressive. It began as a biosecurity.

bipartisan issue, Scott. I mean, President Nixon, if I remember correctly, signed the Clean Water Act. The Clean Air Act as well. And I think they formed the EPA under Nixon. Earth Day. All kinds of things. And then, again, the right figured out how to turn

environmentalism first and then climate change into a culture war, which means that the support for climate change initiatives are as lower in the U.S. than it is abroad, and it's much more starkly divided by class than it is in the U.S.,

For example, climate change and environmentalism and climate change are priorities one, two, and three of college grads. But they are priorities 14 and 17 among non-college grads.

And how much of that is the both the success of the right at, you know, kind of harnessing that issue to create resentment and how much of it is, you know, the fault of Democrats in the way they have talked about issues like climate change or gun gun violence, that kind of thing.

Unfortunately, I think it's a lot of both. But one of those we have control over as progressives and the other we don't. In climate change, first of all, we think about the language of climate deniers. And that reinforces the far right narrative that populism, it really consists of cultural elites looking down on you.

Because we're calling people stupid, right? And so the other thing that happened is that...

Rich people of all political persuasions began to use environmentalism as a way to signal social virtue. So I always think of like there's this amazing hotel, which I've never stayed at. It's too expensive in Mendocino. But it's like eco everything and it costs fifteen hundred dollars a night. So if you don't.

put your towel on the floor in that hotel, you are a very virtuous person because you have helped the environment. So all of this has made it very easy for the right to associate environmentalism with elitism.

and reinforce that populist anger of elites are looking down on you. How do we flip that? Well, instead of talking about climate deniers, tap really deep middle-class values. For example, patriotism. Non-college grads are much more patriotic than college grads are. And for a really simple reason, every group...

Yeah.

So it's really important to develop that class competence to understand that, you know, blue-collar values reflect blue-collar lives. And privilege values reflect very different lives. We need to be able to develop that.

what W.E.B. Du Bois called a double consciousness to understand how things look from our point of view and their point of view. So patriotism, for example, are we going to let China... China stole...

from us, something we invented, which is development of solar cells, is the same thing going to happen to EVs. That is an example of how you focus, how you connect with blue-collar values on the issue of climate change. And there are a lot of others.

Well, so many things that promote green energy, like electric vehicles, for example, are very expensive. I mean, they're not really within range of most working class folks' budget. So that also must kind of fuel this resentment. Absolutely. And you know the old joke that Whole Foods is called hold paycheck. Yeah, that's an old joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, Whole Foods. Yeah, no, and it's absolutely true that even things like forgiving student loans, which Democrats and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris talked about. I mean, if you didn't go to college...

That doesn't really appeal to you. So, you know, these are all I want to take. We're coming up on a break. But I do want to, you know, tick off some of these other kinds of issues in some ways. You mentioned patriotism, some other ways that Democrats can talk about issues that appeal to this so-called missing middle. We're going to continue our conversation with Joan Williams. She's a distinguished professor of law emerita at UC Law in San Francisco. Her book is called Outclassed.

how the left lost the working class. And we'd love to hear from you. What does working class mean to you? How do you define it? Which politicians speak best to working class values? Give us a call at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. Or you can reach us via email, forum at kqed.org or all the social media platforms, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer here this hour for Mina Kim. We're talking about how the left lost the middle class and what it would take to win back trust across the cultural and class divide. We're talking with Joan Williams, professor and founding director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco. Her book is titled Outclassed.

How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. And we would love to hear from you. You know, does what you're hearing so far this hour ring true with your own experience? Why or why not? Have you had a conversation across class or political divides? What did you learn? Email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Find us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, and Instagram. We're at kqedforum. Or you can give us a call right now at 866-866-8666.

