Review of Insecurity Politics by Lorenza Antonucci (Princeton University Press, 2026)

Let me recommend a new book, Insecurity Politics, by Lorenza Atonucci, a professor of sociology. Her book argues, in short, that the rise of both left and right forms of anti-system populism in Europe and North America is best explained by the widespread “insecurity” in these countries.

In her words, “in this book I advance two arguments: first, that socioeconomic insecurity has steadily increased in Europe, albeit presenting itself in different ways across countries and security regimes; and, second, that this increase has created the basis for support for populism.” (3). While her focus is on Europe, similar claims could be made regarding the United States.

“Populist parties have offered new political scripts that restore and underscore the importance of the main security providers (the family, the state, and the market) in sustaining socioeconomic stability.” (8). However, “populist parties’ agenda are not simply oppositional. These parties also plan to restore security through the two actors that have been absorbing the rise in market-based insecurity: the state and the family.” (11).

What does this mean? Well, it means first that when people feel insecure and the status quo has lost its legitimacy, citizens turn to anti-system politics (the title of Jonathan Hopkin’s book, also well-worth reading). Second, they seek parties that speak to that felt insecurity—right populist parties promise to strengthen the family and close the borders, making life more secure, while left populist parties promise to build a twenty-first century version of democratic socialism that will powerfully tame (or completely overcome) the insecurity created by neoliberalism.

As Antonucci recognizes, this is, more or less, an economic explanation for the current crisis. It informs the ongoing critique of neoliberalism offered by the left. But, many liberals will say, isn’t race, or cultural resentment, or something else really responsible for the breakdown of the neoliberal order? There are plenty of studies one can point to if they want to argue that the current breakdown of the neoliberal order is not economic in nature.

Atonucci addresses this point as well. Attempts to dismiss economic explanations for the rise of anti-system politics often look at simple macro snapshots—the unemployment rate isn’t especially low in areas voting for populists, or those voting for populists aren’t the very poorest citizens, so economics can’t be the explanation, right?

This attempt to write off the economic explanation, however, is shallow and unsatisfactory. There is no one-to-one cause and effect where person A becomes unemployed and then votes for an outsider populist. Or person B is in the poorest one percent and therefore supports anti-system parties. The economic factors are more complex and diffuse than this but no less real.

Consider that first of all, the very worst off economically are unlikely to engage in any political activity, especially in as stratified a society as the United States. As Antonucci stresses, “furthermore, insecurity emerges not simply from a reduction in people’s standard of living but from a loss of what makes lives secure in a certain cultural context, which in Europe entails stable work conditions and relatively safe financial lives for the majority of citizens.” (36).

When you have decades of insecurity-driven neoliberalism undermining worker power, job security, and wages, followed by the biggest global economic meltdown in nearly a century, what follows is a generalized loss of legitimacy. Anti-system political ideas, discourses, actors, and parties arise and take the form of outsider populists seeking office. The generalized loss of legitimacy on the part of the status quo, nearly universally felt, doesn’t lend itself to the simple tests that the more shallow ends of social science tend to rely on.

Returning to Antonucci, she emphasizes “the fact that working conditions in European labor markets are now vastly different from what they were a few decades ago.” (48). She devotes considerable space delving into how things have changed. In sum, workers generally have less autonomy, more pressure in terms of speed and production, and the widespread fear they can’t get a similarly good job elsewhere. In the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, there is a broadly felt “fear of falling.”

There are many good reasons for this. “The level of generosity of social insurance policies for individuals decreased in most countries between 1980 and 2018…” (74) Then consider that “the declining compensatory effects of the welfare state since the 1980s accelerated as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent welfare-state responses…” (75). It’s hard to get a good job—if you have one, you fear it will be difficult to get another one, and welfare policies don’t seem adequate to fill in the gaps.

“Research conducted in the United States has indicated that perceived immigrant job threat tends to increase in settings with economic stagnation, where labor unions are weaker and there is a rise of work insecurity resulting from corporate restructuring and low wages.” (93). This characterizes both North America and Europe in recent decades, especially post-recession. No surprise support for such perspectives has surged.

