The Real Working Class
Or: What the world needs now is class solidarity.
My wife and I had dinner with a well-read friend while I was in the middle of writing Cannon Fodder a couple of months ago. Our friend is, like us, what most people would call upper middle class. So I was trying out my various lines of thinking in conversation, to see if I could convince her that we’re all working class stiffs—and that our class is shooting ourselves in the collective foot by focusing on micro differences like religion, education, and retirement savings while the ruling elite concentrate the nation’s wealth and power into an ever smaller number of pockets. This wasn’t too hard a sell, seeing as how none of us had arrived by helicopter with bodyguards in tow.
During this conversation, our friend recommended I read White Working Class. As someone who never says no to a book recommendation from a good conversationalist, I have a reading list so long it makes me want to believe in reincarnation. But the more I’ve been talking about class consciousness with friends—which is quite a bit lately—the more often this book by Joan C. Williams has come up. So I pulled it to the top of the stack and ripped through it in a couple of days last week.
Good books make you think. I knew this one was good when I started taking argumentative notes around page 10.
White Working Class is a short, sharp book that aims to explain why so many white, non-college-educated Americans feel alienated from liberal elites—and why that alienation so often turns into resentment, mistrust, and right-wing populism. Joan C. Williams argues that this group hasn’t just been economically squeezed; it’s been culturally mocked, politically sidelined, and morally judged by the very people who claim to champion fairness. Her core thesis is that well-meaning liberals have failed to see their own parochialism—their assumptions about success, education, and virtue—and in doing so, have deepened the divide between college-educated professionals and the skilled and unskilled laborers they look down on. Where she really shines is in calling out this class contempt for what it is: a key ingredient in the breakdown of solidarity among working people. That much, at least, lines up with my own view.
Early on, she unintentionally illustrates her point about cluelessness by utterly missing the point of The Simpsons.
“Class consciousness has been replaced by class cluelessness-and in some cases, even class callousness. […] The 1990s brought […] Homer Simpson, who epitomized stereotypes of the working-class man as "crude, overweight, incompetent, clumsy, thoughtless and a borderline alcoholic" (to quote Wikipedia). He works as an inspector at a nuclear power plant, his laziness an ever-present danger to the environment.” (p. 15)
The irony, of course, is that The Simpsons was one of the most subversive shows on television precisely because it refused to flatter the powerful. Homer may be lazy and dimwitted, but the institutions around him—his employer, his government, his church—are often portrayed as far worse: corrupt, incompetent, or absurd. The show doesn’t punch down on working-class life; it punches in every direction, including up. Mr. Burns is a caricature of predatory capitalism. The local politicians are transparently self-serving. And the Simpsons themselves, for all their flaws, are the moral heart of the story—struggling to stay afloat in a world that’s stacked against them. Homer isn’t mocked for being working-class. He’s loved because he’s human, and because viewers—working-class or otherwise—recognize how much the system relies on his labor while offering him very little in return.
I don’t want to make too much of this one moment, but it does set a tone that lingers throughout the book. To be fair, White Working Class is packed with smart cultural observations, and for readers in what Williams defines as the “elite”—especially those who’ve never had a blue-collar friend to share a beer and a belly laugh at Mr. Burns’s expense—it may be the perfect starting point. Her analysis invites empathy, and that’s no small thing. But it also carries a faint but persistent air of distance, like someone trying to explain a community they’ve studied more than lived.
Redrawing the lines
Williams draws her class boundary at what she calls the PME—the professional-managerial elite—defined as households in the top 20% of income with at least one college graduate. In her framework, the great divide in American life is between this credentialed elite and the middle 50% of the population, especially those without a four-year degree. This group, she argues, has been culturally disrespected, economically abandoned, and politically misunderstood by liberals who assume that anyone with a good income and a diploma shares their values, goals, and outlook. Her point isn’t that working-class whites have it worse than anyone else, but that they’ve been written out of the moral imagination of mainstream progressivism.
