June 6, 2025

Here is another newsletter about liberal education. I have written about this subject before, but approach it this time from a new angle, using as springboard a remarkable new book that I enthusiastically recommend, despite some of my qualifications below. The book is Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, by Joan C. Williams, and my point of departure will be her argument against the “college for all” mindset. I have read quite a few books on the subject designated in the title, and no doubt hundreds of op-ed articles, but Williams has two virtues that set her apart. One is that she is a researcher, and a very thorough one, a Professor of Law and Director of the Equality Action Center at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. The book bristles with statistics and not only cites the important research but critiques it. There are times when readers have to make their way through numerical thickets, but that is the price of reliability, and is counterbalanced by the fact that Williams writes like hell. The prose crackles with energy and wit, and is always down to earth, never academic. I can’t limit the discussion to education, however, because that has to be understood within a larger context—the context of why Trump won. Williams’ analysis is partly though not entirely original, and is the best-articulated explanation that I have read.

The first task is to determine who are the Trump voters. We have known since 2016 that by and large they are not the poor. People at the bottom of the income scale tend to vote Democratic if they vote at all. They are not the college-educated upper middle. They are, rather, the “anxious Middle” in between, people whose hold on middle class income and status has become increasingly precarious, and who have reacted with anxiety and increasing rage. We have known this since studies right after Trump won for the first time. Williams recognizes three economic classes (19):

1. The college-educated professionals: top 20%. Median family income $244,006.

2. The poor: bottom 30%. Median household income $28,430.

3. The middle: roughly 50%. Incomes ranging from $41,005-$95,650. Median income $75,000.

What we, meaning liberals and progressives, have not realized is that the fact that non-college Trump voters are not poor does not mean they have no cause to complain and are therefore motivated by mere “resentment” at the loss of white privilege. The situation of this lower middle class is devastating. Who are these people? They are blue collar people whose jobs have disappeared due to globalization and the relocating of factories overseas, plus small business owners driven out of business by the megachains like Amazon, Walmart, and the big grocery stores. Despite rationalizations of the “you can’t stop progress variety,” this did not have to happen, or not to such a degree. It was the result of political decisions made by a collusion of the laissez-faire trickle-down economics of the 1% with the “neoliberalism” of the upper middle class beginning in the Clinton years and largely continued by Obama. Neoliberalism believed in free trade, globalization, and deregulation. Clinton pushed through NAFTA, which resulted in exactly what Ross Perot said it would, a “large sucking sound” of jobs leaving the country due to offshoring. Yes, automation played some role, but “Chinese imports accounted for between a quarter to half of the manufacturing jobs lost in the US” (30).

On top of that, “Neoliberalism’s deregulation of the financial industry led directly to the Great Recession, which also did a job on people’s wealth...those in the bottom 25^th percentile lost about 85 percent of their net worth and many never recovered. As recently as the 1990s, wealth was evenly split between college grads and noncollege grads, but today, college grades own three-fourths of it” (30). Obama made sure that the financial industry that caused the meltdown was bailed out, while millions of middle class people lost their homes. “All this explains why the share of Americans who earn more than their parents has plummeted by 40 points” (30). Also as a result, “Life expectancy for Americans without college degrees has plummeted, and is now eight and a half years less than that for college grads. The suicide rate among working-class white men rose nearly 40 percent between 1999 and 2013” (31). The present crisis in the United States is matched by similar crises in European countries, all of which have one cause: the loss of good jobs with benefits and job security for the non-college-educated, jobs that are respected as providing valuable products and services to others and which therefore carry with them a moderate but real social status. The anxious Middle blame the college-educated professionals for their plight, and the blame is deserved. The anxious Middle is blind, however, to the role of the oligarchic 1%. Neoliberalism as more or less invented by Bill Clinton and his New Democrats was a compromise to ensure the survival of the Democratic Party as an effective political entity against the onslaught of Reaganism. It was, as I have often said, a deal with the devil, moving to the right economically while remaining socially liberal. It worked, and Clinton presided over a period of prosperity, at least for some. But now the devil has come to collect.