733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786. You know, Joan, I think back to Trump's first election in 2016, and there was that moment, I think Hillary Clinton was maybe at a fundraiser with a group of donors, and she was, I don't know if she was recorded or just quoted as referring to Trump's

backers as a basket of deplorables. And I remember Obama years earlier talking, you know, sort of explaining this segment of the of the electorate saying that they cling to their guns and religion. I'm wondering, like, what role do comments like that play in this dynamic that you're describing?

They play an important role. Obama, to his credit, referred to that as my biggest boneheaded move. But we have to ask why this happened twice. And it happened because Democrats had, default, become the party of college grads talking to college grads.

Some studies show that really class prejudice is the last acceptable prejudice, that college grads stigmatize non-college grads as dumb, deplorable, and right now enemies of democracy. And they, college grads...

do so more than they do any other group. They stigmatize non-college grads even more than people of color. And having studied people of color for a long time, believe me, there's a lot of stigma around people of color.

And so this is an example of how sort of a cultural reality within that top 20% poisons American politics. We have to understand that, again, blue-collar values reflect blue-collar lives. They're really, really different. And a good example is that

Blue-collar families center self-discipline, really, because that's what they need, the kind that gets you up and out of bed on time to a not very fulfilling job without an attitude. And whereas in college grad families, we tend to focus on self-development, the kind that gets you to the top of your game so you can succeed as an order giver. So blue-collar families

inculcate what you need to be a successful order taker. And those kinds of values really deeply shape American politics, but they're both functional in their specific contexts. Yeah. You know, what I think you're saying in the book is that it's less about the issues per se, like whether it's immigration or border security or DEI or same-sex marriage or guns,

It's less about the issues and the positions that the left takes than it is about the way they talk about those issues, but both have to matter, don't they? They really do both matter. And the example, I mean, the Democratic Party, sad to say, is a lifelong and very committed Democrat and person of the left. Right.

really uses both the language and messaging that are going to appeal to college grads, but also reflects the priorities of college grads. And both have to change if we're really going to build a cross-class, multi-racial coalition. So, for example, I always give the example of gay marriage as the model that really needs to be at the center.

Gay marriage, people often forget, was not the priority of the gay liberation movement. Their priority was sexual liberation for all, legal recognition of a very broad range of relationships, and they thought marriage was kind of dated, dusted, not interesting.

I talked to my friend at UC Law, Matt Coles, who led the ACLU's Marriage Equality Project, and he said what really changed for him was after he and others had gotten domestic partnerships in California passed, the Alameda County court clerk arranged like a big party where she put – had tables with heart balloons –

And she organized a big procession down the grand staircase. And Matt said, and I'm quoting him here, the people coming down the stairs, they weren't doctors and lawyers. They were ordinary, average people. And he said, I get it now. It's the prom and the wedding ceremony and everything rolled into one. And they're able to say, yeah, mom, I got married.

And he realized this was really important to, as to quote him, our people. And he changed the direct, he and others changed the direction of the movement. They didn't abandon LGBTQ rights.

But they realized that in order to build a coalition with non-college members of their community, they needed to shift priorities as well as messaging. They shifted messaging to commitment, but the only reason they could do that is they shifted priorities.

Well, how did things go so wrong on trans issues? Because it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, same sex marriage. Okay, so that covers the L and the G and maybe the B. But the T has caused, it seems, problems that these transgender issues just today, the Supreme Court upheld a law in Tennessee, banning certain kinds of medical treatments for youth who are trans. So what if you had to, if you could rewind the clock,

on these issues. Like how did Democrats, and I'm using Democrats as a proxy for the left, but how did Democrats go so wrong on that issue? Was it not, if it wasn't their positions, was it the way they talked about it and the way they, what things they emphasized?

The problem is that the right has controlled which issues to focus people's attention on and which sub-issues to focus people's attention on. So they lost on gay marriage, and they literally invested a lot of time and money to try to figure out what was another issue related to this community that would be very, very unpopular.

And they came upon two issues, health care for minors and trans women on sports team. And so they've put those at the center. Now, again, they're a one-trick pony. They know what issues are going to be unpopular.