It’s a compelling argument—until you look closely at the boundary she draws. By using college degrees and income percentiles as her dividing lines, Williams ends up lumping together two very different groups: wage-dependent professionals who work for a living, and a much smaller tier of individuals and institutions with the wealth and leverage to dictate terms to everyone else.
Collapsing the upper-middle (Waylon Smithers) and ruling (Mr. Burns) classes into a monolithic “elite” ignores the fact that most college-educated professionals have more in common economically with cashiers than with hedge fund managers. Even small business owners—often working harder than anyone to keep the lights on—get swept into the elite column despite being just as subject to market whims, supply chain chaos, and rising costs. Owning a home and having a 401(k) doesn’t make someone the ruling class—especially if they still rely on a paycheck or daily operations, have no influence over the broader system, and feel just as squeezed by corporate consolidation, rent hikes, and health insurance premiums as their employees do.
The way I see things, the line is simpler and more honest: if you have to work to survive, you’re working class. That includes truck drivers and teachers, coders and cooks, waitresses and white-collar workers—and yes, self-employed people and small business owners who earn their living through labor, not passive extraction. The true elite are those who don’t rely on work at all, whose income comes from assets or monopolies, and who help shape the policies, markets, and narratives the rest of us live under.
Williams presents the divide between degree-holders and non-degree-holders as a class divide. The real class divide isn’t between the credentialed and the uncredentialed—it’s between those who produce value and those who accumulate more than their fair share of it. The college degree may be culturally divisive, but it’s not structurally defining.
She walks right up to the real problem faced by the entire working class today, but then stumbles by confusing her cultural background, education, and relative economic comfort with a class division.
“The Economic Policy Institute has shown that, though wages rose when productivity did in the decades after World War II, that ascent ended in the 1970s; if it had continued, wages would be twice what they are today. […] The challenge is to explain to the white working class that they have gotten screwed not because they are white but because they are working class.” (p. 11)
This applies to 99% of us, not just the rural culture and/or less educated people. We’ve all seen stagnant wages since the Reagan revolution, while both political parties have taken turns tag-teaming the largest transfer of wealth in US history. It’s true that the regressive nature of inflation means that people who make less have been hit harder—but we would all be better off financially if strong organized labor, community-minded corporate governance, and New Deal federal programs had survived the 1970s.
What Williams does really, really well is describe the cultural divide within the working class—a distinction in values, social cues, and worldviews—between those who live and work in culturally urban, credentialed, and media-saturated environments, and those who don’t. These are real differences. They affect how people interpret politics, trust institutions, and signal identity. And they’ve been used to divide the true working class against itself.
So for the rest of this piece, when I say “working class,” I mean something different from Williams. I’m not talking about a demographic category defined by income and education. I’m talking about everyone who has to work to live. People who sell their time and labor—whether it’s with a wrench, a keyboard, a clipboard, or a conference badge. If you don’t own the system, and you don’t control the rules, you’re part of the working class. And that includes a lot of folks who’ve been taught to believe otherwise.
Divisive identity politics
Once we separate the cultural divide from the class divide, we can start to appreciate the real value of Williams’s analysis—and its limits. She’s right that there’s a profound cultural rift between working-class people who live and breathe the professional world, and those who don’t. And she’s right that that divide is filled with mutual suspicion, condescension, and resentment. Where she stumbles is in letting that cultural divide stand in for class itself.
This becomes especially clear in her discussion of identity politics—one of the key themes of the book. Williams notes that her analysis has met with resistance from fellow progressives, “fed…by a narrative that posits a zero-sum game between race and class.” (p. 10) She argues that the liberal progressive obsession with inclusive language and symbolic virtue has alienated white rural voters, who see “PC culture” not as justice but as snobbery. As she puts it:
“When elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss 'the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,' this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. […] Deriding 'political correctness' becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites.” (p. 16)
There’s truth to that. I’ve seen it myself, and I’ve felt it. When people mock the way others speak, dress, or express their beliefs—especially when it’s cloaked in smug progressive branding—it often lands as pure intellectual contempt. But Williams makes the mistake of tying that reaction only to the non-college-educated, as if resentment toward cultural policing is exclusive to rural or blue-collar voters.
