Back in 2016, Joan Williams, distinguished professor of law (emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review on why President Donald Trump attracted so many non-college voters. It went viral with almost four million views, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of the publication. Williams’ new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, outlines how the seemingly common view that her fellow progressives must abandon their social causes to win back those non-college-educated voters is wrong. What is required, she argues, is a renewed understanding of class. She introduces her conceptualization of the “diploma divide,” or the gap between Americans with and without college degrees. Her worldview divides the electorate into three class-based groups: the college-educated, upper-class “Brahmin left”, the low-income working (middle) class, and the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. Her argument is that a new coalition between the latter two has shifted politics to the right. In this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, Luigi and Bethany invite Williams to discuss whether our society indeed breaks down so neatly. If it does, how does her breakdown help us understand recent electoral shifts and trends in populism and why the left is on the losing end of both? As she writes in her book and discusses in the episode, “[the Brahmin] left’s anger is coded as righteous. Why is non-elite anger discounted as “grievance?” Together, their conversation sheds light on how the left can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.Over the last four years, Capitalisn’t has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. With this episode, we begin the same project with the left by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?
Back in 2016, Joan Williams, distinguished professor of law (emerita) at UC Law San Francisco, wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review on why President Donald Trump attracted so many non-college voters. It went viral with almost four million views, becoming the most-read article in the 90-year history of the publication.
Williams’ new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, outlines how the seemingly common view that her fellow progressives must abandon their social causes to win back those non-college-educated voters is wrong. What is required, she argues, is a renewed understanding of class. She introduces her conceptualization of the “diploma divide,” or the gap between Americans with and without college degrees. Her worldview divides the electorate into three class-based groups: the college-educated, upper-class “Brahmin left”, the low-income working (middle) class, and the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. Her argument is that a new coalition between the latter two has shifted politics to the right.
In this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, Luigi and Bethany invite Williams to discuss whether our society indeed breaks down so neatly. If it does, how does her breakdown help us understand recent electoral shifts and trends in populism and why the left is on the losing end of both? As she writes in her book and discusses in the episode, “[the Brahmin] left’s anger is coded as righteous. Why is non-elite anger discounted as “grievance?” Together, their conversation sheds light on how the left can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.Over the last four years, Capitalisn’t has interviewed conservative thinkers like Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari to understand how the political right developed a new platform after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. With this episode, we begin the same project with the left by asking: What could be the economic basis for a new progressive platform?
Show Notes:
Read an excerpt from Joan Williams' new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” out now at St. Martin's Press
Quiz: “Are You in a Class Bubble?”
What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan Williams, Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016
Joan Williams: I have to stop asking what’s the matter with Kansas and start asking, what’s the matter with Cambridge?
Bethany: I’m Bethany McLean.
Phil Donahue: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea?
Luigi: And I’m Luigi Zingales.
Bernie Sanders: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
Bethany: This is Capitalisn’t, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.
Milton Friedman: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed?
Luigi: And, most importantly, what isn’t.
Warren Buffett: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don’t think we should kill the capitalist system in the process.
Luigi: Back in 2016, Joan C. Williams, who is a professor at UC Law San Francisco, wrote a piece that was read by almost four million people, the most in the history of the Harvard Business Review. It was about why Trump had attracted so many noncollege voters.
She wrote: “For months, the only thing that surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it? It’s the class culture gap.”
She went on to point out that the white working class resents professionals but admires the rich. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. If you want to connect with white, working-class voters, place economics at the center.
She concluded her piece with a quote from a major Democratic operative: “‘You are saying exactly what the Democrats need to hear,’ she mused, ‘and they’ll never listen.’ I hope now they will.”
Bethany: I guess that hope was not realized. I also remember all the promises from the mainstream publications after that 2016 election that they were going to broaden their perspective and start talking to more people outside the urban elite bubble.
But that faded. Maybe people thought it could fade. And then, of course, the divides and the lack of desire to understand them, the dismissal of those who didn’t share your views, for example, on COVID, got worse in the pandemic.