And, you know, as part of this book tour, I've been on, you know, lots of radio shows, including some in quite red areas. And what – it's really easy if you know how to say – I'll just give you an example that's not in transit but it's related. I was on this AM radio station in the middle of the country and they were talking about –

Social Security and how there's 90 people who earn $90,000 are on Social Security. And I said to the guy, well, you know, that's because there's two ways to design those programs. One is that they only benefit the poor, in which case they become very politically vulnerable and don't deliver for middle class families.

and the other is to make them universal, in which case you have the odd $90,000 person on Social Security. I said, but really isn't the issue that hard work

should lead to a stable middle-class life. And he went totally, he totally went in that direction. He started talking about that, which taps a very central dynamic that's going on now, which is that the middle class has seen the waning of the American dream. I mean, over 90% of Americans used to do better than their parents, and now it's only about 50-50. Wow.

Wages would be 43% higher if wages had continued to track productivity. And so what the far right wants us to be talking about is how best to bully trans kids. What we need to be talking about, and this would be better, by the way, for trans kids, is to be saying, isn't the real issue, isn't a lot of this interesting?

anger really reflecting the fact that you've lost touch with the American dream. We need to keep drawing attention back to that in addition to finding those ways to defend marginalized groups that connect with the values of

the middle class. Yeah. All right, let's go to the phones again. The number to call is 866-733-6786. You can also send your comments and questions to [email protected] or find us on all the social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, you name it. All right, let's start in San Francisco and Sid, welcome. You're on with Joan Williams.

Hi. My question is that why do college-educated Democrats have to convince anything to anyone, to Republicans or to MAGA or to anybody for that matter, because the actions of current administration are clearly...

showing what they're doing. Their actions are good enough. I mean, what group is safe here? I mean, even if you're white, if your generations have lived in the United States, when you don't get your Social Security, when disabled people aren't protected, when women, which is 50% of the United States,

don't have the rights to abortion, the students don't get their student loans debt forgiven. Nobody's safe except unless you're Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire. So why do we have to convince anybody anything? - Yeah, Sid, thanks for those comments. There's a lot to unpack in what you just said. Joe, let me ask you about abortion, which Sid just mentioned.

You know, I think a lot of people...

In the long term, that is the best way to corrode democracy. We have gotten to the stage where we have to not only – we have to get rid of the game of inches because it's very, very costly. We have to build a broad coalition that taps people who are non-college grads. That's the only way we can protect every single group that you named. Yeah.

You know, there are a lot of assumptions that in the last election that the gender gap, for example, was going to be huge, both because Kamala Harris was a woman and that was going to draw out a lot of female voters. Also, the positions on abortion and threats to access for the abortion drug and so on. And yet it seems like the the divide between men and women was very strong.

relatively small, a lot smaller than people thought it would be. Those are the initial exit polling, Scott, but actually more recent analyses by Catalyst showed that there was an increase in the gender gap driven almost exclusively by the sharp shift in men towards Trump.

Trump performs a certain kind of masculinity that we in the gender biz called bad but bold masculinity. And that is a form of masculinity that really appeals to men who have economic anxieties. The studies of masculinity show that when you threaten, I mean, they bring people into the lab and they threaten their masculinity and a support for war goes up. They want to buy huge SUVs.

the men whose masculinity has been threatened. And that's what we see. So you see men in this fragile and failing middle class really going very sharply for Trump, because if you can't prove your masculinity by being a provider, well, maybe voting for Mr. Macho becomes very attractive. And this also is happening among young voters, Scott,

who, as you know, trended away from Democrats by 19 points in 2024. Although some of the polling I've seen recently kind of shows many of them coming back, but that, you know, that we'll see. There's an election next year, but, you know, that emphasis on masculinity, you know, I attended the Republican convention in Milwaukee and, you know,

And it was all country music, and Hulk Hogan was there, and Kid Rock. There were athletes and wrestlers. Wasn't subtle, was it? It wasn't subtle. And I kept thinking, wow, this is really going to turn off a lot of women and a lot of others.

