Joan C. Williams

First, the idea that culture is completely separate from economics is a mistake. Class is expressed through cultural differences as well as through power dynamics and economic position.

As far as the cultural differences go, one crucial observation is that non-elites turn servitude into honor. In elite circles, we feel entitled to self-development because it’s available to us, and we focus on self-development and maximizing our skills because that’s what succeeds in elite jobs. But if your best hope for stability is a blue- or pink-collar job where you need to show up reliably without attitude to a job that’s often not intellectually stimulating, you don’t feel entitled to self-development. What’s valuable instead is self-discipline, without which you and your family could end up homeless.

When elites go off the rails, either their parents bail them out or they pay for expensive therapy to develop a new narrative about their lives and find a new path. For working people, there are rarely second chances, even fewer than there were forty years ago. You need to keep your nose clean and stay disciplined. So non-elite culture places a high premium on self-discipline and the institutions that anchor it.

Another way to explain it involves different strategies in what I call the “scrum for social honor.” In elite circles, social honor comes from being articulate, intelligent, and from having an esteemed job — that’s why we’re so eager to tell people our professions immediately. But for blue- and pink-collar working people, their jobs don’t offer social honor, less so with each generation. So they seek alternative avenues to social honor through religion and morality. That’s their card in the deck.

Traditional gender roles also matter. Middle-status people — meaning working Americans who occupy the middle 50 percent, sandwiched between elites above them and the poor below them — know they can’t achieve class ideals by becoming like Elon Musk or Barack Obama, but they can achieve gender ideals. When those gender ideals thrived in the 1960s, at least for whites, work life was far more manageable: a father in a blue-collar job, mother working part-time or at home. Compare that to working-class life today, where people often patch together multiple part-time jobs without benefits or childcare. It’s sometimes said they’re nostalgic for white privilege, which captures one dimension, but they’re also looking back to when working-class life functioned.

Joan C. Williams

Middle-status people are desperately holding on to a stable life. Life thus consists of working, coming home, caring for your family day after day, holding it together. Self-discipline means not talking back, controlling impulses, and keeping your nose to the grindstone, because there’s a lot to lose. This is where you get clichés like “making a religion of hard work.” The Left doesn’t understand the politics of hard work. This applies equally to men and women.

But the poor are, in certain respects, more like the rich. For the poor, stability seems impossible, so self-discipline doesn’t seem worth it, since it won’t improve things much anyway. In that sense, elites who aren’t focused on self-discipline are actually more like the bottom quarter than the middle half. They share an adrift quality that makes their cultures markedly different from that of middle-status people.

Joan C. Williams

The Democrats’ coalition used to center on stable lives for blue-collar families. That’s what the New Deal was about. Universal programs fit perfectly with middle-status values: stability and “earning” benefits through hard work and paying in.

Then my generation of hippies arrived with antiwar, abortion rights, and environmental concerns, followed quickly by race and gender issues. They were all noble causes, but what’s missing? If you already have a stable middle-class life, you can worry about the end of the world. If you don’t, you’re worried about the end of the month, as the yellow vest protesters in France put it.

By the 1970s, the issues salient to influential Democrats were those important to people who already had stable careers. These issues matter — they’re all my issues as a typical San Francisco lefty — but this approach doesn’t advance them. Unless we ensure a stable middle-class future for anyone who works hard, we won’t get action on climate change, and we’ll lose abortion rights.

Democrats were seduced away from the politics of the New Deal coalition by neoliberalism: self-regulating free markets, consumers benefiting from globalization. What a vision! But the consummation wasn’t what they had hoped. After World War II, productivity and wages grew together — then, with the introduction of neoliberalism, wages stalled while productivity grew eight times faster. If wages had maintained that growth line, they’d be 43 percent higher today. Three-fourths of that decline happened in the fifteen years after 2000.

People are angry because they got screwed. The economy is rigged. They have legitimate reasons for anger, even if they’re not directing it at those responsible.

I actually think neoliberalism is dead, thanks to Donald Trump. He accomplished what the Left couldn’t — killing neoliberalism in just four or eight years, depending how you count.

Joan C. Williams

Exactly. How hard was that?

The Trump administration is offering up many gifts if Democrats can use them effectively. We should recognize that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is an opportunity to change the narrative that government only takes from average working Americans and gives to the poor. No, government provides the foundation for stable middle-class life, which is never more evident than when DOGE is hacking away at the foundations.

Democrats should be featuring people who waited six hours at Social Security offices. They should be highlighting what the Trump administration is doing to veterans — a cross-class ideal of people who exhibited toughness, self-discipline, and manliness. It’s important to get the messaging right. With regard to Medicaid cuts, the Democrats’ impulse is to say, “Look what’s happening to poor people.” That’s true, but it’s not the best way to reach the target audience. Say instead, “Medicaid cuts mean closing more rural hospitals.”

If we want to really help poor people, we need to break the elite feeling rules that mandate empathy for certain groups and scorn for others — empathy for poor people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, but scorn for people who go to church, respect the military, and embody the basic culture of middle-status America. That’s a losing strategy that ironically puts a target on the backs of the aforementioned marginalized communities, as we are seeing.

We need to stop asking “what’s the matter with Kansas?” and focus more on “what’s the matter with Cambridge?”

Joan C. Williams

Yes, we won that right by not contradicting, not ignoring, but rather relying on core middle-status values. My colleague Matt Coles, who led the American Civil Liberties Union’s gay marriage initiative, held focus groups and listened to how people talked about marriage. They spoke in terms of commitment. What does commitment mean? Stability.

What people don’t really understand is that the gay liberation movement wasn’t initially interested in marriage. They saw it as a lame, patriarchal institution. They focused on legal rights, equality, and celebrating diverse intimacies. The idea of prioritizing marriage was anathema to many leaders. The gay activists trying to legitimize diverse sexual expressions initially thought, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

But the movement as a whole, including many people who originally thought that marriage was a boring goal, made a decision to pivot, and it worked.

Matt Coles tells an amazing story of looking at people lining up to get married at San Francisco City Hall and realizing, “These weren’t doctors and lawyers. These were ordinary people. For them, this was the prom, the wedding, the ability to say, ‘Mom, I got married.'” A lot of gay and lesbian people were middle-class people with corresponding values, and this was the key.

So the movement knowingly pivoted. One of the major goals was always to communicate that gay intimacy is dignified. Instead of fighting it head-on, they achieved far more by connecting with middle-status people’s respect for family, stability, and propriety.

Gay marriage is the only social justice battle we’ve definitively won in forty years. There’s a key message for the Left in here. Your values are your own — don’t compromise them — but politics is about building coalitions that win. The gay marriage movement built a winning coalition and changed what it meant to be gay in this country. We think of it as inevitable, but it wasn’t.