Luigi: By the way, in the notes for this podcast, we’re going to share a test to see how much you belong to the bubble, and we’re going to reveal our scores in the next episode.
There is nothing like a sound defeat to focus minds. Here we are again. The new ideas and platforms are the children of the most bitter defeats. The Reagan revolution was the child of the Goldwater defeat, the Clinton wave of 12 years of Republican victories. The current Trump revolution is the child of Obama’s triumph.
Each of these revolutions has changed the relationship between capitalism and the American public, which is why here, at Capitalisn’t, our focus is on what Trump’s victory means.
In the last four years, we investigated how the right developed a new platform after being defeated by Trump. We interviewed Oren Cass, Patrick Deneen, and Sohrab Ahmari. Now, we are starting to do the same with the left. What could be the basis for a new progressive platform?
Bethany: Williams’s words are certainly relevant again, and she has a new book, which now brings her total to 12, in addition to the over 100 articles she’s written.
The title of her new book is Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. She argues that the conventional view, which is that progressives—and she very much identifies as one—have to abandon their social causes is wrong and that there actually is a holy grail, that Democrats can win back voters without compromising on progressive values.
She writes: “Scolding myself and my friends to abandon causes we have dedicated our lives to won’t work. I have been a pain in the butt about gender and race for decades. That’s the only way women and people of color ever make progress. We are used to being told we should put our own issues aside, and those of us who are effective don’t follow that advice.”
Luigi: As she did in 2016, she puts economics at the center of the platform. She writes: “After the fall of the Soviet Union, the so-called end of history reflected the belief that free trade and free markets would raise GDP, lift billions out of poverty, and even lure China in the direction of democracy. It was unfashionable to worry about how the new wealth will get distributed.”
Another gift to the right is to deny that economic populism is about economics. She also writes, “By electing Donald Trump in 2016, noncollege voters got precisely what they wanted, which was to smash the neoliberal consensus.
Bethany: She points out the Democrats are shockingly clueless about this still. I thought this anecdote was pretty stunning. She writes: “In 2023, Rep. Marcy Kaptur wowed her Democratic colleagues with a pretty simple chart. It showed a sea of blue on the first page, which listed congressional districts with the highest median incomes.
“The second page, which listed districts with the lowest, was a sea of red. Her fellow Democrats were shocked. They still thought of themselves as representing the have-nots.”
These issues are obviously critically important to the future of the Democratic Party, and this isn’t just a national issue. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a local one. Williams writes that “in nearly 20 western and southern states, Democrats are virtually shut out of statewide offices,” largely due to their inability to attract noncollege white voters. She notes that Democrats simply can’t win nationally, either, unless they figure this out.
And she says that Democratic strategists often note this conventional wisdom that Democrats should just give up on rural and Rust Belt voters who are never coming back, but that it simply is unrealistic in a political system with winner-take-all elections and districts defined by geography.
She notes that Democrats have lost ground among nonwhite voters in almost every election over the past decade and that, because working-class whites are such a large percentage of the electorate, Democrats simply can’t afford many defections among people of color and still win.
Luigi: Of course, we have a lot of questions, too. Her worldview divides the world, essentially, into three groups: what she calls the Brahmin left; the working class, by which she means the middle class; and the shadowy group that she calls the right-wing merchant class, which pushes for economic policies that benefit the rich. We’re not sure it breaks down that easily, but nevertheless, let’s talk to her and see.
Bethany: One of the fascinating things you write about is what you call a cottage industry that denies that economic populism is actually about economics. Why is this?
Joan Williams: People have a variety of excuses. One is that in the United States, it was very popular—less so after the 2024 election—to say it was all about race.
Another common explanation is, “Oh, those blue-collar jobs are gone because of technology. It’s delusion to think that they’re anything but gone,” as if that completely eliminates people’s responsibility for ensuring good jobs for noncollege graduates. Both of those are really flawed, and I think the reason that these excuses keep getting thrown up is something psychologists call identity threat.