Turning to Brexit: “Instead of being someone who had been permanently left out of society, the Leave voter appeared to be an individual with a worsening social position who was increasingly struggling—and hence a member of the intermediate middle class and the wide group of people who experience insecurity.” (117)

This confirms Antonucci’s broader finding—it is not necessarily the worst off but the squeezed middle, those who are declining, who feed support for populism. This is commonly felt and glaringly obvious but it is also diffuse. The legitimacy crisis doesn’t lend itself to easy statistical analysis. But Antonucci’s perceptive observation jibes with research indicating support for Trump has been especially strong in areas hit by the consequences of global trade.

What is true for Europe is true for North America as well. This helps explain why populism, and anti-system politics more broadly, isn’t going away anytime soon. The legitimacy crisis is real and arguably intensifying. “Since 2020 there has been an acceleration in the pervasiveness of insecurity within European societies, fueled by Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis.” (132). The same could be said for the US.

“This suggests that the seeds of populist support are to be found not in the growth of unemployment or the lack of a stable job per se, but in voters’ everyday experiences of instability in relation to their finances and work conditions.” (136).

Later in the book (145) Antonucci lists three ways insecurity is changing politics. 

1. It is about micro things like work quality, security of work, day-to-day costs, not macro things like unemployment rate or GDP growth
2. Insecurity is a broad source of discontent, not limited to the most precarious or poorest
3. It leads to new class coalitions and thus new political coalitions

The “current populist wave” features people “bonded together by a perception that their life conditions have declined.” (152). Indeed, “insecurity is the material condition that bonds people together in opposition to the secure elite.” (153). I haven’t done too much analysis here; mostly quoting some important passages to illustrate the key claims of Antonucci’s book. They are compelling. Check out this book!

In addition, I’ve mentioned above Jonathan Hopkin’s Anti-System Politics, which I can’t recommend enough. Jacob Hacker’s earlier The Great Risk Shift is also informative, since it addresses this increase in insecurity.  

Some Thoughts on Race and Class in American History

I recently read a lengthy essay in The Guardian titled “The White Working Class Knows the American Project Isn’t Working. Here’s Why That Will never Matter to Them.” The author, Saida Grundy, is a sociology professor at Boston University. The essay is historically informed and thoughtful but also, I will argue, fundamentally flawed. I believe the essay offers a clear example of how not to think about American politics and history. The author is not a conservative, so this isn’t a case of left versus right interpretations of American history. It has more to do with disagreements among those left of center on how to assess these issues. The essay I am critiquing is an example of what could be called the radical race perspective. (It can be accessed here: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/ng-interactive/2026/jun/21/american-racial-anxiety-white-working-class-rights?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other).

First, the piece is torn between two conflicting viewpoints. The first recognizes that political and economic elites have used racial cleavages to divide and weaken the working class. It condemns this and calls for a cross-racial working class coalition. This is the position of labor organizers and socialists, from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders. I will refer to it as the historic left project and its advocates as the class based left. I endorse it.

Citing W.E.B. Du Bois, Grundy says that “the racial order required by capitalism could only be maintained if white elites successfully manipulated the white masses against their class alliances with other races. They needed to be goaded into loyalty to a white supremacist planter class…” This seems to imply, in other words, that the Jim Crow order that was created in the post-Civil War south was against the material interests of southern whites and that they had to be, in effect, tricked into accepting it. This is an example of the first viewpoint.

The second viewpoint, which seems to dominate the piece, is that the white working class is so invested in its aristocratic racial status that it will never choose to embrace a cross-racial coalition. According to this view, all efforts to create a successful multi-racial democracy, including the left project of democratic socialism, are doomed from the start, crashing on the shoals of an unchanging, forever racist and deeply powerful group of whites. As Grundy bluntly states, referring to the “white lower classes, “in reality, access to power over other racial groups is their preferred political currency.”

