OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
JOAN C. WILLIAMS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list
An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.
Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? changing the class dynamics driving American politics.
The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)―Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Wonk heaven. Like data? Want the sources more than the resources? Here's us a book.
"'The reason voters don't vote based on economics is that they absolutely don't believe that either Democrats or Republicans will ever deliver for them,' pollster David Mermin remarked to me in 2023." A key insight into the absolute weirdest phenomenon I know of, one that's bewildered me my entire adult life from Reagan robbing Social Security in the 1980s to felonious yam's announced before election tariff debacle. I think I get it now. Five decades-plus of betrayal and backstabbing in the service of making the rich into obscenely rich by both sides has led to the resigned certainty that no one in power cares a bit about your problems because they started stealing and hoarding long enough ago they're immune to your problems.
Add in the emasculation of working-class men, the rendering of their traditional work and work ethic unimportant and without value, and you get people ready to do anything they can to stick it to the bastards sticking it to them.
I get it. I feel it myself.
It's a situation better explained to me now. It was not a prose delight to read, but a careful academic explication (endnoted to a fare-thee-well) of what the data we have shows that is relevant to this question of why working-class political behavior is so out of sync with their actual best interests. Back someone into a corner and then start removing the floorboards they're standing on and you get irrational behavior.
3 November 2026 was a resounding rebuke of the worst offenders against the working class. Elon Musk spent $474 million...million...on the midterms and every candidae he backed lost, every measure he backed lost. The defeat of Proposition 40 in California was a typical Californians fooling themselves moment and, well, might be the most short-lived victory of the night. But a victory it was, and not for people who need the government to step up and do its job. In "winning" this victory, the fools with money handed already angry people a real, sharp-edged weapon to use against them. And if the winners of 3 November's blowouts don't hear from we-the-people that we *want* them to use that weapon, they will leave it sheathed, because it's scary to go against someone with piles of money and hate in his heart...but a bit less so now we've seen the real power of that money's limits. Remind the winners that reality does not only obey rich scumbags/tech oligarchs.
I think it's a big ask to say "read this book" in the midst of a celebratory mood about happy results for hard work done. I also know from ugly experience what happens when we-the-people walk away from a good night at the polls and go back to bed. Turn on your lamp, pick up a book about Society's problems, and read a chapter. Every night. We *all* need to start doing the work, thinking the hard problems through, and so discover the topics to focus attention on to include our fellow citizens more broadly.