There are excuses that allow that group, my group, the Brahmin left, to say, “We don’t have to listen to the voices of those ignorant, noncollege voters who are seduced by conspiracy theories and are tricked by the con man, Trump.” It’s an excuse why the Brahmin left can’t hear the voices of the working class. It’s an excuse they give to themselves.
Luigi: Can you discuss with our listeners your theory about why so many people fall for conspiracy theories and, in particular, the connection between this and the Virgin Mary?
Joan Williams: Yes. In 1946, my mother, a Jew, married my father, a WASP. Their first argument was about the virgin birth. You have to admit that, objectively, it’s kind of unlikely that that happened, but just the fact that it is unlikely means that, if you can persuade people to believe it, they have a lot invested in that way of approaching the world. Otherwise, they look kind of silly.
In many ways, I think the “stop the steal” and the conspiracy theories had a similar dynamic, where they were more of a social bonding mechanism than a search for objective truth.
“Stop the steal” is a great example. I think it attracted people who really felt they had been ripped off by the economy. Actually, they’re right about that. And Trump is so adept at connecting with people that he chose that phrase, “stop the steal,” that elided the difference between stealing the election, which, of course, didn’t happen, and stealing their futures, which, of course, did happen.
Over 90 percent of Americans used to do better than their parents. Now, it’s just an even shot. And the percentage of productivity that went to workers has fallen very sharply, and workers know that. Workers know that they’ve been ripped off.
Luigi: One thing I found fascinating about your book—and I don’t know to what extent this is Pierre Bourdieu, to what extent it is you, to what extent it is both, and if you would actually distinguish it for me, you’ll do me a favor. But the reason people of lower classes have a different sense of morality and a different set of values, different culture, that dichotomy—culture versus economics—is actually a false one because different economic conditions drive different cultural conditions, and the emphasis on responsibility that we see among middle-class and lower-class people is driven by necessity.
The reason solidarity is so important is because you are in tough jobs that require fellow people at the job to help you out and protect you in case there is a problem, in a way in which we Brahmins don’t have. It’s very easy to be condescending or look down to a different kind of morality, but in fact, we need to understand that. Can you explain that and tell me to what extent that is Bourdieu, to what extent that is you, and to what extent it is both?
Joan Williams: It’s both Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, and my life. If you are growing up in a family where the good job—whether it’s a routine white-collar job or a blue-collar job or a pink-collar job—requires you to get up every day, get there on time without an attitude, and is not very intellectually stimulating, what you’re going to try to inculcate in your children and yourself is self-discipline, the kind that can make you successful in that kind of job. You’re going to very highly value traditional institutions that anchor self-discipline, whether it’s religion or the military or traditional family values, traditional gender roles.
When Democrats had a very solid coalition with blue-collar families, both elites and blue-collar families shared a pretty traditional morality. My father was a New Deal Democrat. He thought feminism was ridiculous. And then my generation of hippies came in, and we saw ourselves in a very self-congratulatory way of trashing all outdated social structures, including gender roles. We were interested in social inequality and race and gender and climate change. At that point, the culture of the Brahmin left became very different than the culture of the settled middle class, what we often call blue collar but is actually the middle 50 percent.
That culture clash is what created culture wars, and then the right learned how to weaponize those culture wars to pry workers away from liberal parties. Meanwhile, unfortunately, all of this was happening at just the time when workers’ futures were going up in smoke very often, and the result is that people in the middle got very, very, very, very angry.
My crowd, of course, and this includes me, I’m very focused on climate change, but when I was reading about the yellow-vest movement in France, there was one very common sign that said, “Macron”—who of course was the French president representing, in this case, the Brahmin left—“Macron cares about the end of the world. We care about the end of the month.”