I think this second perspective, the radical race perspective, is both descriptively wrong and politically defeatist. But it is very common among scholars and activists and it seeps into all politics from the center to the left.

In short, an ever-present, vague, inchoate racism pervading the polity explains nothing. Being everywhere, it can’t explain anything. The radical race perspective offered in the piece fails to address anything concrete. For instance: the multiracial, working class New Deal coalition that dominated American politics from the Great Depression in the 1930s through the postwar decades, before breaking apart in the 1970s, is a direct rebuttal to the author’s perspective.

Looking back to the direct aftermath of the Civil War, Grundy discusses the grotesque racist presidency of Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. Powerful as this is, it ignores the fact that Johnson, who was not elected President, was succeeded for two terms by Ulysses S. Grant, the pro-racial equality Union hero whose two electoral victories had to consist in substantial part of white votes.

In more recent decades the popularity of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama depended in large part on their ability to win the support of masses of working class whites. They may have been neoliberals but their rhetorical gifts won widespread support from this supposed homogenous and racist group. Similarly, the loss of such support among the working class, and with it the shift in support to the professional classes for center-left parties, what Thomas Piketty has termed the rise of the Brahmin Left, is a new dynamic that calls for explanation not offered by the author. The gradual break-up of the New Deal Coalition, a key part of this story, is likewise unexamined. American social democracy, such as it is, came into being because working class whites are not inevitably and always focused only on racial grievance.

The author also suggests that if the Trump phenomena is at least partly class-based it should impact nonwhite voters as well. Contrary to what the piece claims, this is exactly what has happened. Given that the year is 2026, it is a glaring omission for the essay to ignore the surprisingly multi-racial nature of the Trump 2024 coalition. Trump won more Latino votes than any Republican in decades, perhaps ever, through his ability to win over working class Latinos, particularly men. He also won more black votes than any Republican in decades, again by pulling in a surprising number of working class men. Ditto across different categories of Asian voters. This is exactly what happens when working class Americans of all races are shifting right. Again, this ties into the changing dynamics of American politics and shows how much the US has in common with Europe, even though our domestic histories are distinct.

A key problem for the historical analysis provided by the radical race perspective is that it treats the white working class as a homogenous group, unchanging through time. But this is simply inaccurate and won’t do for serious historical and social scientific scholarship. Poor white farmers in the south in the 1820s have nothing in common with ethnic immigrant families working proletarianized jobs in northern cities in the 1920s, who have nothing in common with downwardly mobile white families in the rustbelt struggling to make ends meet at Dollar Tree in the 2020s. Their shared whiteness just doesn’t get you anywhere if you want to understand the changes in American history. 

Consider the idea that white people form an “aristocracy” in America. The historic left project, best embodied by Mamdani and Sanders today (and a slew of less famous people) says that we must try to unite the exploited multi-racial working class across its differences. The radical race perspective says this will never work because white people form an undifferentiated aristocracy over all people of color. That’s the key problem with seeing all white people as part of a ruling aristocracy. If this is true, as the elites in the Jim Crow south claimed, then whites will never give up this power. And this in turn would mean that the historic left project can never be realized. What a terrible, depressing thought. 

The author criticizes centrist elites, claiming that concerned writings about the white working class are produced by “almost exclusively centrist white elite authors.” Let’s set aside the fact that we shouldn’t be shaming authors for their race. The other problem is that this claim disguises the fact that the essay, and the entire radical race project, is punching left as much as right. It is, in its strongest form, a rejection of the historic left project as an impossibility.

This points to a key difference in understanding how the world works. When those of us on the class-based left look at the Jim Crow south, for instance, we see an evil system in which black people were tyrannized. We see a system in which most white people in the south were also screwed, suffering in poverty and frequently disenfranchised. The radical race perspective looks at the Jim Crow south and sees an evil system in which black people were tyrannized but white people were undifferentiated aristocrats.

Here I think we should spend a little time with MLK’s “Our God is Marching On” speech from 1965. In his words, “it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir).”