Not really. I think they were on to something. We missed it. Well, they were on to something with respect to men and especially young men. And, you know, racism, of course, is one of the best predictors of votes for Trump. That's not enough voters for him to win, actually. But

It's a very strong predictor of votes for Trump. But belief in traditional gender roles is an even stronger predictor of votes for Trump, not only among men, Scott, but also among women.

You know, there was a lot made in 2016 and 2020 of the so-called Obama-Trump voters. Now, maybe that wasn't a very large number, but clearly, you know, you're talking about racism being a real strong connection with support for Trump. So how do you explain that phenomenon of, you know, the Obama-Trump voter?

This is something I think the left needs to understand a lot better than it does. There are two... This is data from 2016, but there were two groups of...

economically progressive Trump voters. So one of them was called the American preservationists. They're about 20% of Trump voters. Their being white and Christian is very central to their identity. And they had very cold feelings towards people of color in

which is one of the ways to measure racism, and they're very anti-immigrant. So American preservationists are probably not the group that we're going to align with. On the other hand, 19% of Trump voters call the anti-elites anti-immigrants.

had the same feelings towards people of color as non-Trump voters did. Two-thirds thought that climate change was a serious problem. They actually had the highest endorsement of gay marriage of any group of voters, and they were the least loyal to Republicans.

Democrats should be hyper-focused and the left should be hyper-focused on making a connection with these anti-elites. And what does that connection look like? All the things you've been talking about? I think putting at the center the economic issues and the commitment to making sure that hard work

Pays off in a stable middle class life. If you don't do that, nothing else is going to matter because a lot of this anger is focused. It comes from economics. I mean, economics and the economy were number one and two in terms of the issues that voters who voted for Trump in 2024 cared about. And then the second is what we've been talking about.

is to understand how to use talk traditions that connect with non-college voters, how to be respectful that college grads' priorities are different than non-college grads' priorities, and to begin to understand that we need a response to this one-trick pony of turning everything into a culture war.

Yeah, we've got some listener comments here. Let me read some of them. Alan writes, is the blue collar white collar divide even germane anymore? Both of my kids have advanced degrees and work in jobs considered blue collar. I think 90% of us are now working class. Any thoughts about that, Joan?

I'm not sure I understand the question, Scott. Yeah, well, I'm not sure what the jobs are that make Alan say that they are, in fact, blue collar. So maybe we should skip over that a little bit. But I'm thinking also, like, the impact of technology and what a threat that is, you know, even for college grads. And they come out of school, and they think they're going to be able to get a great job. And then they suddenly realize that the job or kind of job they wanted is being replaced by AI or something along those lines.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say if you're wondering which group you belong to culturally, whether you belong to this middle, this kind of blue-collar family middle, or whether you belong to the top 20%, we've actually developed a quiz. It's called the Class Bubble Quiz. Maybe we can put a link to it. I just want to interrupt you, and we can come back to that, but we have to take it.

break. We'll come back to the quiz in a moment and we'll continue our conversation with Joan Williams. Email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org or you can give us a call at 866-733-6786. Again, 866-733-6786 or, you know, all the social media platforms, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, we're at KQED Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer here this hour from Mina Kim.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

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And welcome back to Forum. Scott Schaefer here this hour for Mina Kim. Talking with Joan Williams. She's a distinguished professor of law emerita at UC Law San Francisco, and her new book is called Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class. We'd love to hear from you.

To hear from you, give us a ring at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. Joan, before the break, I rudely cut you off because we had to take a break. But you were talking about this quiz. Yes. Go for it. We've developed a fun 10-question quiz that will tell you in 10 questions whether you're economically elite, whether you're culturally elite,

and kind of where you fit in. So I think that if the caller is interested in sort of where him and his kids fit in, that class bubble quiz at classbubblequiz.com would be really a fun way to find out. The other point, Scott, that you were making is how about AI and how's that going to affect the situation?