That’s exactly the kind of culture clash that the far right has weaponized so effectively, and it’s really a one-trick pony, but they only need the one trick because we keep falling into the trap. I’ve been saying the same thing for 20 years. It’s really time to stop falling for the same old move.
Luigi: In your story, you didn’t mention the Vietnam War that I think plays a pretty crucial role—
Joan Williams: It did.
Luigi: The Vietnam War generation became Democrats because of the opposition to the war in Vietnam and started to gain power in Congress after the Watergate scandal. The generation of the Watergate babies, as they were called, are the ones who started to look down on the union workers, who, by the way, supported the war in Vietnam. What role did the Vietnam War play in all this?
Joan Williams: The Vietnam War did play a role in the hippie revolt, which was, in retrospect, a revolt of upper-middle-class kids against their upper-middle-class parents, and so was read by blue-collar people as just another exercise of privilege by irresponsible, elite kids who didn’t need to seek security because the security was daddy’s bank account. The issues that created this cultural rift eventually became a cultural difference between elites and nonelites.
You’re right, the Vietnam War played a very central role in that. We see the echoes, though, today, and this is particularly true in Europe, but it’s also very true in the United States. There is no far-right populist movement that has been successful without centering the issue of immigration. The issue of immigration is similar to the Vietnam War issue. It goes back to a very human instinct, which is to stress whatever form of high status you have.
My crowd, we stress that we’re members of a global elite. We stress class because that’s the highest status we have. But Americans—and this is true of Italians, too, and many other countries in Europe . . . For people who are British but working class, being British is one of the highest-status categories that they have, that they inhabit. And so, working-class people are more patriotic than elites are because each group is stressing the status that gives them social honor.
It’s what I call the scrum for social honor, which is a very important spring of a lot of social behavior. Back in the Vietnam War, you have the middle-class Americans, very patriotic, and elites, not patriotic, even burning flags and such. The way this plays out in Europe is that you have a Brahmin elite that is very pro-Europe, and you have middle-class Italians who are voting for Giorgia Meloni. The globalism versus patriotism vector of politics that’s been going on since the Vietnam War is also an artifact of this class dynamic that I’m trying to describe.
Bethany: One of the other interesting things you articulate is this idea of predistribution versus redistribution. You quote a researcher estimating that nearly half of Democrats’ loss of less-educated voters over the past several decades can be directly attributed to this focus on redistribution instead of predistribution, where what middle-income Americans want is predistribution.
You also note that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have strong support for higher taxes in order to support redistribution, but they don’t want predistribution. Why did the Democratic Party and the powerful people in the Democratic Party become attached to redistribution as opposed to predistribution?
Joan Williams: Just to define the terms, predistribution means who gets what through the labor market. In the ’30s, Democrats were very focused on who gets what through the labor market and through universal government programs to maintain stability so that hard work would lead to a stable middle-class life.
In the ’70s, and actually, even before that, in the ’60s, liberals’ attention focused on the poor. They sort of figured, “Oh, the working class, they’re doing fine, but the group that deserves our empathy and activism is the poor.”
We had two things: a new set of government programs that were means tested so that you are only eligible if you’re quite poor. That, actually, is a recipe for turning the middle class against government, which is exactly what happened because if you get just one notch too far into the middle class, you get zero, and you have to work hard at a not-very-fulfilling job to pay taxes so that somebody who “isn’t working” can get benefits.
The problem with means-tested programs is that they end up pitting the have-a-littles against the have-nots, to quote one blue-collar homemaker. Very often, Democrats have been attracted to this because we need to design programs to reach “the most vulnerable.”
One of the things to recognize is that if you do design programs to reach the most vulnerable, they will be politically very, very vulnerable, and the benefits, they’ll be unstable, they’ll be highly stigmatized. That does not make sense.
The left has to understand that it’s the right’s move to make programs means tested. The left’s move has to be to make programs universal. I’ve been trying to get people for several years to use this tagline: hard work should pay off. Hard work should yield a stable middle-class standard of living. That’s what the left should stand for.
