Joe Queenan reviews for Barron’s a book that attempts to explain how Democrats lost their political stranglehold over the white working class.
Law professor Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California in San Francisco, not only explains how the Democratic Party lost the support of the white working class but also suggest ways it can get it back.
White Working Class should be read by every mopey, whining, delusional Democrat still trying to figure out how the forecasters got the presidential election so wrong. They got it wrong because they forgot the central animating principle of U.S. politics: It’s always the economy, stupid.
“The working class…has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain, while elites have focused on noneconomic issues,” Williams writes. Elsewhere in the book, she adds, “During an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the white working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked.” …
… The author takes on every tired, knee-jerk complaint that the elites register about the white working class and tosses it back in their faces. Why don’t those crackers get the hell out of Podunk and move to the big city? Because they like it where they live. Why don’t they go to some fancy college? Because they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives paying off their student loans. Why don’t they throw in the towel and take crummy service jobs like everybody else? Because they don’t want to work at McDonald’s. But thanks for asking.
