On Democrats and Class, the Writing Was on the Wall
Two writers, Thomas Frank and Joan Williams, provided sharp insight into the Democrats’ hemorrhaging of working-class voters eight years ago. The Democratic Party ignored their perspectives. We asked them to explain how we ended up here — again.
People cast their ballots on the last day of early voting for the general election in Michigan at the Livingston Educational Service Agency in Howell, Michigan, on November 3, 2024. (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Ewald Engelen
When Joan Williams appeared on my screen one gray Amsterdam evening a week after the US presidential election, she was “shocked and anxious” about Donald Trump’s victory. “But you guys have been here before,” she noted, referring to the election of Geert Wilders and the Netherlands’ first far-right government. Americans, too, had been here before — how that happened was the subject of Williams’s 2017 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Yet even she couldn’t shake a sense of bewilderment and foreboding in the election’s immediate aftermath.
Thomas Frank, who I spoke with separately earlier that evening, expressed surprise too — not at the election results, but at pundits suddenly rediscovering his 2004 modern classic, What’s the Matter With Kansas? “They’re like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient. How did you do that?’” Frank told me. “It’s funny, because I wrote it in my thirties. How can that still be a serious commentary on our current present? But it seems it is. And actually, that says a lot.”
For both Frank and Williams, this all feels like Groundhog Day. Some months before Trump won his first presidency in November 2016, Frank had published a no-holds-barred philippic against the Democratic Party leadership titled Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? The story Frank told in that book was one of a party led astray by the influx of postmaterialist academics in the late 1960s and early ’70s who agreed on one thing: the material emancipation of the working class had been accomplished, so now the party had to move to a new postmaterialist political frontier. From that moment onward, the economy became the reserve of Ivy League–trained economists and drifted out of political sight, while cultural issues became the litmus test of progressiveness.
For Williams, a feminist legal scholar based in California, Trump’s 2016 victory was a wake-up call. As the polling results came in, she retreated to her study to write an essay critiquing Democratic Party leadership for its dismissive attitude toward non-college-educated working-class voters. Drawing on personal experience, Williams illustrated the humiliating effects of elite condescension. The essay, published on the Harvard Business Review website, became one of the site’s most-read and most-commented-on pieces. A year later, Williams expanded it into the acclaimed book White Working Class.
Eight years on, for both writers, the question is not why Trump won but why the Democrats lost. Then as now, the explanation lies in the chasm of lifestyles, fears, and expectations between elites and the working class. Where Frank emphasized the changing of the guard within the Democratic Party and the trahison des clercs he described in Listen, Liberal, Williams focused on the microsociological effects of working-class wounded pride, shame, and anger.
Both have largely stayed out of the public limelight during the Biden years. Frank has dedicated himself to a new book project investigating the postwar history of creativity, while Williams has written Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, due in May 2025. In the interview below, both provide trenchant insights on Trump’s unexpectedly robust election victory.
The answer to the first question is obviously yes. I went to the Republican convention and heard J. D. Vance present his stump speech. It was like he was reading my mind. They’re playing exactly the same bait-and-switch game they’ve been playing for forty years — talking working-class themes but doing rich people things — and they’ve become so much better at it now.
The Republicans, the Trump people, put together a much better platform than they used to have. Each rally was like a focus group. Trump would try out sound bites and talking points and simply pick what resonated — not organized by technocrats with fancy PhDs but tried out on real people, with real emotions. This is not to let them off the hook. I think Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous and foolish.
At the same time, there is some nuance. This time around, a small number of people in the Democratic Party understood what I had been saying. Joe Biden did make steps in the right direction, tiny ones, but steps nevertheless. His outreach to organized labor, his appointment of Lina Khan as antitrust czar — it’s not enough, and it’s just the beginning, but I’ve been calling for that type of thing since forever and was overjoyed that he did it. And then he lost his compos mentis: a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions of which the last has not yet been said. If you went to the Democratic convention, which I did, it was palpable that the party clearly sensed danger this time and did outreach to organized labor, at least.
Things haven’t improved, I’m afraid. In 2016, it was only Trump and Brexit. Now there’s this transnational movement. We have to figure out what’s driving the success of the far right.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the deep conflict between the Brahmin left and the working class. The US election was a good example. The Left now uses language and prioritizes issues in ways that, without truly understanding it, send the signal that its audience consists only of people with college degrees — as if the rest don’t matter.
Meanwhile, the far right does talk about economic issues. They’re blaming the wrong groups for economic problems, in my opinion. But at least they’re directly addressing economic concerns that are very pressing and real, and they do so with a blue-collar style and aesthetic that has profound cultural appeal. The Left unconsciously uses an aesthetic that comes directly out of the lives of the more privileged.
Take the Kamala Harris campaign. She did a lot of things right, but ultimately the two issues she focused on were democracy and abortion, while polls indicated that the economy and immigration were what mattered. To serve up democratic norms as your main campaign topic when people have been feeling vulnerable economically for four decades and don’t think anybody has delivered for them or talked about their issues — that’s missing the point.