The neoliberals are all the more guilty in that everyone knew what was coming, that non-college-educated jobs were going to disappear. But rather than mobilize an attempt to cope with this disappearance, the neoliberals fell back on the Reagan and Thatcher style of magical thinking, saying that “market forces” will deal with the loss of jobs. Translation: Oh well, they’ll find other jobs eventually, somehow, but let’s not help them, because the invisible hand of the market solves all problems.” One of the people who saw it coming was Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton and still with us as an admirable and articulate progressive. In the 90’s, I used to teach a college address by Reich in which he laid out for students what was going to happen to jobs. Blue collar work would disappear, leaving two kinds of jobs: low-level, low-status, low-paying service jobs and well-paying, high-status jobs for those he called “symbolic analysts,” that is, people whose work depends on the manipulation of symbols, whether words, numbers, or images. These jobs would all demand a college degree. That meant college for all.

So, if students knew this, why weren’t they wise enough to go to college? These days, the answer has increasingly become lack of money. Right now, because of the hollowing out of the middle class, so many students can only pay one semester at a time, can’t buy the proper textbook and try to substitute some cheap, downloaded, inadequate substitute, can’t register for next semester during registration when the courses they need are available because they don’t yet have the money and in fact still owe for the present semester, and so on. Their grades suffer from this deprivation. Some can’t even afford food. This insecurity contributes to the high level of depression and anxiety, which has skyrocketed since I began teaching full-time in 1989, and which affects their academic performance, in the worst cases causing them to fail.

But in tandem with economics is another reason: a difference in culture. The most original parts of Williams’ book are those in which she painstakingly demonstrates the fallacy of trying to decide whether what motivates Trump voters is economics or culture, culture meaning values and the lifestyle that is born from those values. In other words, are Trump voters ruled by jobs or the culture wars? It’s a false distinction. Values and lifestyle are the expression of the economic situation. They are people’s way of coping with the demands and limitations of the economic situation in which they find themselves. That’s true of everyone, not just Trump voters. This is an idea that Williams takes from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

The non-college middle class—or lower class, or working class—do not live in small, close-knit communities merely because they are insular but because that is a natural result of their life situation. They are reluctant to move because it means leaving their social support system that provides childcare, employment connections (you get the job because your uncle knew someone who was hiring), people who pitch in when special help is needed in raising a barn or putting on a new roof. Their friends are people they’ve known all their lives, who live within miles of them, again because being closely connected is a survival tactic. The educated professional lifestyle, in which your friends are largely work connections at the same time that you may not even know the names of the people who live next door to you, is baffling to them. Work friends may not be reliable when you’re down and needy—but you make enough money to hire whatever help you need, so you do not have to depend on connections, which frees you to be more individualistic anyhow. Non-college people are conformist because following orders is how you avoid getting fired at their kinds of jobs. They raise their kids strictly, training them to follow orders, because that is the kind of life their kids are going to lead. It all flows from their economic situation in a way that is almost Marxist: the cultural superstructure has a material basis that determines it. These parts of the book are fascinating, all the more so because I grew up this way. My parents moved only far enough to escape the hardships of the farm and coal mines, to the small city of Canton, Ohio, where my father worked in the steel mill, though at precision work as a lathe operator. All the relatives were still only a half hour away. What is left of them are still there.

Having a kind of conversation with Williams is stimulating to me because we are of the same Baby Boomer generation, but our perspectives have been shaped by radically different upbringings. She grew up a member of the elite—BA from Yale, Masters from MIT, JD from Harvard Law. But she married a man whose father was a factory worker. She came to understand the non-elite by having to learn how to relate to them, which meant learning to understand them. I, on the other hand, am a first-generation college student from a family where only one cousin—and I have a lot of cousins—even went to college, much less became an academic. I went to a small college only 60 miles from home, then came back there to teach again for 35 years, never climbing the career ladder. My one foray was to get my MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, not because it was “the Harvard of the north,” as they used to say, but simply because my hero Northrop Frye was there. I was never socially comfortable there, even though the Canadians were warm and treated me wonderfully, but simply because it was big and sophisticated and Anglophile and I was from a nowhere college in cow country. The words “high table” made me feel instantly insecure. I am not comfortable in sophisticated restaurants to this day. Williams reports a tone-deaf remark of Barack Obama’s, joking about the price of arugula at Whole Foods. A working-class woman said she didn’t know what arugula was. I don’t either. This is neither defensive boasting nor shame. I am comfortable with who I am, and do not need to fall either into snobbery or liberal guilt. My point is that I can understand without translation where the non-college class is coming from, because those are my roots, and I have never repudiated my origins. It is just interesting to compare notes with Williams in a non-combative way.

