overweight, incompetent, clumsy, thoughtless and a borderline alcoholic” (to quote
Wikipedia).^1 He works as an inspector at a nuclear power plant, his laziness an ever-
present danger to the environment.
With rare exceptions—Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics come immediately to mind—this
offensive portrait reigns today. It’s unbecoming for a country that prides itself on a
commitment to equality.
An entire book—a different one than mine—could seek to explain why this shift
occurred. But the upshot is simply this: 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 typical white working-class household
income doubled in the three decades after World War II but has not risen appreciably
since.^2 The death rate for white working-class men—and women—aged 45-54 increased
substantially between 1993 and 2013, a reversal from the decades before. In 1970, only a
quarter of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 10%; by 2000,
40% did.^3
In an era when the economic fortunes of the white working class plummeted, elites wrote
off their anger as racism, sexism, nativism—beneath our dignity to take seriously. This
has led us to politics polarized by working-class fury. “We’re voting with our middle
finger,” said a Trump supporter in South Carolina.^4 If Trump fails to rejuvenate Flint,
Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio—and he probably will—things could turn even uglier.
That’s saying a lot.
This book focuses on the class comprehension gap that is allowing the United States (and
Europe) to drift toward authoritarian nationalism. To be clear, I do not focus on hollow-
eyed towns gutted by unemployment and the opioid epidemic, or despair deaths of white
men with high school educations or less.^5 To focus on white working-class despair will
lead well-meaning people to approach the white working class as they traditionally have
approached the poor—as those “we have a moral and ethical obligation to help,” to quote
a well-meaning colleague. This attitude will infuriate them and only widen a societally
unhealthy class divide.
Instead, I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans
without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites
commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss “the dark rigidity of
- Why Talk About Class?