It’s not. Anti-PC backlash runs straight through the educated parts of the working class, too—and into the higher rungs of the managerial class. There’s no shortage of well-paid professionals who roll their eyes at DEI trainings or complain about “cancel culture” while collecting six-figure salaries. Cultural resistance to perceived elitism isn’t limited to those without degrees; it’s a symptom of a broader alienation from institutions that increasingly ask for ideological performance while offering very little material security in return.
This is where the distinction between culture and class really matters. Because once you see the “politics of PC” as a cultural sorting mechanism rather than a true moral divide, it becomes clearer how both sides of the working class get played. One side is told it's backward; the other is told it's special. But neither side has any real power. And both sides are increasingly frustrated, not because they disagree about pronouns, but because they know—whether consciously or not—that the system isn’t working for them.
Williams is right to criticize educated progressives for condescension. But she still talks about the working class as if it’s “them,” not “us.” That positioning allows her to frame political correctness as a wedge between classes, rather than what it really is: a wedge within the working class. One that keeps us fighting over who gets to speak while the owners of the economy decide who gets to eat.
This matters, because it speaks to the real challenge in building solidarity. Williams is rightly concerned that this cultural gap—which she misidentifies as a class struggle—must be bridged “or we will keep making the same mistakes that have helped foster the populist, anti-establishment anger that welled up in the 2016 election.” (p. 17). It is unfortunate that she misses the point: anger at economic injustice is warranted, but has been intentionally misdirected at socially vulnerable and historically marginalized people, thereby fueling intra-class strife.
Unifying structural analysis
We might make real progress if only the urban, cultured, educated working class people that Williams misidentifies as the elite would get angry, too. At one point in the book, she poses a question that strikes at the moral heart of the economic system:
“And if you cannot learn to be 'smart' but possess a strong back and a strong work ethic... should that be diminished to tiny wages with no benefits although the occupation be a societal necessity?” (p. 40)
On this, we’re in full agreement. No one who does essential work—especially the physically demanding kind that society can’t function without—should struggle to make ends meet. That they do isn’t a personal tragedy; it’s a structural disgrace. And it’s not because their labor lacks value. It’s because that value is extracted and hoarded elsewhere.
To her credit, Williams doesn’t stop at wages. She recognizes that racial division has been a deliberate tool used by the elite to keep working-class people from uniting around shared interests. Her reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s wages of whiteness—the idea that poor whites have historically been “paid” in social status to keep them from aligning with Black workers—is an important inclusion. And when she invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a cross-racial coalition for economic justice, she briefly touches a nerve that could have carried the whole book:
“The wages-of-whiteness strategy protected the elite from a cross-race coalition of the disenfranchised. That's the coalition America needs now: the interracial coalition for economic justice Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed a half century ago.” (p. 45)
That coalition still needs to happen. But it won’t without clear structural analysis that separates class from race, gender, and cultural concerns. These are equally important issues, and they will be easier to address once working class cohesion is established.
What Williams calls “elites” are mostly just educated working people themselves—professional and management types who still rely on wages, still rent their futures to institutions, and still have more in common economically with baristas than billionaires. Telling them they have a moral obligation to fix injustice on behalf of their fellow working-class citizens may feel generous, but it’s functionally disempowering. They don’t have the capital. They don’t control policy. Most of them are just trying to survive their own burnout.