Luigi: One of the many things I found insightful in your book is that the hate toward government, the hate toward bureaucracy from the middle class, is a result of the fact that it used to be the case that government jobs were not particularly desirable, but as the middle class has eroded, as the middle class is dropping and feels a sense of insecurity, government jobs look much more secure and, to some extent, there is the envy of the middle class that is falling into the lower class. They start to hate the ones who are privileged. Part of the love for Elon Musk’s chainsaw is the result of that insecurity.
Joan Williams: I think that’s so insightful. I’ve been trying to get someone to publish an op-ed saying exactly that.
I have studied the working poor because I did a randomized controlled trial shifting Gap sales workers onto more stable schedules. About a generation ago, if you worked in retail, you had a full-time benefited job at Macy’s. Then, the 1 percent figured out they could make more money if they gave everybody part-time jobs without benefits and unstable schedules, so that nobody would ever work one hour when they weren’t being “productive.” You have the growth of precarity, it’s often called, in working-class jobs.
What Musk is doing is creating exactly the same kinds of precarity in government jobs, and that makes sense. From the point of view of the 1 percent, it’s fantastic if people are terrified every day of the week they’re going to lose their jobs. It makes the power over them virtually absolute.
Bethany: I couldn’t tell if this was a source of optimism for the left or a source of incredible pessimism for us all, that you’ve argued that part of the solution is ironic in that life is getting harder for everyone, that the path forward is to link some of the economic woes of the missing middle with those of younger, college-educated voters, who are also now struggling to buy homes, afford child care, provide good jobs. Is that a positive or is it actually a huge negative for the state of our economy, or is it both?
Joan Williams: Certainly, in terms of the coalition, one of the challenges has been that the Brahmin left has priorities that are not particularly economic. They’re climate change, racial justice, abortion rights, all of which I prioritize, of course, but the issue is not what makes me feel whole. The issue is, do I have a coalition that can win? If you’re focusing attention on, “Do I have a coalition that can win?” you have to talk to other people and find out what they want, if you want them to join you.
DOGE really dramatizes this, but so does the swing of younger voters to Trump, particularly men. It reflected that younger voters, even some of them with college degrees, were so angry because of their failure to launch economically that they went to the guy talking about economics, not to the girl talking about defense of democracy and abortion rights.
Am I happy that the college-educated people’s future now sucks as bad as working-class people’s? No, I’m not happy, but it does present an opportunity to focus the Brahmin left back on economic issues.
Luigi: I really appreciate your criticism from the inside because very few people are able to do it, but maybe you go a little bit too far in that direction and don’t look enough at the bigger picture.
Before reading your book, my view was that the reason all the debate is cultural is because it was basically in the interest of the moneyed elite to have this debate because both parties economically are very similar. They need to differentiate themselves for the election and to pretend that there is democracy, and they differentiate on the things that are orthogonal to money, which are gender, civil rights, et cetera.
The Brahmin elite got the cake and ate it, too, for most of this period because they became rich. They got most of their civil rights, and on occasion, they won an election. 2016 was really an accident. With 30,000 votes in a different direction, they would have won. In a sense, everything was working fine. I think 2024 is really the watershed when they realized that they are losing.
But by and large, these mechanisms work, and in my interpretation, I think it was all financed by the huge influx of money in elections. The reason why economic rights are off the table is because the donors, both the Democrats and the Republican donors, want them off to the side. That’s not necessarily the fault of the Brahmin left. The fault of the Brahmin left is not to understand the game.
Joan Williams: I actually partly agree but partly disagree with you. People like Rupert Murdoch understood and tolerated intensely anti-elitist rhetoric, including railing against economic elites, and have for decades. One study of Tucker Carlson for a five-year period found that something like 70 percent of his programs railed against elites, and of course, that’s part of the Murdoch empire. The far right has always understood that they need to tolerate anti-elitism. Democrats haven’t. Democratic donors haven’t.