She has come to appreciate the non-college working class from the perspective of the educated professional class, and by effort and honesty has come to see them at their best, where their values and lifestyle display genuine virtues. But I grew up inside the non-college class life—and, like many if not most of my friends, I was in fairly full flight from it much of my life. It is amusing to me that it is only now, in old age, that many of us are starting to wax genealogical, to send our spit to 23andme to learn our DNA and trace family histories. I was a hippie, and it was to Williams’s San Francisco that many young people fled their middle-class families during the Summer of Love in 1967 to live in communes, to live “in sin,” to live beyond the reach of the family work ethic. Williams does know this, and knows that we were regarded as spoiled brats by many of our parents’ generation. I think we sometimes were. But there was a reason for that rebellion and that flight. Williams makes such a strong attempt at empathy that at times she seems tempted by the nostalgia for non-college family and community life as it is projected back to the 1950’s.

The life of that time did have its virtues at times, at least if you were lucky enough to be born into one of the functional families. But working class life was never the pastoral good old days it was mythologized as being. I know: I was there. I grew up in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, in those close-knit and traditional values ways. It was not great. We are nostalgic for the days of those blue-collar factory jobs entirely because in that time a husband could support a family on one. But the jobs themselves were dirty, dangerous, and physically taxing. The retirement age was set at 65 because many a working man’s body was worn out by that time. Why in the world is anyone nostalgic for the coal mines? My grandfather was a coal miner. He retired after his leg was crushed in a cave-in, and he also had black lung. The woman was at home not only keeping house but bringing children up alone, usually without the advantage of extended family help. I tell my students about the early Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper,” which is about tranquillizers, which had just come on the commercial market and helped women endure being cooped up 24/7 with children and housework. People only ate out on special occasions, and there was no such thing as ordering in. Women didn’t drive, so men had to take them shopping and wait while the woman was in the dressing room.

Again, people are nostalgic for the “nuclear family,” and people like JD Vance want to force women back into it again—all those “childless cat ladies” whom some Trump voters believe want abortion rights so they can sleep around, but who really want to be independent enough to leave abusive men. And the men were sometimes abusive, no doubt because they were unhappy. They had grown up in hard times during the Depression, and they worked at a boring and laborious job day after day, having to obey orders from a foreman who was an asshole, having to periodically go on strike, luckily with a union, in order to force management to concede to decent salaries and working conditions. Men forced themselves to work at such jobs for 30-40 years because of the male value of being a “provider.” The man who could not provide for his family was not a man. So the men often drank. My dad was an alcoholic, and all my male relations drank heavily.

At one point Williams claims that the working man used to be respected and admired, pointing to WPA murals. That changed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when husbands began being portrayed negatively, she says, citing Archie Bunker and Homer Simpson. That seems to me an oversimplification. I don’t see why Archie Bunker is a more negative portrayal than Jackie Gleason playing bus driver Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners in the 1950’s. And my working-class parents loved that show, all the more because it was it was genuinely blue collar and not idealized (Ralph’s friend Ed Norton works for the sewer system). In fact, the fathers in the idealized families of 1950’s and 1960’s sitcoms were never working class, or at least not blue collar. Ozzie Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet was an entertainer, and so was his wife. So was Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. Rob Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show was a writer for a comedy/variety show. Ward Cleaver of Leave It to Beaver was some sort of white collar professional (and from Shaker Heights here in Cleveland, an upscale suburb). Jim Anderson of Father Knows Best was an insurance salesman and manager. Andy Griffith was sheriff of small-town Mayberry. In other words, and it is a startling realization, the ideal families of the old sitcoms were almost all from the professional class, not the working class—not necessarily college-educated, but not blue collar working class either. The implication is that these wish-fulfilment fantasies idealize a life above working class status, something to aspire to. For every father hurt and bewildered that his sons didn’t want to follow in his line of work, I’d say there was one who said, “I’m working in the factory to make money to send you to college so you don’t have to.” This was the definition of the American Dream. To do better than your parents meant to change lives, change social classes, not remain where you started because you needed “stability” and “tradition.” My father and uncles escaped the coal mines and farming of their immigrant parents and moved to the suburbs. The bitterness and opioid addiction and deaths of despair of the left-behinds are due almost entirely to the loss of the kind of jobs that enabled men to sustain families—not to the job itself, which was a means to an end. When Trump swears he’s going to bring back all those manufacturing jobs, he is turning the American Dream regressive.