“We can communicate that we believe that the injustices experienced by working-class whites are ones elites have a moral obligation to address. […] Would working-class whites be so furious about ‘political correctness’ if they were among those whose challenges were recognized? Not likely. We won't know how much racism falls away until we stop insulting working-class whites and try including them within our ambit of responsibility.” (pp. 49-50)
What we need isn’t noblesse oblige—it’s recognition of a shared stake. Working class identity should absolutely be part of the conversation. But again, she defaults to a framing of responsibility for rather than solidarity with. Her instinct is to humanize, but her framework still divides the cultural urban professional from the rural laborer as if they occupy different economic universes. They don’t. Not in material terms. Not in power. The line between them isn’t about class—it’s about aesthetics, language, and the curated rituals of belonging.
And in the meantime, the actual ruling class—the one that needs no paycheck, fears no recession, and lobbies every party in every election—stays well out of view.
Jobs, dignity, and distribution
Williams opens her section on work with a blunt observation: the working class doesn’t want sympathy, and it doesn’t want handouts.
“What they want is not a social safety net but a job.” (p. 57)
She means this as a defense of dignity—and she’s not wrong to make the point. People want to contribute. They want to be useful. They want to be seen. And for many, the absence of a job isn’t just a financial problem—it’s a crisis of identity. But framing the working-class demand as a preference for jobs over social support runs the risk of repeating a dangerous myth: that dignity only flows from paid labor, and that the only solution to economic injustice is more work.
What people really want is a socially meaningful role—something that makes them feel like they matter and that their effort has purpose. That role doesn’t have to come with a W-2. It might take the form of caregiving, volunteering, organizing, mentoring, or building a life that isn’t legible to the metrics of GDP. The goal isn’t just employment—it’s recognition, agency, and stability. And that can’t be achieved if the only jobs on offer pay poverty wages, offer no control, and leave workers constantly one illness or rent hike away from disaster.
Williams says the solution is to create upskilled jobs for everyone—especially for men who might otherwise reject low-paid, traditionally female-dominated service work. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it skips a more obvious and urgent step:
“The solution is not to consign working-class men to the underpaid, dead-end jobs traditionally provided to women. The solution is to create up-skilled jobs for both men and women.” (p. 62)
It’s a nice thought, but it places all the emphasis on transformation—on building new jobs, training new workers, and nudging people toward economic mobility. That framing assumes the value is missing and needs to be created. But the value is already here. The first solution is not to create new jobs, but to redistribute the value of the jobs we already have—fairly and proportionally—from the true elite ownership class to the working class: professionals, managers, skilled and unskilled workers. If existing jobs paid a living wage and offered basic security, many of them would suddenly seem a lot more dignified.
We don’t need to reinvent work. We need to rebalance the rewards. That starts with raising the floor—not just with minimum wages, but with universal guarantees of healthcare, housing, education, and time. And it means challenging the idea that markets alone should decide what labor is worth. Dignity doesn’t come from labor—it comes from justice. If a job is essential, the people who do it should live like they’re essential. Otherwise, the system isn’t one of work—it’s one of exploitation dressed up in patriotic hustle.
Williams sees the anger. She respects the work. But she still places the burden of reform on the worker—learn new skills, seek better jobs, climb the ladder. What we need instead is a system that starts by honoring the value already being produced, and makes sure it gets shared with the people who make it possible.
An honest look at US history
We’ve had a system that honored work—and we remember it. Anyone over 50 lived through at least part of an era where a single income could support a family, where public institutions were generally trusted, and where the link between effort and reward—while never perfect—was strong enough to feel real. It didn’t last. But its ghost still haunts the national imagination.
Williams picks up that thread in her discussion of public trust. She observes that the working class is often unaware of the many ways they still benefit from government programs—Social Security, public education, infrastructure, disaster relief—because civic institutions have become largely invisible in day-to-day life. She points out how the story of American government has shifted in recent decades—from one of shared accomplishment to one of endless dysfunction. The loss of trust, she implies, isn’t just a response to policy failure—it’s a failure of cultural memory.