King in this speech recognizes the psychological power that came with whites being told that they were part of a ruling aristocracy. But King, unlike the current radical race perspective, recognized that this was a lie. You can’t actually eat Jim Crow. Far from being members of an aristocracy, poor whites in the south were exploited, suffering laborers, often denied full citizenship as well, who were told that they were aristocrats to distract from this reality.

In King’s words, again, “And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”

Grundy recognizes that Jim Crow segregation was an elite strategy to weaken and divide America’s workers. But once we recognize this fact, that it was a contingent strategy that was created and put in place through concerted effort, we must recognize the consequence: it can be defeated. White and black Americans divided against one another isn’t an immutable fact of America—it is a contingency that democratic socialism seeks to overcome. King is gesturing at this in the above quotes. He doesn’t flinch from condemning the monstrous evil of a century of Jim Crow. But he also recognizes how that system doesn’t work for most southern whites either. Note how King described the populist movement of the late 1800s that tried to unite working whites and blacks: “The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.” See King stressing how that vile racist order was bad for black and white Americans?

The class based left is deeply opposed to racism and sees it as a significant part of our history and our present. The evil injustice of racism is not just an unfortunate blip from our past, as some conservatives treat it. But I have tried to show that the radical race perspective, as embodied for example in Grundy's essay, does not offer the best way to think about race in American politics. The historic left project, embodied now in democratic socialism, is deeply concerned with racism but also understands its operation in different terms than the radical race perspective.

What does this mean for today? We are not battling Jim Crow but global neoliberal capitalism. To succeed we need to unite workers of all races into a coalition for something like democratic socialism. This won’t happen if you think working class whites are aristocrats and dismiss their sufferings as “feeling left behind.” Read Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton for a tutorial on the misery in much of working class white America if you need convincing on this point.

Unfortunately, the radical race perspective is not only descriptively misguided. It is politically defeatist. If you really believe that the white majority is an unchanging group committed above all else to its aristocratic racial privilege, then nothing will ever change. If you really believe this you should simply shrug your shoulders and give up on politics.

On the other hand, if you believe, as leftists throughout American history have, that a working class coalition can be formed in favor of democratic socialism, then a more just world is possible. In the political sphere today this will probably look something like Bernie Sanders’ steely anger at the dominance of oligarchs combined with Zohran Mamdani’s cheerful hope that democratic socialism offers the best prospect for constructing a more democratic, more peaceful, and more equal world.

For an optimistic take on winning rural voters see this piece from The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/30/democratic-socialists-rural-voters.

Talking to Struggling Men

When discussing the changing class cleavages in American politics, one can focus on the structural changes that have taken place in the wealthy economies of the world. When doing so, one looks at the role that automation, trade policy, and the destruction of labor unions have played in fragmenting and destroying the working class in America and other wealthy countries. Other works focused on structural factors look at the rise of professional class jobs in the knowledge economy that rely on college degrees and the ability to manipulate information. When combined, these structural factors help explain how the working class has increasingly shifted to the right in wealthy countries and the professional classes have shifted to the left. Thomas Piketty has discussed this rise of the “Brahmin” left in essays and in Capital and Ideology, Matt Karp has discussed it in articles at Jacobin, and Daniel Bell discusses the emergence of such dynamics as early as the 1960s and 1970s in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

A second type of analysis of changing class cleavages looks at how professional class members think and talk about politics, work, expertise, merit, family, and so on. Joan Williams, in Outclassed, pays considerable attention to these questions of style. But to call them “style” perhaps undersells how important they are. As the professional classes have come to constitute the base of the Democratic Party they have brought with them ways of seeing the world that reflect and reinforce this growing diploma and class divide, whereby the Democratic Party speaks to the way professional class individuals see the world and the Republican Party speaks to the way blue collar, working class individuals see the world. 

This question of style matters, then, because it reinforces the structural factors driving the class cleavage. It reinforces the feeling that different Americans belong in different worlds. Two books by authors on the left, Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice movement, seek to shed some light on these developments. 