William’s rebuttal, though, is a strong one: at what price the life of college-educated professionals? Some of the best parts of the book are its painfully vivid descriptions of what she calls the Great American Speedup:

In elite families, the pace is frenetic. Parents “rush home, rifle through the mail, prepare snacks, make sure their children are appropriately dressed and have proper equipment for the upcoming activity, find their car keys, put the dog outside, load the children and equipment into the lock, lock the door, and drive off. | It’s matched by the Great American Speedup in work life. Concerted cultivation is preparation for a life of work devotion. Work hours for the elite increased sharply during the neoliberal decades between 1970 and 1990. But the turn of the new millennium, 40 percent of college-educated men and 14 percent of college-educated women worked more than 50 hours a week. “Bankers’ hours” and leaving at 3:00 to play golf gave way to extreme schedules displayed as evidence of work devotion. | Just as parents’ outlandish work hours reflect a fear of falling in the winner-take-all economy, so does children’s tailorized leisure, which reflects parents’ anxieties that children won’t “make it” in an economy where the losers really lose out. There’s an unsettling mixture of parents’ concern for kids and parents striving for social honor. (112-13)

This continues into the educational system in a way that is sadly familiar to me. In high school, students cram as many extracurricular activities into their schedules as possible so it will look good on their college applications. This was already beginning when I was in high school and my parents nicely begged me to at least join something or no college would look at me. But I was already in full rebellion against the dress-for-success culture of achievement. Automatically inducted (without applying) into the National Honor Society, I was told I had to give a mandatory speech on “Character” during the ceremony. Angered by this, I gave a speech saying people who really had character didn’t need honors and accolades to show it. I have always been ashamed of my arrogance and unkindness in doing this, and still am, but I now give myself a little bit of credit at the same time for instinctively reacting against the meritocratic rat race. I didn’t join anything in college either except for the literary magazine. Nowadays, compulsive achievement by students has reached a level of lunacy, so much that the provost had to cap the number of majors and minors students are allowed. We had students with two majors and three minors, sometimes failing to graduate on time in the attempt to finish them. Being constantly busy (and not sleeping very much) becomes a kind of psychological addiction to some students, who tell me they not only don’t mind the pace but become nervous and depressed when they have nothing to do. The students’ activities are invariably worthwhile—that is not the point. The point is that liberal education depends on leisure, because at its heart is a form of meditation. I once told an academic dean that the central activity of the humanities is reading a book, thinking about it, having a conversation about it in class, then going home to write about it, and that the breakneck pace of students’ lives destroys the focus necessary for reading, thinking, and writing. I was told I was old fashioned. Translation: students need to pad their resumés, not meditate.

But Williams is absolutely right when she identifies the source of the greater number of students’ mental health issues. They derive from a combination of familial and academic overachievement mania with a financial anxiety that commutes to school with them from their families. Don’t blame phones and social media: these are the crutches they use to cope with their stress.

One of the most admirable things about Outclassed is that it tackles, if perhaps imperfectly, the most difficult challenge in dealing with Trump voters: their heterogeneity. It attempts to distinguish the “anxious Middle” that she views as sympathetic even if at times wrongheaded from hard-core MAGA. Hillary Clinton was not entirely wrong: there are “deplorables” among Trump voters. Are we going to deny it in the face of the January 6 rioters and the Proud Boys? This type Williams calls the “American preservationists,” who are 20% of Trump voters (179). Of these, she says, “Only 15 percent were college graduates. They were only half as likely to be employed full-time and the most likely to be underemployed, with 19 percent reporting being unable to work due to a disability” (178-79). These are, among other things, the racists: “The Far Right has convinced this group that their dim prospects stem from the fact they are white. In fact, it’s because they are working class” (179). To these, however, we may add

authoritarian Christian nationalists and their right-wing Catholic counterparts, the advocates of Project 2025. There are also the cultists and conspiracy theorists, from QAnon to RFK, Jr. to Elon Musk. These are in collusion with college-educated but equally deplorable politicians trailing criminal allegations and sometimes criminal records, starting with our pussy-grabbing president and his crooked business dealings. Cultivating these types is a waste of time, but the good news is that there are not enough of them to win elections. The thesis of the book is that we should distinguish the angry and frustrated but redeemable non-college voters, ignoring the rest, recognize and address their genuine grievances, win them back, and return to winning elections.

