Talk Traditions of the Brahmin Left
Talk Traditions of the Brahmin Left
Outclassed is a monument to the very elitism it seeks to challenge.
Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
by Joan C. Williams
St. Martin’s Press, 2025, 368 pp.
Over several weeks this spring, the New York Times offered two revealing reports on the mindset of the Democratic Party’s leaders. The first indicated that major donors were gearing up to “spend tens of millions of dollars” to “find the next Joe Rogan” in an effort to counter the popularity of right-leaning podcasters and improve the party’s reputation among younger, less affluent voters. The second declared that leading Democratic figures were withholding endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, the party’s nominee for mayor of New York City. This reticence emerged even as it became clear that Mamdani had earned his surprisingly decisive primary victory in part by appealing to just those voters whom donors had hoped to reach, through just those means they had hoped to use: grassroots online media. Readers of both articles, in fact, might reasonably pause to wonder whether each referred to the same political organization, as the nattily attired assemblyman from Queens would seem to be everything Democrats could hope for in 2025. Instead, some donors are apparently kicking the tires on every possible general election alternative, up to and including the scandal-ridden, MAGA-curious sitting mayor, Eric Adams.
Those looking to better understand this apparent contradiction could learn much from Joan C. Williams’s recent book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. This is not because her argument—that Democrats need to show more respect for the culture and material needs of working-class voters—is particularly enlightening. Though certainly part of the story, it’s also an idea some decades past the point of novelty. It’s instead the book’s failures that are illuminating. At turns banal, well-meaning, and thoroughly off-putting, Outclassed is a monument to the very elitism it seeks to challenge. Williams jokes that, given the reception she expects for her ideas, the phrase “I’ll never have lunch again in San Francisco” would make a good subtitle for the book. It’s an inadvertently searing indictment of her target audience.
A law professor and social scientist, Williams might be fairly described as an expert in DEI, the much-maligned corporate shorthand for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In addition to her extensive research on the topic, she has also helped advise companies seeking to create more inclusive workplaces and published books aimed at educating corporate executives. As such, she has long worked as an elite who speaks to other elites about how they might better treat those who are less elite.
Outclassed takes on this dynamic. Williams assumes her readers are from the “Brahmin Left”—highly educated, generally well-off Americans with progressive views on cultural issues—and the book reads much like a corporate diversity training delivered to senior managers alongside white wine and a light collation. One can almost see her pacing across a TED Talk stage, alerting her audience to their unacknowledged biases toward people she calls variously “the missing middle,” “the lower middle class,” and “blue collar”—namely those non-college-educated voters who, while not necessarily poor, confront an increasingly precarious economic future thanks to anti-union legislation, neoliberal market deregulation, and resulting globalization. Competing for wages against a rising middle in places like India and China, working Americans, she reveals, have seen their share of national income plummet. Rightly identifying elites in both parties as the cause of their difficulties, these voters have adopted an “anti-elite” posture, which Donald Trump ably harnessed in 2016 and 2024 through a mix of empty gestures toward economic populism and nativist attacks on immigrants.
The problem for Democrats, Williams explains, is that this anti-elitism works particularly well against them. This is because—in addition to embracing neoliberalism as much as Republicans—they have also become the party most associated with progressive social causes, which, she argues, are a twofold political liability. The first issue is that many in the “missing middle” associate causes like marriage equality, transgender rights, and even secularism with the condescension of the highly educated and well off—and it is true that the more educated one is, the more likely one is to be both wealthy and culturally progressive. The second problem, as she puts it, is that “college-educated voters’ values and preferences currently dominate the Democratic Party.” “Progressive activists,” as Williams calls those like herself, are the most influential of these voters, and they are “outliers in many ways.” As few as 8 percent of Americans, she suggests, hold views fully in accord with those of progressive activists. Elite culture, as the name implies, is not majority culture.
Thus, Williams warns her readers, the Democrats have effectively made themselves into a minority party. They no longer speak to the very real economic crisis of the missing middle, while focusing their energies on cultural issues that, despite their importance as matters of justice, are not pressing concerns for a consistently large enough group of voters. She does not recommend abandoning the cause of greater social equality, of course, but calls instead for pairing it with a renewed focus on the “bread-and-butter” issues that matter to non-elite voters. President Joe Biden made progress on the policy front, she suggests, by moving away from neoliberalism through his pro-union stance and initiatives like the Build Back Better Plan. However, he and Kamala Harris botched the delivery, failing to successfully “adopt blue-collar talk traditions,” as she recommends, or sufficiently hammer Republicans for catering to the rich.
This is all thoroughly reasonable. It’s also something of a retread, echoing points that have long been made by others. In 1969, for example, Kevin Phillips was infamously among the first to propose that a new Republican majority was emerging among working-class voters alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for the Civil and Voting Rights Acts—ideas that would help animate Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy for securing Republican hegemony in the early 1970s. Writers on and near the left such as Stuart Hall and Christopher Lasch took note as well, sensing early in the neoliberal era that parties of the center-left across the non-communist world were risking their electability by not only failing to defend the material position of working people but also actively working to cut away the redistributive structures that supported them. Hall warned in 1979 that “in the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives, the state is increasingly . . . experienced by ordinary working people as . . . a powerful bureaucratic imposition,” one they would happily throw off if it didn’t directly deliver to their needs. Writing a decade later in The True and Only Heaven, Lasch similarly observed that “to people who have become the objects of liberal contempt, these cultural pretensions look like mere social snobbery.” Indeed, as Raymond Williams demonstrated in 1973’s The Country and the City, capitalist development—and its constant disruption of traditional ways of life—had long given “progress” writ large a bad name.