And that really highlights an incredibly important thing that's received far too little attention, which is there's a lot of economic anxiety among younger people as well. I mean, there was one article that said it sucks to be 33. I mean, a lot of younger people are stuck in gig work. It's really hard for them to get a permanent long-term job.

They can't afford housing. They can't afford childcare. And that's even before AI is beginning to gut their white-collar jobs in the same way that deindustrialization gutted the jobs of these people, this missing middle.

Young people, again, trended away from Democrats by 19 points in 2024. Very, very shockingly. And men in particular, right? Men in particular. And young people of color since 2012 have trended away from Democrats by over 40 points. What does that tell you?

Well, I mean, I think the key for Democrats is to take and connect with this economic anger of people in the middle and connect that with the economic anger of younger people, including college grads, and say, look, everybody who works hard in the United States deserves a stable middle class standard of living with jobs.

healthcare, childcare, and a stable job. Yeah. But then next question, okay, so what are you going to do about it? You can't stop AI or the impact that it's having. You can't stop AI. On the other hand, I go back to the fact that if you look over the long arc of

Wages should be 43 percent higher than they are. I mean, the three-fourths of that decline in wages happened before Trump's first election. Nearly all of the net job growth in the 15 years before Trump's first election was in gig work or short-term jobs.

And the kinds of policies we can talk about, certainly support for unions and legislation that requires that if you're working full time, you're treated as an employee. You're not treated as an independent contractor. But quite apart from the policy issues, which Democrats often kind of get too

too caught up on, the fact that there are structural changes in the economy, and always will be, that's healthy, does not excuse creating what were good jobs into crappy jobs or no jobs. With no benefits, yeah. All right, let's go to the phones. And Chris in Oakland, you are next. Welcome to Forum.

Thank you. My name is Chris, and I come from a family that was a working-class family, and my father was a plumber. He...

He and my mother were able to buy a house on Arch Street in North Berkeley. At this point in time, I, who have worked for 45 years, I guess, I'm retired now, and I couldn't myself, despite the fact that I've got great retirement benefits,

Because I was in the labor movement my whole life working. The reason I was in the labor movement my whole life is because my

My father was a union plumber, and he was able to do that. And so I think somewhere deep inside me, I knew that I wanted to be in the labor movement. Well, it's interesting, Joan, because even union households seem to have been slipping away from Democrats. Does that come back to all the things we've been talking about here in terms of the way issues are discussed and framed? Yes.

It comes back to the cultural mismatch between the priorities and the messaging of the Democratic Party and people who are in this middle. But what Chris is highlighting is that her father, who was a union plumber, and so it was a missing middle job. He could buy a house. He had a stable job. He ended up, I assume, with good benefits.

Whereas today, many, many more people in that missing middle, there's no way. They can't even get a full-time stable job, much less hope of buying a house. And people have to understand that

If you can't give that level of economic stability to your family, that is your number one priority. And if you have Democrats talking about other issues and some charlatan breezing in saying that he's going to promise an economic stability for your family, many people are going to vote for the charlatan.

And they're not necessarily going to believe him, but it's like at least he's talking about the right stuff. Yeah. All right, let's go back to the phones, and we're going to go up to Fort Bragg, Mendocino County, and Peter, welcome.