Abortion is super important to me, but if you look at voting crosstabs in the United States, support for abortion rights is more heavily favored by college-educated voters than noncollege voters of every single racial group. It reflects what Arlie Russell Hochschild would call the “feeling rules” of the elite: among the Brahmin left, you feel very deeply about the oppression of LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, and perhaps women, which are all good things. But for the working class, you don’t feel anything at all. It’s an expression of contempt: “They’re idiots. They voted for Trump.” Thinking and behaving this way just strengthens the far right.
What do you expect to come out of four more years of Trump?
I try not to expect much. My attitude is the same as my daughter’s, who said to me, “Head down, chin up.”
So far, I don’t know what they’re going to do. Will the Trump administration actually follow through on massive trade tariffs and mass deportation and drive up prices even further? Because that’s what both of those will do. Or is Trump going to be like Biden-plus, with some nationalist flavors? With Trump, you never know because it’s all about his fragile ego.
As for his vice president, J. D. Vance — he’s very deeply tied to the merchant right. He comes straight out of venture capital, but also adheres to this neotraditionalist gender ideology that’s become quite en vogue online nowadays. You don’t know where that’s going to take the administration or whether it’s going to have any influence at all.
I don’t want to take him lightly when he says he’s planning to do mass deportations. We’ve never done anything like that in America. Who would really try something like that? I almost can’t believe that was his slogan or that he wants to do that. If he really tries, that’s despicable, and it’s going to go wrong in a hundred ways. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Same with tariffs across the board — that is not a smart move. I’m not against some tariffs here and there. I’m not one of these free traders from the 1990s who believed in free trade no matter what. That’s just a different form of folly. Tariffs have their place, as does every other tool at your disposal. But tariffs without even thinking about it? Then you’re looking at an instant recession, and the Democrats will have a good chance of returning to power. That’s what happens in a duopoly: the losses of the one are the gains of the other. Zero sum.
On the other hand, if Trump listens to his big business cronies and doesn’t do those stupid things and just accepts Joe Biden’s legacy — an economy that is growing robustly — then there’s no reason why he wouldn’t have four years of great prosperity. Do a little bit of tariffs, crack down on border security . . . do that, and he could easily have four years as a very successful president.
That actually scares me much more because that means Vance after him. And Vance doesn’t say monstrous things like Trump does. He is smart and has good manners. Trumpism with a brain is what you have to worry about.
What needs to change?
When I first moved to Washington, there were two big pressure groups in the Democratic Party. One was the Bill Clinton faction, called the Democratic Leadership Council. The other was identified with Jesse Jackson and his ilk, and eventually with the Bernie Sanders wing. There have always been these left challengers within the Democratic Party.
The Clinton faction has won every battle since then. It does things like make sure there’s no primary once the president steps down because he’s mentally falling apart, and then simply anoint his successor. It has basically killed the internal democracy of the party. This should stop. It should step down and give the other side of the party a chance — the radicals, the Sanders bunch, and his younger colleagues, AOC and all the rest of them.
And message-wise, the wokeness, the technocracy, the globalization stuff — that too needs to go. Democrats need to replace it with an actual plan for reindustrialization. They should go to the “sacrifice states” in the Midwest and tell voters they actually have a plan for industrial policymaking. Now they don’t have a plan. Do you know what they tell voters? “Go get a college degree and move to the Sunbelt states.” That is not a plan; that is a death verdict.
My main point still is that the Democrats should urgently address their class cluelessness. Take the extensive school and day care center closures during the pandemic. It was a disaster for essential workers who had to go out and didn’t know what to do with their children, while the Brahmin left could combine working from home and home schooling.
The same is true for climate change advocacy. Many green policies are easily accessible for citizens with savings to spare, but inaccessible for citizens without savings.
These forms of class cluelessness contrast sharply with the success of the campaign for gay marriage in the United States. I interviewed the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, and he told me that what they did was very simple: they centered the concerns of ordinary people. And what they wanted was really simple as well — they just wanted to get married. That is how you build a cross-class alliance for progressive change. You need to listen to working-class people, not just doctors and lawyers. It’s not a subtle message, but unfortunately it’s one that needs to be learned again and again.
The other thing the Left needs to do is get real about masculinity. You’ve no doubt noticed that there was a sharp swerve toward Trump among Latino men and even among young black men. One out of three young black men voted for Trump. Just mind-blowing. Why? Well, Trump projects what scholars have called “bad-but-bold masculinity.” It’s not exclusively a working-class masculinity. But it’s a kind of protest gender identity that has many adherents in the working class.
Masculinity is a cherished identity for most men, and you can’t fight a “bad-but-bold masculinity” with nothing. The only way you can contest that valuable asset is with an alternative set of masculinities. That is what the Left urgently needs to develop because, so far, who owns the cultural power of masculinity? It’s the far right. It is one of the most powerful weapons the far right has, tying working-class males to the party. It’s one of the key class-bonding tools that they use. So far, the Left has not understood either its power or how to counter it.
Do you feel that your earlier position has been vindicated? And what has changed since 2016?