Luigi: As you know, there is a lot of soul-searching on the left, in the Democratic Party, about what the new platform should be. Particularly, there is another book that is receiving a lot of attention among the Brahmin left, that is, the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Joan Williams: Yes, Derek Thompson.
Luigi: What do you think of that book as an alternative to your position?
Joan Williams: I think it’s a step in the right direction, but it’s solving for a very specific problem. Certainly, the idea that we have to communicate that we on the left are working toward a society where everybody has access to housing, to good jobs, abundance in that way, seems totally right.
Also, the idea that we on the left should acknowledge that regulations sometimes have been abused and have not been designed to be very user-friendly is also very, very important and very well taken.
On the other hand, that’s getting at a very important slice of the problem, but I think that, in order to really turn this situation around, we’re going to have to stop asking what’s the matter with Kansas and start asking, what’s the matter with Cambridge?
We’re going to have to understand that our preferences, our politics, our values, our ideals in the Brahmin left, they’re very class-based, and that if we want a coalition, we have to not just live our values because that’s living out our class privilege. We have to have that leap of imagination to understand what the life is of somebody who doesn’t have the same horizons and the same privilege that we do and see how we can connect with what they want.
The abundance agenda does that in two ways, but we need to do that in many, many ways, including by talking American rather than talking articulate.
Bethany: This is such a depressing question, but do you worry that with the advent of AI and with the fact that so many jobs are gone that we’ve missed the moment, that the damage has been done? I guess I worry that this reflection comes too late in the game, and there’s a new game going forward, and it’s not clear what that new game is going to be, but it’s too late to go back and right the wrongs of the past, especially when AI is coming for a lot more of the jobs that we’ve been talking about.
Joan Williams: And the jobs of college-educated people.
Bethany: And the jobs of college-educated people, too.
Joan Williams: You can look at that in two ways. First of all, it sucked when blue-collar jobs were lost, and it’s going to suck when college-educated people’s jobs are lost. What we saw in the last election is that young people are already feeling the affordability crisis. Wait until they lose their jobs.
Luigi: You are very polite in your response about Abundance, but I thought that you would say that what it lacks is more a politics of predistribution because abundance is very much in the old neoliberal way of maximizing the pie and then distributing. There’s not much discussion, as far as I remember, of antitrust.
One of the points that I love in your book is you said that one of the defects of the Democratic Party is that in 1992, it abandoned an antitrust agenda, and it resurrected it only recently. Isn’t that missing from the abundance agenda?
Joan Williams: Well, thank you, Luigi. You know what’s missing from the abundance agenda? I really like that analysis. I’m going to have to go back and look at the book again with that in mind.
Certainly, the out that Democrats have taken for far too long under the influence of neoliberalism is that the path to economic stability for everyone was in more growth, more growth, more growth. One of the things that we’ve seen loud and clear since 2016—and the tariffs, God knows, express this—is that people who formerly had a stable middle-class life who now don’t, who are on the edge of this precarity, they do not care about economic growth if they don’t get their bite of the pie.
That is the predistribution part. We can’t just grow ourselves out of this. Again, workers’ wages used to rise when productivity did in the decades after World War II. If that had continued, workers’ wages would be about 42 percent higher.
That has nothing to do with lack of abundance. That has something to do with the problems of distribution, that if you work hard, you should be able to access a stable middle-class life, and you can’t when your wages are 42% lower than they should be.
Luigi: So . . .
Bethany: Luigi and I are in person, for once, by the way. I think the only time we’ve seen each other in person in the last five years has actually been at Stanford.
Luigi: That’s true.
Bethany: This is pretty shocking. We’re sitting next to each other and still being civil. This is astonishing.
I still am not sure about her characterization in the book. The thing that I liked the least about it was this characterization of this right-wing merchant class because I think that exists on the left as much as it exists on the right. I thought her answer for why that could be overcome was quite chilling but potentially also quite accurate.