Hey, thanks for taking my call. I want to make three very quick points. I spent 40 years working full-time in progressive politics, and these are cultural changes that I observed. The first is that when I started, the job was literally talking to other people. And as such, you interacted with all kinds of folks. Nowadays, it's gotten progressively more and more kind of careerist. And you see this in particular in D.C. And if people are introducing...

themselves and their work background, almost none of them have worked alongside, you know, quote unquote, working people, just totally off their radar. The second is that what's really incentivized is the approval of your peers more than, you know, kind of winning campaigns and things like that. Frankly, it's like, how well does your peer group approach

appreciate what it is that you had to say. And the third is the financial incentives. The foundation community, and I've worked with a lot of foundations over a lot of years, they're often really interested in things which are kind of quote-unquote edgy or groundbreaking, etc., but are

totally disconnected from the lives of regular working Americans. And so between those three, you have a culture internally which is less and less capable of talking to normal Americans. Yeah. Joan, what do you think of Peter's issues there? You know, Peter, from your lips to God's ears, unfortunately, all are true.

The research shows that actually liberals are 2.4 times less likely to be using language that persuades their audience than conservatives are if they're talking across the aisle, so to speak.

And, you know, as somebody who's run a nonprofit for 26 years that has advocated for women and for people of color, I really think, you know, that kind of work, that kind of edgy work is really important. I've done it for much of my life. And I've been, I've felt the financial pressures that Peter talked about in terms of, you know, go edgy. That's what the funders care about.

Just had an NSF grant canceled too, by the way. And that's really important work. But people have to understand that the political work of pushing the envelope, so, so important, what I think of as Malcolm work, is equal, that the political work of building a coalition, what I think of as Martin work, is also important. And that it's very different work.

The premises are different. The strategies are different. The goals are different. And we can't confuse Malcolm work with Martin work. I know that these issues you're describing are much larger than nominating the right person to run for office. But I'm wondering if you look out at the political landscape, especially in California, but beyond as well, are there people who you think are really missing the mark?

versus really like the kind of candidates that have the kind of message that really resonates with these, you know, the missing middle voters, the working class.

Yeah, I mean, I tend to shy away, Scott, from candidates, particularly since I'm going to be chatting to people in Congress next week. But I'll just mention a governor who really knows how to do this right, who is Gretchen Whitmer. Gretchen Whitmer, her campaign slogan was, fix the damn roads.

So one of the you notice how direct, straightforward, unvarnished. That's one of the things that people like about Trump. He doesn't sugarcoat things, said one Trump voter. Also, you notice how she's connecting immediately with a concrete way. I'm going to make your life better. I'm going to fix the damn roads so you can get to work.

Also, Gretchen Whitmer has been brilliant at bringing together the progressives, the college-educated progressives, with this missing middle group. For example, she spurred huge investments by GM in electric vehicles. So climate change initiative for college-educated progressives, good blue-collar jobs for the missing middle. That's the kind of

language and analytical approach to forging a coalition that really highlights the path forward. Yeah, I think you're just in a phrase it's or a word it's authenticity as well. Well, you know, it's really tough. I thought a lot about authenticity. I mean, you know, Trump bless his heart is very authentic. He's very angry at elites. He's angry at the people who wouldn't let him on, you know, museum boards in New York. And

But authenticity, among college-educated professionals, what we pride ourselves on is being articulate. Among people in the middle, what they pride themselves on is their authenticity. This presents actually really complicated challenges for women candidates since women candidates have to prove themselves much more than men do.

But if women brag, then they're unlikable. Does this sound like a couple of candidates you've heard of? And so how do you, women really have a narrow, narrow tightrope to walk and find it very hard to come off as authentic because of that context of gender bias. Yeah, well, and ironically, in Jake Tapper's book and Alex Thompson's book, Original Sin, they say that Biden really wanted to pick, really connected with Gretchen Whitmer as VP, but ended up

obviously selecting Kamala Harris. Wonder how that might have turned out differently if he had done that. Anyway, let me read some comments here. Mark writes, wouldn't the Democrats be better served by focusing on the 90 million eligible voters who did not vote rather than moving to the middle and trying to flip undecided and swing voters? Joe, what do you think about that? I mean, that is a heavy lift, getting people who are not really engaged to pay attention and then to vote.

I mean, I think I have two responses. First of all, that's just against the evidence now. If less engaged voters had voted in greater numbers in 2024, Trump probably would have won by more. That's what the numbers show.

