As pundits debate whether inflation or cultural grievance drove high numbers of working-class voters into Donald Trump’s embrace, legal scholar Joan C. Williams suggests a new approach to the problem. In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Williams argues that the Democrats’ loss reflects a fundamental cluelessness about class cultures in America.

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-class 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.

Joan C. Williams is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Hastings, law school and founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law. Her work examines how class differences shape not just economic circumstances but fundamental ideas about work, family, religion, and government, and therefore American political dynamics.