This brings me to the subject of this essay, which concerns style but reflects more structural features. The liberal professional classes don’t know how to talk to struggling men. This was an important insight of Joan Williams in Outclassed and it is one that must not be forgotten.

Liberal discourse is powerfully sensitive to gender inequality. This has helped produce tremendous strides toward gender equality, even though we don’t fully have it. Women do more domestic work, they are at much greater risk of domestic violence, and it is mostly colored women working low-quality jobs at the very bottom of the economic totem pole. 

At the same time, professional class liberal discourse tends to be class blind and can’t see where men struggle. Indeed, to simply discuss the possibility that any putatively privileged group, say men, might experience unique hardship is to invite a giant chorus of denunciations from left-liberal hordes online. And it is this failure, this very inability, to engage with the challenges of struggling men that has driven so many of them into the arms of the right.

For instance, recent decades have seen tremendous strides in women’s achievement in education. Those strides are now so huge that boys and men are falling way behind, on everything from standardized tests to high school and college graduation rates. If current trends continue it won’t be long before higher ed is overwhelmingly female (say, perhaps two-thirds).

If nothing else, young men are clearly struggling to succeed in our current K-12 and higher education system. But professional class liberal discourse genuinely struggles to see this and tends to dismiss these concerns as expressing care for the powerful. Really? All men are part of some kind of undifferentiated aristocracy? The long-term homeless men I walked past every day in Long Beach, California were in the ruling class? The male adjunct professors zipping up and down the 5 making $30,000 a year were part of the ruling class? This is about as true, and insightful, as when ideological defenders of the confederacy told dirt poor whites that they were in the ruling class.

As Joan Williams so helpfully points out again and again, the dominant ways of thinking and talking among the professional classes in recent decades are class blind. They simply don’t understand how a privileged group, i.e. men, could struggle. And if you don’t understand class, you can’t understand anything happening in America or around the world. You won’t understand the rage in the heartland and you won’t understand the political homelessness of Gen Z men. You don’t have to go as far as Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels and proclaim No Politics but Class Politics (though this volume of essays and interviews is a very good read). But you have to get most of the way there if you want to comprehend the shortcomings of professional class discourse.

There are at least two key challenges facing men in America (with echoes of this around the world). First, working class men in manual trades have seen many industries that used to provide secure, dignified work and social esteem move abroad. Second, coming of age Gen Z men have been struggling as they move through K-12, college, and then the professional world. The lesson they all too often hear when asking questions is to be more aware of their privilege. This doesn’t work and drives them into the arms of the right.

Those of us on the populist left have been making this point over and over again for at least a decade. Neoliberalism has ravaged the working class and stunted the future for younger generations. This includes men and women of all races. Scolding struggling people, in this case men, over their privilege is bad analysis (neoliberalism devastates women and men) and insane politics. You have got to learn to speak to men. The first way to do this is to recognize that class permeates everything and that no group, and certainly not a group as large and varied as men, constitutes an undifferentiated nexus of privilege. 

These concerns apply to future generations of men as well. For instance, many millennials are now the parents of young children. As the father of a young son, the future of men in America is of deep personal importance to me. The same goes for the other parents of little boys. Discourses of undifferentiated male privilege and accusatory claims of toxic masculinity offer nothing to these boys as they seek to navigate an educational environment that no longer works so well for them. They need less critique, more positive reinforcement. They need people on the left, in our lives and language, to offer positive examples of how to be a man in the 21st century.

Liberals and leftists need to attend to these concerns. With a young child, I have naturally focused more on school. But as Williams discusses in Outclassed, thinking and talking as working class people do, including working class men, is a necessary task for the left. A key part of this will be listening to and elevating the voices of those in the working class. A burgeoning collection of research suggests that working class political candidates perform better than professional class ones, for instance. Recent election cycles offer numerous examples of this. Perhaps no surprise, I am arguing along with Bernie Sanders for the left to return to making class primary. 

