Joan C. Williams Discusses Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class & How to Win Them Back

BPL Presents features Joan C. Williams on her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics. The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands—or so argues Joan C. Williams. In Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide,” while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege.

With illuminating stories—from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)—Outclassed shows how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions that disadvantage the working-class.

Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

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Described as having “something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco. Photo credit Olena Jacenko