Economic “precarity” driving workers to the right
Over at Jacobin, feminist legal scholar, Joan C. Williams, discusses her lates book that urges progressives instead of emphasizing cultural differences, if they want to win back working voters, they must promote “cultural principles that grant average Americans’ lives dignity.”
In a twist on the “last-place aversion” we’ve talked about as driving the middle class to the right (as opposed to “economic anxiety”), “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back” (St. Martin’s Press, 2025), argues that it’s the insecurity that comes with a threatened loss of status:
Economic precarity is a stronger predictor of support for Trump than poverty, suggesting that Trump has something valuable to say to people hanging on to middle status for dear life. A competent opposition has a responsibility to find out what it is. In Outclassed, Williams argues that the values of the rich and the poor differ from those of the workaday middle, for whom stability, self-discipline, and directness are the dominant ideals. To reverse its political fortunes, the broad left must stop neglecting these pillars of the average American worldview.
Economic anxiety is about loss of stability.
Joan C. Williams
First, the idea that culture is completely separate from economics is a mistake. Class is expressed through cultural differences as well as through power dynamics and economic position.
As far as the cultural differences go, one crucial observation is that non-elites turn servitude into honor. In elite circles, we feel entitled to self-development because it’s available to us, and we focus on self-development and maximizing our skills because that’s what succeeds in elite jobs. But if your best hope for stability is a blue- or pink-collar job where you need to show up reliably without attitude to a job that’s often not intellectually stimulating, you don’t feel entitled to self-development. What’s valuable instead is self-discipline, without which you and your family could end up homeless.
When elites go off the rails, either their parents bail them out or they pay for expensive therapy to develop a new narrative about their lives and find a new path. For working people, there are rarely second chances, even fewer than there were forty years ago. You need to keep your nose clean and stay disciplined. So non-elite culture places a high premium on self-discipline and the institutions that anchor it.
Another way to explain it involves different strategies in what I call the “scrum for social honor.” In elite circles, social honor comes from being articulate, intelligent, and from having an esteemed job — that’s why we’re so eager to tell people our professions immediately. But for blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality. That’s their card in the deck.
The old models for earning self-respect have decayed. The right is not simply longing for a return to traditional gender roles and whiter days of the 1950s, but to an economic system that that provided a stable home life, on a single income, if necessary.
“Compare that to working-class life today, where people often patch together multiple part-time jobs without benefits or childcare,” Williams says. “It’s sometimes said they’re nostalgic for white privilege, which captures one dimension, but they’re also looking back to when working-class life functioned.”
Meagan Day
But working-class life didn’t function better because of traditional gender roles. That was incidental to the fact that a single income could support a whole family.
Joan C. Williams
That’s right. It was because of wages. But the correlation is powerful, even if causation isn’t there. And that distinction isn’t necessarily obvious to people. What they know is that their parents’ or grandparents’ families looked quite different from theirs, and everything seemed to work then. Now nothing seems to work.
That is the “great again” Donald Trump is selling, Williams implies, along with the people to blame for why things ain’t so great.
Democrats, she suggests, should play to working people’s need for self-respect. There’s more at the link.
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