When Joan Williams appeared on my screen one gray Amsterdam evening a week after the US presidential election, she was “shocked and anxious” about Donald Trump’s victory. “But you guys have been here before,” she noted, referring to the election of Geert Wilders and the Netherlands’ first far-right government. Americans, too, had been here before — how that happened was the subject of Williams’s 2017 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Yet even she couldn’t shake a sense of bewilderment and foreboding in the election’s immediate aftermath.

Thomas Frank, who I spoke with separately earlier that evening, expressed surprise too — not at the election results, but at pundits suddenly rediscovering his 2004 modern classic, What’s the Matter With Kansas? “They’re like, ‘Wow, you were so prescient. How did you do that?’” Frank told me. “It’s funny, because I wrote it in my thirties. How can that still be a serious commentary on our current present? But it seems it is. And actually, that says a lot.”

For both Frank and Williams, this all feels like Groundhog Day. Some months before Trump won his first presidency in November 2016, Frank had published a no-holds-barred philippic against the Democratic Party leadership titled Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? The story Frank told in that book was one of a party led astray by the influx of postmaterialist academics in the late 1960s and early ’70s who agreed on one thing: the material emancipation of the working class had been accomplished, so now the party had to move to a new postmaterialist political frontier. From that moment onward, the economy became the reserve of Ivy League–trained economists and drifted out of political sight, while cultural issues became the litmus test of progressiveness.

For Williams, a feminist legal scholar based in California, Trump’s 2016 victory was a wake-up call. As the polling results came in, she retreated to her study to write an essay critiquing Democratic Party leadership for its dismissive attitude toward non-college-educated working-class voters. Drawing on personal experience, Williams illustrated the humiliating effects of elite condescension. The essay, published on the Harvard Business Review website, became one of the site’s most-read and most-commented-on pieces. A year later, Williams expanded it into the acclaimed book White Working Class.

Eight years on, for both writers, the question is not why Trump won but why the Democrats lost. Then as now, the explanation lies in the chasm of lifestyles, fears, and expectations between elites and the working class. Where Frank emphasized the changing of the guard within the Democratic Party and the trahison des clercs he described in Listen, Liberal, Williams focused on the microsociological effects of working-class wounded pride, shame, and anger.

Both have largely stayed out of the public limelight during the Biden years. Frank has dedicated himself to a new book project investigating the postwar history of creativity, while Williams has written Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, due in May 2025. In the interview below, both provide trenchant insights on Trump’s unexpectedly robust election victory.

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Contributors

Thomas Frank is a political analyst, historian, and journalist. He cofounded and edited The Baffler magazine. He is the author, most recently, of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

Joan C. Williams is an American feminist legal scholar, the founding director at the Center for WorkLife Law, and a distinguished professor of law at UC Law San Francisco. She is the author of several books, including White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Ewald Engelen is professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam and a feature writer for De Groene Amsterdammer. He is working on a book about the farmer protests in Europe.

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