These are just some preliminary thoughts on a big topic. They concern school struggles, lost jobs, and a lack of social esteem and personal meaning. This is a void in the lives of so many men. if you don’t offer answers someone else will fill them in for you, as the right so powerfully does today. We are seeing that the post-60s, libertarian-inflected life advice too common on the left, something like “don’t hurt anybody, otherwise just do whatever you want,” isn’t good enough. Young people want more thick, helpful, and inspiring guidance, and if those on the left can’t provide it, those on the right happily will. 

Finally, as Williams recognizes when it comes to men, “because masculinity is a cherished identity for most men (and many women), the only way to fight toxic masculinities is with alternative, honorable masculinities.” Pundits, politicians, scholars, religious leaders—all these figures on the right are willing to provide visions of how to be a man. To speak to Gen Z men, and future generations of men, those on the left half of the political spectrum will have to figure out how to do so as well.

Review of Outclassed by Joan Williams

Let me review a book that I can’t recommend enough. I have pages of notes and quotes from the book which I will try to organize into something useful. Joan Williams, a law professor, has written a book titled Outclassed that was published in 2025. The main thrust of the book is to understand how the Democratic Party, and the left side of the political spectrum more broadly, came to lose touch with the American working class. 

This is a topic of central importance to me and I have written about it both on this blog and in my latest book, What Time Is It? The American political cleavage has increasingly come to represent a divide between Democratic-voting professional class workers and Republican-voting, working class voters. Consider that in 2024 Harris won the top 10% of income earners while Trump won the bottom 50%. This is the inverse of how American (and other wealthy countries) used to be divided. Rather than take this for granted, we should be asking how it happened. Similar developments have been happening in wealthy countries around the world but Williams focuses on the US.

Any time you talk about class in America you raise the question of how to think about it. Williams uses working class, or lower-middle class, to refer to Americans who are generally in manual occupations, in the middle or below on the income scale, and lack a college degree. I think we can recognize the intuitive appeal of this definition without getting bogged down in more technical debates about strict class divisions. 

First, why has the left side of the political spectrum been losing working class Americans? What started out applying to working class whites has spread to working class latinos and even some working class black voters. Our staring point should be humility and, as Williams stresses, curiosity. As she says, “we have to get curious about why people vote for far-right populists. This book is for the curious.” (9). This is especially important when so much of liberal and progressive thought and punditry is devoted to back-slapping about how crazy and deranged Trump voters are. (Good luck winning their votes back if that’s your perspective).

How has the populist right been winning the allegiance (and votes) of working class people on the US and Europe? As Williams recognizes, “far-right populism attracts lower-middle class voters holding on for dear life and worried about their future.” (14).  Consider this crazy indicative fact: around 60% of non-college whites voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, while less than 30% voted for Biden in 2020. That number shrunk in half in thirty years! And it’s a decent comparison, since both Clinton and Biden were winning candidates. 

How have the upper echelons of the professional classes been so clueless to these changes? “One thing that blocks some progressives from understanding class dynamics is that they resist the notion that they are elites.” To make the top 20% of household income you have to make around $130,000 per year or more. This income level is of course exceeded by oligarchs and superstar professionals like corporate lawyers. But most of the people in this top 20% have more mundane professional class jobs. Denial that you are in this professional class elite or the other side, obnoxiously embracing it and looking down on those who are less educated, are both strategies designed to lose.

On page 20 Williams summarizes how for decades nobody spoke to those who are struggling economically, are economically populist and left leaning, but culturally conservative. The new far right populists do this. She also says in the US the current polarized political battle is increasingly between the professional classes and the struggling middle (or working classes). I cover this in detail in What Time Is It?, and it is a development that was just starting to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, covered in prescient detail in Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (another book I cannot recommend enough).

Over the past few decades, “the US economy polarized into jobs at the bottom and jobs at the top, with workers formerly in middle-class jobs falling into low-paid dead-end service jobs: the Walmart greeter or the McDonald’s cashier…” meanwhile “the upper-middle class did well. Wages have increased by 83 percent for college graduates since 1989, but hardly at all for noncollege grads.” (29). It should not be confusing that there is now a populist revolt against the professional classes. Populists on the left, like myself, have been screaming this for years. 