Given that the problem persists, there certainly is a need for work that delivers this old argument in new and compelling ways. Outclassed, however, fails to do so. As much as Williams should be applauded for her efforts to save the Democrats from themselves, the flaws of her book reveal as much as her thesis—demonstrating some of the same patterns of thought that prevent the Brahmin Left from a full reckoning with the problems she outlines.
The rather cringeworthy line about “blue-collar talk traditions” is a significant tell here. Though Williams spends large portions of the book trying to make working-class voters more sympathetic to those on the Brahmin Left, she does so by reducing them to their economic station. Conservatism in the working class is, for her, primarily a response to economic precarity, not a result of sovereign individuals making free choices in values. The missing middle “cling to guns or religion,” in Barack Obama’s infamous words, primarily because they are less economically well-off than elites—an expansive claim she supports with data about how education level is a strong predictor of one’s cultural views. She also shows a fondness for cliched tropes: blue-collar Americans associate “change with loss” because “their fragile hold on middle-class life makes change seem risky,” and “religion provides for many non-elites the kind of intellectual engagement, stability, hopefulness . . . and social safety net that elites typically get from their careers, their therapists . . . and their bank accounts.”
Class impacts culture, to be sure, but the presentation here is often vastly oversimplified, regularly devolving into what one could call a vulgar Marxism without the Marxism, where every conservative predilection can be ascribed to economic precarity—up to and including an unfortunate interlude in which Williams ascribes her husband’s reticence to rearrange their home as due to his working-class origins. These breezy personal asides are tossed in among a kaleidoscopic whirl of social scientific data without full contextual discussion of each study’s methodologies or whether findings from one contradict those in another (as the reader often suspects). Some of these studies seem like the worst of their disciplines, pushing the boundaries of the term “science” and testing the reader’s credulity. One study, for example, apparently asked “every fourth passerby” to assess their own skin tone and politics, data that was then run through the researchers’ own (evidently innovative) scale of skin colors, to somehow prove that “Latino Americans who think their skin . . . is lighter than it really is skew Republican.”
Williams appears genuinely interested in making working people appear sympathetic, but her presentation still comes off as hopelessly condescending. Blue-collar Americans seem mere caricatured products of their dispossession and little else. It doesn’t help matters that she regularly goes out of her way to prove her Brahmin bona fides—at times letting the mask of understanding slip, as when she ridicules Christians who believe in the virgin birth for holding to something that “is just so obviously nonsense.” The possibility that a Latinx working-class Catholic, for example, might, of their own volition, be in possession of a cosmology more sophisticated than the middle-brow secularism of many on the Brahmin Left is, apparently, not worthy of consideration.
It’s startling that Williams assumes this will play well with readers (even Nancy Pelosi, after all, is a Catholic), yet her success as a writer and consultant would suggest she knows her target audience well. Indeed, though she tries to give the impression that her book is quite subversive, it is hard to imagine someone on Martha’s Vineyard spewing their iced tea all over the veranda because of the idea that poverty causes conservatism, for example, or the suggestion that liberals should shift their tone and offer a smidge more to working people to win elections. The book’s lack of specific policy recommendations—beyond the endorsement of Bidenism as a good first step—further reinforces this impression. While Williams alludes to the fact that more radical policies will be required to regain working class voters, these policies are never discussed in detail, perhaps to avoid upsetting her readers with talk of higher capital gains taxes. The result is that, for all her insistence that Outclassed is not just about messaging, messaging is all that one is really left with.
The real issue for Democrats, however, is the policies. Biden and Harris didn’t lose because they failed to talk “blue collar,” but because their policies were not blue collar. However admirable efforts like Build Back Better may have been, they were far from aggressive enough to address the very real crisis facing the average American as they struggle to make rent, find time to spend with their children, or dream of a better future on a sweltering planet. Williams tries to make this point, but she buries it under an avalanche of data about class and culture, leaving the policy element vague, and letting elitism and the culture wars obscure her nominal focus on class privilege.
This is unfortunate because, in the end, Democrats don’t lose elections because they care about the culture wars too much. If they truly did, they would be swarming to endorse Mamdani, a cultural progressive across the board. Democrats lose elections because they care about the money of rich Americans too much. Their issue with the would-be mayor of New York is not his views on transgender rights or even, as party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries have implied, his imaginary problem with “antisemitism”; it’s that he is a social democrat. Democrats may have left neoliberalism behind, but it is not yet squarely in the rearview mirror. Not unlike Williams in the book, party leaders seem aware of the problem they confront yet unable to transcend the worldview that causes it. As a result, while willing to toss working people a few more bones than Republicans, the Democratic establishment seemingly believes that it is enough to show up on a handful of picket lines, reshore a solar panel factory or two, and call it a day. Maybe a podcast would help. Free buses and state-run grocery stores, however, are a bridge too far, even if they might win an election.
If it’s Williams’s book that finally drives home the message that more radical steps are required, it will be a worthy contribution. Yet it’s her joke about becoming a pariah in San Francisco lunch circles that will likely provide Outclassed’s lasting insight—one as revealing as the non-endorsements of Mamdani. Democrats may currently be the better choice, but Republicans are far from the only enemies working Americans face.
Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in Middle Tennessee. His work has appeared in publications including Time, the New Republic, Diplomatic History, and Jacobin. His newest book, The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy, and World Order since 1776, will be published by Bloomsbury in January.
