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 blacks. 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, as I discussed in What Time Is It?, drawing on Daniel Bell’s earlier work. 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, ss 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.