Why, then, did it seemingly take so long for the rural revolt and the populist upheaval to arrive? The neoliberal era takes off in the 1970s and 1980s, the economic splits between knowledge workers and manual workers begin cleaving even earlier. But, as Michael McQuarrie rightly pointed out, the “civic associations, labor unions, and political institutions unraveled long after the industrialization itself.” (41, Williams is quoting McQuarrie). The neoliberal economic assault devastated places economically first, and then the other mediating institutions unraveled. This all took time. The slow-moving, decades-long neoliberal devastation of the working class then exploded with the twin hammer-blow of open trade with China in the 2000s and the Great Recession in 2008. These were the final pieces that broke the back of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus.

These developments hit manual workers much harder than knowledge workers, contributing to their increasing distance from one another. The professional classes are isolated from the working classes and this “fosters a social myopia that makes it increasingly difficult for the college-educated academics and policy-makers to see how distinctive a working-class understanding of the world is.” (This is Williams quoting Michele Lamont on p. 57).

In blunt terms, “Americans who did not graduate from college have lost status, recognition, and social honor in recent decades.” (59-60). Continuing with this, “lower-middle-class people lack both economic capital and also cultural capital—tastes socially defined as “classy.” Instead, they value social ties (social capital) and character (moral capital).” (60). The Democratic Party and professional class liberals have generally ignored or inadequately addressed these developments.  In Williams’ words, “the far right has put a lot of time and effort into connecting with noncollege grads. The rest of us need to learn how.” (57). 

Let’s tour through the rest of Outclassed by touching on a few recurring themes. 

Masculinity

Democrats, liberals, the professional classes—you name it—don’t know how to talk about gender to working class people. As Williams recognizes, working class men tend to have a strong sense of masculinity. Contrary to so much discourse on the contemporary left, this is not inherently problematic. After all, there are many different understandings of what it means to be a man. 

Williams suggests that there are four traditional components of “mature manhood” in working class culture—being a breadwinner, owning a home, being a father, and being a husband. Note, only the first value is patriarchal. The other three are reasonable, and nearly universal, aspirations for not just working class but all American men. Professional class men can generally take for granted their ability to achieve the latter three and to share breadwinner status with their high-achieving wife or husband.

Thanks to decades of neoliberalism, however, “all four components of mature manhood—breadwinner status, homeownership, fatherhood, and marriage—are becoming increasingly unattainable [for working class men]. In response, men double down on aspects of masculinity they can attain—like voting for Mr. Macho.” (81).

Professional class liberals fail to understand this point and thus fail to speak effectively to working class men (and women who also care about these values). “It’s a recipe for resentment to have college-educated elites (whose men still hold traditionally masculine jobs) tell blue-collar men that the solution to their families’ gutted-by-neoliberalism economic prospects is for men to take the low-wage, feminine-coded jobs.” (86). Yes, it should be obvious that telling men who used to be, or aspire to be, respected manual workers that they should take minimum wage housecleaning jobs is not a winning proposition. 

These types of jobs, usually held by women of color, absolutely suck. Americans won’t become more equal by having more men fall into these terrible jobs. Rather, jobs like housecleaning and caring for the elderly must become much better in terms of pay and conditions or be automated. 

Let me summarize, albeit too briefly, Williams on gender and masculinity: “Because masculinity is a cherished identity for most men (and many women), the only way to fight toxic masculinities is with alternative, honorable masculinities.” (234). There has been some recognition of these points, in books likes Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man, Richard Reeves’ research on the struggles facing young men in America today, and even in leftist outlets like Jacobin. This is all to the good.

I should also mention from personal experience that struggling with insecure employment, let alone failing to get employment, in your area of training is devastating to your self-esteem. We derive internal satisfaction, as well as deeply important social esteem and self-respect, from succeeding at a task we put ourselves to. When academia spits you out into a low-status, insecure adjunct job it grants you affinities with manual workers struggling to get by on insecure, trade-threatened jobs. Successful professionals by definition don’t understand this. Again, there is nothing inherently sexist about any of this.