The other point is that as someone who has studied the lives of poor and middle families, a lot of them are mother-headed households. They are trying to patch together three part-time jobs. They often don't have child care or very – the last thing they need is to figure out how to vote. They need to figure out how to get through the week. Yeah. You're listening to Forum. I'm Scott Schaefer in for me and Kim.

We're talking with Joan Williams, scholar of social and inequality, about her new book, Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Let's go back to the phones and we'll go to Oakland. And Philip, you're next. Welcome.

Yeah, hi. Good morning. I can't hear you, but I'm not supposed to say that. So, Joan, I was listening, and I couldn't help but get a little annoyed by blaming hippies, because I'm the child of hippies, and, you know, so I'm over 55, and I'm also blue-collar. I've built houses since I was 18, and

And it's not good to scapegoat another group. I don't think that all hippies are exactly the same, and I don't think that it was really just their thinking that led us to this point. And since I can't hear you, I can't hear a response. But...

Well, Joan, you want to defend hippies. Yeah, no, I know you don't need to. I was going to go on and say that, you know, but but I think that it's because the Democrats and the Republicans have not delivered to protect the middle. And I've been listening and sounds like you're on the same page. But, you know, until somebody like Bernie Sanders gets in there and we can actually get

gains for the middle class. This is going to continue because people's anger, you know, is going to find a place and the Republicans have harnessed that. So I agree with most of what you're saying, but I wish that you hadn't scapegoated hippies because I don't think that's true. I think it's the middle has

deceptively used certain... Now it's trans people, but you're using hippies. And so, anyway. Yeah, yeah. Joan, you want to respond? Boy, Philip, I stand corrected. It's so easy to stereotype people. I meant that to be funny and self-deprecating. But you're right. I mean, I...

I stand up for the values that my generation of hippies championed, including sexual liberation, feminism, anti-racism, all of the rest of it. So I really do stand corrected. And you're dead right that what we need to do is to give people a future. And that many people in my group and I, I mean, it's hard to understand why people would vote for Trump. And I totally hear that. But

But the shocking thing is that they don't think either Democrats or Republicans have delivered for them. So I just think, Philip, you're you're you know, you have two points and you're right on the money and number one and you're right on the money and number two. Thank you. Well, and you think about the things that Democrats could have done when they controlled Congress, both houses of Congress and the White House, whether it's immigration reform, immigration

you know helping the dreamers become citizens all you know securing voting rights you know and they they didn't do those things um but i do want to come back to what peter said he mentioned bernie sanders and you know people a lot of younger people are drawn to his message aoc alexandria ocasio-cortez the two of them have been getting big crowds in some republican parts

of the country. Is that economic populism? Is that what you're talking about? Because I think that if I mean, it would have been very interesting in 2016 to see how he would have done against Trump. But there's also you can just imagine how they would take him apart on the socialism, you know, kind of reputation that he has.

Quite apart again from candidates, it's really striking and important that Bernie and AOC in the anti-oligarchy tour attracted very large crowds in very red areas. And so economic populism, again, has to be at the center. And one of the things that is, again, too little talked about is that some important Democratic donors are not comfortable with economic populism.

And I think they need to wise up in the way that Republican donors did long ago. Rupert Murdoch and other people on the far right, there was one study that showed that Tucker Carlson, when he was on Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, railed against elites in 70% of episodes.

And so Democratic donors need to understand what Republican donors learned long ago, which is in this level of economic anger, economic populism works. That is Joan Williams. Her book is called Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class. Thank you so much for joining us. It's an excellent book, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to read it after listening to you this hour.

Thanks, Scott, and thanks for all your work. Thank you. You've been listening to Forum. Thanks to my guest and also to all of you, our listeners, for your comments and calls. I'm Scott Schaefer in for Mina Kim. Tomorrow, it's Guy Marzarotti. You've been listening to Forum.

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