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.