Her answer was that Trump’s policies are smashing everything, basically. And the direction of the world where white, college-educated voters are no longer able to live in stability means that that alliance of the merchant class on both the left and the right is going to have to break down. I thought that was interesting, albeit scary for our world order.
Luigi: I agree with you that I think she is a bit too rough in characterizing the merchant right as a big group. The ultra-wealthy rich are mostly Republican, but not all of them. There are a lot of them on the Democratic side, and they want the same stuff that the so-called Republicans do, and it’s not clear that they’re not going to get that from Trump.
We will see how he can wreck the economy. But remember, there is a big chunk of the working-class population that does not have a 401(k), for which not only does the drop in the stock market not mean anything, it might actually mean that they feel more on equal footing with somebody else, which might be good for them.
The super-rich are going to find other ways to make money. Everybody points to the fact that Tesla has lost a lot in the stock market recently, so much so that Elon Musk is going back to work for Tesla, but they are ignoring the fact that there is new regulation coming up for satellites, and it is giving SpaceX an effective monopoly on space.
This is stuff that maybe is not immediately reflected in the stock market—SpaceX, by the way, is not publicly traded—but it is there to stay in the long term. Space is the new frontier, and he’s getting a monopoly on the new frontier. Space, I’m sorry to report, is limited, at least the one that is geostationary, whatever. If there are a lot of satellites from Elon Musk, the second-comers are left behind.
Bethany: Yes, I agree with all of that. I guess the way I would think about the last 30 or 40 years is that the rich among both Democrats and Republicans actually had a pretty shared economic worldview and a pretty shared view of what the policies were to further their interests.
I still think the point that that is breaking down is a pretty valid one. It’s certainly breaking down for children of the well-off, who no longer have their own path toward economic stability, no matter where they graduated from and how they graduated.
It’s breaking down for a lot of people who believed that Trump cared about the stock market and who are seeing their livelihoods and their way of being decimated by tariffs. That is going to force some kind of political realignment that we don’t see coming right now and may mean that a lot of people who did fundamentally believe in that old neoliberal consensus because it worked for them and who would rather see redistribution than predistribution because that seems like a better outcome may be forced to think about it differently.
Luigi: Remember, the Roman emperors were ruling very effectively by distributing bread and games that basically meant Christians being eaten alive by lions in the Colosseum. I think that the spectacle of others suffering more is a pretty good spectacle that creates consensus.
Trump is fantastic in going after the new targeted class. I found this new acronym called MANGOs. We are MANGOs.
Bethany: What’s a MANGO? What are MANGOs?
Luigi: MANGOs are media, academics and NGO organizations. It’s basically the elite we belong to that is really being attacked in a major way by Trump and his MAGA supporters, with a lot of consensus among the MAGA people in the lower class.
Did you read that the attorney general of DC is going after the Wikimedia Foundation, the foundation supporting Wikipedia? The explanation is that it’s an instrument for foreign propaganda, and so they want to take away the nonprofit status of Wikimedia, which is one of the greatest institutions in the world, in my view.
Bethany: No, I hadn’t seen that, and that’s depressing. Well, I was trying to find some silver lining in all of this, so thank you for blowing a hole in my silver lining or for turning my silver lining black. Thanks, Luigi.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the conversation, and I do think that the statistics she has pointing out that you cannot blame all of the defection of the working-class voters on racism are really important for everybody to grapple with it. That is both true and not true. Part of her book points out how ingrained racism is among the very people who would most say they are not racist as well. I actually think that recalibration of the role of racism is important for everybody to realize.
Luigi: I completely agree, but I’m a pessimist by nature. I take it that it’s easier to be pessimistic than to be optimistic, so I’m trying now to be optimistic, but I do not see how this shift is taking place. One possibility is really that the middle class erodes to the point . . . But even if it erodes to the point, the more instability you get, the more you get support in the Trump camp.
I think there should be a cultural transformation, but it’s difficult to run this cultural transformation because the Democrats are run by an educated elite.
