White Working Class

WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

JOAN C. WILLIAMS

Harvard Business Review Press, 2017, 180 pages

Here’s something unusual. A member of the liberal (“I have devoted my life to gender and race issues”) elite (Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, law professor) writing about the white working class, who delivered the 2016 Presidency to Donald Trump, without contemptuously writing them off, Hillary-style, as “racists, bigots, sexists, xenophobes”.

Professor Joan Williams (University of California) says that, over the last four decades, “progressive elites have stopped connecting with the working class”, have “insulted or ignored” them, have not understood, or wanted to understand, the lives of white workers. Liberals who would never utter a racist comment, she says, are blasé about stereotyping low-income whites as rednecks – the “last acceptable ethnic slur in polite society”, along with ‘white trash’, ‘trailer trash’ and similar casual class epithets.

White workers, says Williams, deserve respectful consideration. For an extended time now, they have experienced job loss, stagnant real wages, increased poverty, higher mortality, more substance abuse, quiet despair. In the 2016 Presidential election, however, their political quietude was stunningly converted into anger at the political establishment - ‘we’re voting with our middle finger’, said a Trump supporter, quoted by Williams, in South Carolina.

White workers’ resentment at their lot is solidifying, not only against the establishment political elite but often enough against those the elite lavish with attention and taxpayer dollars. Williams cites, for example, her sister-in-law who works for a child care centre which provides free child care for poor women, many of whom do not work, many of them ‘people of colour’, whilst herself earning so little she could barely afford to pay for her own child care and was materially worse off than the subsidised poor she served.

Like Williams’ sister-in-law, many white workers feel not only “totally forgotten” but taken advantage of to fund, through their taxes, the “irresponsible and lazy” poor who have not put in a “lifetime of hard work” (doing, usually, “a menial job they hate for forty years”), nor practised “rigorous thrift and self-discipline”. Obamacare, for example, gave free health insurance cover to more of the poor but at the cost of massive premium increases for the employed working class to pay for it.

The Left, however, which now trades in the political currency of ‘identity’ (blacks, Latinos, migrants, etc.) rather than class, has stopped caring about the white working class. The reciprocal response has been a terminal loss of support from white workers who once, in FDR New Deal times, anchored a Democrat political coalition of “blue-collar workers, white Southerners and African-Americans” that delivered seven of ten presidential elections to the Democrats between 1932 and 1968, with much of the white worker support delivered by strong labour unions (which organised a third of the private sector workforce fifty years ago but only 6% now).

The modern Democrats have now become the enthusiastic architects of job-killing, wage-cutting, free-trade-negotiating, neo-liberal capitalist globalisation, keeping their corporate donor base happy but slowly immiserating, and alienating, their former white worker voting base which has been “asked to swallow a lot of economic pain” during the process - in the decade from 2000, notes Williams, over 42,000 factories have closed (some due to recession but most moving overseas) with the loss of six million manufacturing jobs.

As a result, white workers have increasingly veered towards the Republicans, most notably under the influence of Trump’s gravitational pull in 2016 because “at least he understood them and the policies they need”. Working class Trump voters are “decent” people, says Williams, “tired of a political correctness that ignores the challenges of working class whites whilst mandating they feel sorry for all other groups’ woes”.

The class consciousness that used to inform left-wing thinking has now been replaced by “class cluelessness, even class callousness”. To compensate for this white working class political flight, the left has further focused on the fringes, the ‘rainbow’ of minorities and other identity groups, wooing them with “affirmative action, jobs, welfare, free lunches” and general adoration.

Williams wants to change the contemporary Left’s hostile blindness to white workers and win this labouring class back to their former honoured place in liberal-left politics. Williams, however, is an unrepentant disciple of multiculturalist ideology and remains wedded to the concept of identity as the organising principle of politics. Thus, she is unable to see that an expanded identity politics which simply grants white workers the status of one more identity group is incompatible with their material and cultural interests because identity politics is fundamentally driven by anti-white sentiment (against ‘white privilege’, statues of Confederate generals, trigger-happy white cops, etc.).

