Democrats can win back sections of the working class they lost to Donald Trump without compromising their commitment to equal rights and compassionate government, according to a new book.
They can do so by seizing control of rightwing talking points and reframing debate around issues like the climate crisis and LGBTQ+ rights.
The left can fight back, too, against how the right wing has claimed masculinity – offering an alternative to Trump’s bellicose interpretation of what it means to be a man.
Such is the verdict of Joan C Williams, a professor at the University of California, whose work focuses on social inequality and race and gender bias, in Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.
Democrats have too often talked about issues in abstract language or in ways that don’t resonate with people’s lives, Williams writes. On climate, some Democrats and liberal “elites”, Williams says, can talk too frequently about vague risks of global warming rather than discussing the real world impact on people’s lives.
When it comes to immigration, talking points about increasing cultural diversity in the US have found little appeal with the white working class, in particular. That’s a voting bloc which has found Trump particularly alluring, and Democrats, Williams said, have failed to make the case that immigrants may well be just as proud of living in America, if not more, than people who have lived here for generations.
Williams gave the example of how Democrats should present climate policies – an issue that Trump, Republicans and the rightwing media have categorized as a waste of money and inconsequential to Americans’ lives.
“Do you talk about climate change as: ‘There are climate deniers that deny science and in their ignorance, are taking us to a toasty future?’ Or do you talk about climate change as creating situations where farmers can no longer farm what their grandfathers farmed - how you have a situation where insurance companies are refusing to offer fire insurance to middle-class people?” Williams asked.
Similarly, Democrats can reclaim messaging over masculinity, Williams believes. Part of Trump’s appeal is his image as a tough, hyper-masculine guy, whether talking tough about confronting foreign leaders, bullying members of even his own party or telling crowds at his rallies to beat up protesters, or claiming that he would be among those marching to the Capitol ahead of what became the January 6 insurrection.
There’s little evidence that Trump is actually the strong figure he presents himself as: he’s nonconfrontational when firing people, often doing so by tweet rather than in person; he avoided the Vietnam draft because of alleged bone spurs; and he left the January 6 rally in a car as his fired-up supporters set off for the Capitol.
Still, his messaging has been effective. But Williams thinks it can be countered without simply mirroring Trump’s puffed-up rhetoric.
“You can characterize Trump’s behavior as not seemly for a grownup man. You can [say] that seemingly behavior for a grownup man is not whining, being strong enough to stand up for yourself, and those you love, and the values that you all share,” Williams said.
“That’s what being a grownup man is all about. That’s not selling out our values.”
The phrase working class is frequently interpreted as describing white, blue-collar workers in the US, despite Black people being more likely to be working class than white people – something historian Blair LM Kelley explained in her book Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.
Black working-class voters have not followed the exodus from the Democratic party to Trump that the white working class or, to a much lesser extent, Latino working-class people have.
But Williams writes that despite consistent support for Democrats from Black Americans, that support should not be taken for granted. She believes that Democrats’ positions on some issues are more likely to reflect the positions of white elites rather than Black, Latino or white, working-class voters, who may hold conservative views on issues like abortion.
The left can appeal to working-class people of all races in similar ways, Williams said. In Outclassed, she quotes Ian Haney López, a scholar on race whose work on “race class narrative” suggests that the left can engage Black, Latino and white working-class voters by emphasizing that the right wing has deliberately set out to divide them in order to distract from economic policies that have created devastating income inequality in the US.
And despite some working-class voters holding conservative beliefs on social and cultural issues, Williams said Democrats do not have to abandon their principles on things like equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, support for women’s rights and commitment to racial equality in order to appeal to what she refers to as “middle-status voters”.
“I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it. I mean, the debate in the United States now is that [some Democrats] are saying: ‘Just talk about the economy. Don’t talk about culture at all.’ And that’s because they assume that if they talk about culture, they have to appeal to these middle-status voters in the same way the far right does – by, for example, bullying trans kids, and they don’t want to do that.”
Williams says “that’s a failure of imagination” and that the left needs to “find our own ways of connecting with these middle-status voters.”
Something telling, Williams notes, is that the Gadsden flag, a yellow flag emblazoned with a coiled snake and the words ‘Don’t tread on me,’ has been co-opted by the right as a stance against government interference and is frequently flown at Trump rallies.
“This is a standard flag among Trump-voter types. Well: ‘Don’t tread on me, butt your nose out of my family.’ Are we talking there about abortion? Or how parents can raise their kid, if the kid is gender non-binary? We don’t talk about that,” she said.
“It’s a process of imagination, of understanding what the values are of the folks who are flocking to the far right and rethinking how we can build bridges, respectful bridges to them, without becoming the far right.”