Neoliberal economics

Williams generally takes for granted, as do I, that the background for these developments is the decades-long destruction of the American working class by neoliberal policies. She cites some truly mind-blowing stats, like the fact that median household income in most counties in Ohio and Michigan is lower today than it was in 1980. Not stagnant—lower. “And as if to highlight how capitalism run amok fuels all this, opioid deaths skyrocketed particularly in areas with high loss of employment since 2000.” (92). The ongoing horrors of the opioid epidemic, and related after-effects of neoliberalism, are well documented in Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, which should be required reading for all Americans.

Culture plays a role here too. As Williams notes, “blue collar whites…tend to attribute poverty to moral failings—their own as well as others.” (92). This internalization of failure hits hard. You need some way to explain why things are falling apart in rural and small town America. Professional class discourse, focused on race and gender, can’t explain the struggles of working class white families, who by definition aren’t oppressed in this class-clueless worldview.

The problem is that “a society that understands race but not class as structural exacerbates the hidden injuries of class.” (93). People in these struggling rural communities were blaming themselves, Democrats offered them little in the way of answers, then Trump comes in and blames immigrants, China, and other elites. Is it a wonder people latched onto this?

In simple terms, as Williams says, “if people are upset, it’s because they’ve gotten screwed.” (94). This is the answer of the populist left, the one that makes sense of the times. The identity-focused liberals and complacent centrists that make up much of the professional classes continue to struggle, even in 2026, to grasp this simple point. Patting yourselves on the back and calling MAGA deplorable is much easier than carefully assessing the confluence of factors over the past few decades that brought us to this point. 

Attaining the American Dream

Most Americans, of all races, aspire to some version of the American Dream. On this point Williams relates the following anecdote: “All they want is a three-bedroom, two-bath cinderblock house,” said a friend from Atlanta, but after the 2008 Recession, “they can’t get one.” The key for Democrats in the US and for leftists abroad is to signal incessantly—and deliver—on the modest expectations of noncollege grads.” (161).

Why are Americans flocking to states like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Arizona, or Nevada? It’s not politics driving this move to southern and sunbelt states, it’s the cost of living. These are places where middle-class people believe they can achieve the American Dream, unlike California or New York. The suburbs of Washington, DC, where I spent most of my childhood, have gone in my lifetime from an affordable middle-class haven to a sprawling metropolis for the top ten percent.

Consider again those markers of adulthood. Men want them but women do too. Look at this stunning data—in 1960, 77% of women and 65% of men had all the main parts of adulthood by age 30: “they had finished school, become financially independent, left home, married, and had a child.” In 2000, 46% of women and 31% of men had. The male number shrunk in half! No wonder so many people, especially men, don’t think things are working for them. Again, without a specific strategy to address men, they will drift to the right, where they find many politicians and commentators eagerly offering them an explanation for their woes. The left-liberal discourse of toxic masculinity and male privilege, so predominant in professional class circles over the past decade, has only succeeded in driving Gen Z men into the arms of the right.

As we can see, part of Williams’ story, which I agree with, is that professional class left-liberal discourse doesn’t know how to talk to struggling men. They won’t win back the working classes until they figure this out. The story of America’s struggling working class applies to men and women of all races. But as Williams recognizes, a key part of the story concerns the recent struggles of men. I’m tinkering with a follow up essay that will address the need for those on the left to address the challenges facing men.

Concluding

Williams gives us this wonderful summation in her concluding chapter: “The Far Right’s formula has been to listen and then provide an explanation for the flood of pain and frustration it hears. I firmly believe it’s the wrong explanation, but here’s the point: you can’t fight a vivid and compelling explanation without an alternative explanation.” (259).

The populist left, a la Bernie Sanders, has been attempting this for the past decade. It will take some version of this universal, economic-focused left politics to reconnect with America’s struggling, multi-racial working class.