You were talking about Biden, and it’s true that Biden had a lot of policy that could be constructed as helping the middle class, but one of the biggest ones that was stopped by the Supreme Court was a complete disaster, the forgiveness of college loans.
This was really targeted to the Brahmin left because the majority of American people do not have college loans because they didn’t go to college. And the ones who are more responsible, who tend to be the children of poor people, actually paid off their loans. This was really a gift given to the irresponsible Brahmin left and was sold as a popular policy.
Bethany: I tend toward the pessimistic, too, and I think you could pretty easily write a narrative that these class divides continue to get worse and worse, and that as life feels more and more unstable for everybody, the result isn’t coalitions but more out-and-out warfare.
I’m going to choose to be infected by her optimism and see that maybe the shakeup will result in some new coalitions that help us do what I think is really, really important. What she has said over and over again, which I agree with most fundamentally, is that if you’re willing to work hard, you should be able to support yourself. That should be a fundamental tenet of American life. And it has not been for a long time.
Luigi: I agree. But I think that it should start with a cultural revolution on the left, actually having respect for hardworking people and not condescendence. Listen more to their voices.
When Biden stepped down, it went so fast that it wasn’t really possible, but I was trying to push the idea of Hélène Landemore that the most correct way to choose a candidate would have been to randomly draw a set of Democrats and have them, in a constitutional convention or in a citizen assembly, decide by themselves who would be the proper candidate. This would have been a very bottom-up choice. Of course, the Democrats chose to do exactly the opposite. That should be a cultural revolution inside the Democratic Party to listen to the people.
Bethany: It should be, but to cite our own Matthew Lucky’s research on this, it’s not as simple as listening to the people. It’s the people wanting to be listened to.
I think that there’s an arrogance in that that I’m having trouble putting my finger on. Yes, I like the lack of arrogance inherent in the idea that the problems all came from the Brahmin left. But I don’t know that I like the arrogance then that results from that, that it’s all ours to fix because maybe people don’t want to be listened to. It’s not that simple.
The hatreds go deep, I think, on both sides, or the lack of respect goes deep on both sides. It’s not just rhetoric and learning how to adopt the language of class. They have to want their language to be adopted.
I think most of the time when it is, it feels very put on and very false. I hate nothing more than when politicians refer to people as folks. That’s just one of my pet peeves, “folks.” It feels like some argument on this rhetoric side is for a little bit more in the folks way of speaking.
Luigi: Absolutely. If this is just a strategy, it’s going to backfire because people are not stupid, and they recognize the lack of authenticity. That’s why I love the citizen-assembly agenda because as Hélène says, “You should have experts on tap, not on top.” This is very humbling for us because we tend to like to be on top, but that’s the only way to regain the trust of the American people at large.
Bethany: I think that that makes a lot of sense, and I like that way of thinking about it, even though letting go of power structures is really hard for people. I was talking to the journalism fellows here earlier, and one of them asked me about my red flags for CEOs. One of my red flags for most people is when they say they like to be disagreed with, and they like to be challenged, and they like to hear other people’s points of view. No one does. Everyone wants to be agreed with. The trick is to make yourself do it anyway.
I don’t know what the forces are to make people . . . I think her point would be people are going to have to do it, but I don’t know what the forces are to make people do something that is really unpleasant.
I do think it’s human nature. It’s not just class. It’s human nature to want to consider yourself better than and different from other people. I don’t think she’s arguing for just a rhetorical change, but really that idea of then having fundamental respect for other people, I don’t know that it’s the way humans are wired. We like to differentiate rather than coalesce, and we don’t like to give up our power structures.
Luigi: Certainly, we don’t like to give away power.
Bethany: Now, how did you get me back to being negative?
Luigi: Yeah, I was trying to be optimistic, and then you blew my optimism.
Bethany: I was being so positive for a while and somehow, you hit a pressure point, or you said something that flipped me back into total negativity.