This failure of a political vision blinkered by multiculturalism is starkly illustrated in Williams’ liberal orthodoxy on migrants. The impact of immigration on the white working class receives only a brief mention in her book, and that solely to issue a ‘nothing to see here’ verdict.

Williams notes that mass immigration to the US returned in the 1970s (for the first time since 1910) and has “coincided with the white working class’s fall from blue-collar grace” but correlation is not causation, she swiftly concludes. Thus immigration has nothing to do with any white working class economic distress, especially as immigrants “do the jobs that whites don’t want to” (at the el cheapo wages on offer, she could have, but chooses not to, add), a stale argument, of course, in the long tradition of those who talk most vociferously about ‘jobs Americans won't do’ never themselves, unlike the white working class, being in a line of work (like professoring) where unskilled immigrants can compete with them.

The economic and political screwing of the white working class just happened to fortuitously take place from when non-white immigration went through the roof, she blithely asserts, but whilst this view may try to preserve leftish, identitarian political ideology from being tainted by ‘anti-immigrant’, ‘xenophobic’ and other anti-‘Diversity’ sins, the basic economics of cheap labour suggests that there is a legitimate political problem for the white working class posed by mass Third World immigration.

The old Latin question, cui bono? (‘for whose benefit?’), is always worth asking in politics (as in legal and police investigations) to find out who gains by any particular act. As with the aim of the modern ‘Open Borders’ advocates, the late 1960s saw much radical immigration legislation in the West by governments in political and financial embrace with their corporate constituency which stood to gain bigger profits from a domestic market expanded by importing a massive number of new consumers (to compensate for the West’s below-replacement fertility rates since the mid-1970s) and a readily exploitable supply of cheap labour.

The 1965 Immigration Act in the US, for example, which dramatically downgraded immigration from developed nations in favour of mass immigration of unskilled immigrants from the Third World, has seen around sixty million mostly non-white migrants flood into the country. Similarly, in Australia in 1966, the bipartisan, government ‘White Australia Policy’, which had severely restricted non-European immigration to Australia for over half a century, formally ended with the result that Australia now has the highest per capita immigration rate, overwhelmingly non-white, in the developed world.

The extraordinarily vigorous and never-to-be repeated post-war economic boom masked the impact of this wave of mass immigration on the domestic labour market for a couple of decades but, as capitalism returned to its more ‘normal’ boom-bust cycle of recession and jobless recovery, the economics of a mass cheap labour pool asserted itself (along with automation and factory-shuttering globalisation), resulting in job theft and downward wage pressures for the native-born working class (along with deteriorating social conditions and unsustainable population growth for their formerly cohesive communities).

The left, however, being increasingly beholden to multiculturalism, welcomed this mass immigration and snubbed their traditional, white working class base. Opposing the undercutting of wages and conditions by cheap labour, especially from low-wage, non-unionised countries, used to be a pillar of traditional socialist and trade union politics but the contemporary identitarian left has increasingly abandoned this principle.

Williams opens one sympathetic eye to white working class reality but keeps the ‘Diversity’ shades resolutely drawn over the other, shutting out any disturbing view of the detrimental effect of mass immigration on white workers. Like her liberal multiculturalist peers, Williams still refracts her political vision through the prism of identity politics. Her obligatory, Diversity-compliant anti-Trump jibes (‘endorsed by the KKK!’, ‘beyond-the-pale’ statements about Mexicans!, ‘anti-Muslim discrimination!’, The unspeakable Wall!, etc.) merely serve to emphasise Williams’ failure to fully comprehend that candidate Trump won the election contest of ideas with a policy victory for the material interests of the long-abused, white working class against the more-of-the-same globalisation and multiculturalist policies of Hillary ‘Diversity-is-our-Strength’ Clinton. White workers had had a gutful of these Democrat policies, however, and, in 2016, said ‘No More’. It’s time the progressive liberal elite did the same.