And yet, she doesn’t stop at nostalgia. She also sees a crack in the narrative that might be pried open into something useful:
“Two-thirds of Americans say government has a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. But 56% believe the same thing about large corporations. This suggests a potentially useful theme for people interested in restoring faith in government. Americans need government to protect them against overweening corporate power.” (p. 66)
That’s a sharp observation. And it’s a window of opportunity. If people are equally disillusioned with government and corporations, then the way forward isn’t to choose one over the other—it’s to reclaim public power as a counterbalance to private dominance. This is what I meant when I wrote in Growing Pains that when corporations operate like nations, and billionaires have their own space programs, the only force on Earth with even a theoretical capacity to check them is a democratic state—a government of the people, by the people, that still remembers what that phrase means.
Unless we’re going to let things get so bad that pitchforks and torches are the only option, our common understanding of the potential greatness of US democracy needs to be more than a brand, a flag, or a symbol. We need to believe in government as a real mechanism of justice, scale, and accountability. One that can still say “no” to those who otherwise never hear it.
Williams gestures in this direction, especially in her call to revive a more balanced narrative in civic education. She writes:
“I'm not suggesting that we abandon the social history curriculum completely. But we need to make sure all Americans know not only the ways our system has failed but also the ways it's succeeded—if progressives want to keep the social gains we've made in the past 50 years.” (p. 68)
That’s a fair argument. People need to believe that government can work in order to fight for a government that does work. But her call to rebalance the civic story—to revive narratives of shared achievement and national unity—lands very differently in 2025 than it did when the book was published. Because today, that nostalgic story of American greatness isn’t being used to inspire public service or democratic reform. It’s being used to justify authoritarianism.
Trump’s 2025 executive orders have explicitly revived the 1776 Commission and redirected federal education and cultural institutions to promote “patriotic education.” He’s reframing the problem not as government neglect, but as leftist sabotage—claiming that diversity, transparency, and critical thinking are the threats we need protection from. His administration is using the same logic Williams uses—restore trust in America’s institutions—but toward a deeply different goal: whitewashing history and silencing dissent.
That’s the danger of nostalgia without context. It opens the door for authoritarian myths to fill the vacuum left by legitimate disappointment. People don’t distrust government because they forgot FDR. They distrust it because it no longer delivers. The mail still comes. The roads still get paved. But wages don’t rise, the rent is too damn high, and your insulin price might double while Congress adjourns for vacation. You can’t fix that by tweaking the civics curriculum. You fix it by making public power visible again—by reminding people what a responsive, just, democratic government can do in their daily lives.
If you want people to trust the system, you have to make the system earn it.
United we stand
White Working Class is a good book—especially when read as a call to action for those of us from the educated upper-middle class to better understand and find common ground with our fellow working-class citizens doing the skilled and unskilled labor that keeps our society running. Williams writes with empathy and insight, and her core message—that working people have been abandoned culturally, economically, and politically—is one we all need to hear. But it’s regrettable that she, like so many well-educated professionals and managers, still clings to a class identification with the elite.
This isn’t just a semantic error. It’s a political liability. When people who live in just enough comfort to panic only when a ham-handed trade war tanks their retirement portfolio mistake proximity to power for possession of it, we all lose. We lose the clarity we need to build real solidarity. We lose the urgency to challenge structural injustice. And we lose each other—divided by credentials, zip codes, and taste instead of united by labor, struggle, and the simple truth that none of us are free until all of us are free.
So here’s my call to action, two-pronged and simple:
If you’re from an urban or suburban culture that places a high value on education, read this book to better understand your class compatriots—the ones who built your schools and the roads you drive on to get there. If you’re from the other side of the tracks, read this book with empathy for the misguided professionals who think they’re part of the system just because the boot is on their chest instead of their neck.
And when you’re done, talk to someone whose life doesn’t look like yours. Not to convert them, not to explain yourself—but to find the common ground upon which we can finally make a stand. Not for the right or the left. Not for the college-educated or the self-taught. Not for white-collar or blue. But for the working class, in its entirety.
Because empathy is a good place to start.
But power is what we need to finish the job.