The ambiguous mix of Trump voters confuses us all. We all know salt-of-the-earth people who absolutely love Trump, cling to the hope that he will do something about their plight, the type I have satirized in the past as Aunt Joanie. But perhaps the greatest limitation of this admirable book is that it is statistical but not sufficiently psychological. The easy distinction between non-college “anti-elites” and the rabble described above will not always hold, and this partially interferes with Williams’ project of appealing to the supposedly redeemable non-college voters. What would improve the book is a discussion of mob psychology and how contagious it is. Williams understands how anxiety, frustration, and despair lead to a desire to lash out at something. But when prolonged or intensified, such emotions lead to what Jung called, quoting the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl, an abaissement du niveau mentale, a lowering of the mental threshold, and a flooding of ego consciousness by the unconscious. Under such conditions, people may be taken over by their shadow, their other side, consisting of all the anti-social traits they have repressed. Dr. Jekyll is overtaken by Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner by the Hulk, whose tagline is pure MAGA: “Hulk smash!” Not for nothing was Hulk Hogan made a speaker at the Republican National Convention.

The shadow may take gendered forms: for men it may be the violence of the January 6 rioters or the misogyny of the Andrew Tate toxic males. Women may play the role of hysterical guardians of morality, trying to censor books and keep those horrible people from grooming our children. The resentment of immigrants taking American’s jobs may turn into a belief that they eat people’s pets. I do not think any of us find it easy to identify two clear-cut groups, analogous in a way to the deserving and undeserving poor of a century ago. The raising of hatred and fear to a fever pitch, deliberately cultivated by Trump in his speeches and the far right through the media, has produced a mob mentality that has swept across the nation. This has happened before in history. Eye witness accounts of Hitler’s speeches describe huge crowds that completely lost control. The other famous example is the French Revolution, whose chaotic, blood-lusting crowds are described by Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens. And the people who should be in charge of law and order are leading the charge. Musk with his chain saw eliminating people’s jobs at the behest of an administration whose mandate was to create jobs is the new Robespierre.

How does mob psychology affect Aunt Joanie, our prototypical salt-of-the-earth Trump voter? Meme viruses are just as unpredictable as biological ones, and some people have better psychological immunity than others. It is possible that Aunt Joanie will detach herself from MAGA herd mentality and declare that, although she is still angry and upset about the injustices done to her class, she does not countenance what the far right is doing now that it has power. In that case, she would be the type amenable to the pitch by a reformed Democratic Party of the type that Williams envisions. It is also possible that she could go the other direction and be radicalized by some conspiracy theory she encountered online. Between these best and worst case scenarios is the one that is unfortunately most likely. Aunt Joanie may become a willfully low information voter, choosing to get what news she gets from Fox News, telling herself that legitimate news organs are “fake,” minimizing the widespread damage and trauma the Trump regime is causing, rationalizing it on the grounds that the ends justify the means, and secretly feeling some satisfaction that Trump is going after all those frightening criminals and gang members and is going to get rid of all those immigrants taking American jobs, which may entail bending some of the rules.

It is, frankly, more than a bit difficult, after five months of misery, pain, and fear, to distinguish the salt-of-the-earth Trump voters, especially when 46% of the country still says it supports Trump. Williams seems so determined to find good Trump voters to appeal to that she is occasionally in denial about their shadow side. Her example of how religion can be a stabilizing and redeeming force in the life of a non-college voter is...JD Vance? She takes Hillbilly Elegy at its face value and even quotes from it passages in which Vance talks about how the church saved him from the “hard living” self-destructiveness of his mother’s lifestyle. But she makes no mention of what we all know: that Vance has gone over to the dark side and is an advocate of the Handmaid’s Tale-style plans of Project 2025 to force all those cat ladies into being tradwives, and he is the chief liar about Haitian pet eaters, brazenly admitting he was lying but regarding it as justified.

I imagine Williams might reply, “But what other choice do we have but to assume, by an act of faith, that the better type of Trump voter might still exist, and appeal to them by attempting to redress the injustices they have suffered?” I would agree, but still feel that the recognition of the psychological difficulties would strengthen the book’s argument by signaling that the author is aware of them and not merely naive. I for one am not willing to absolve non-college Trump voters of their share of responsibility for the catastrophe that has occurred, even as I accept responsibility as a progressive for the neoliberal policies that have driven so many Trump voters over the brink. The point is not to blame but to solve the problem, and a political alliance of the redeemable members of two economic classes is the only thing that will solve it, but the alliance has to be reality-based. The necessary mutual respect cannot be sentimental in either direction. I think Williams would agree with that.

What would such an alliance work toward? Here’s the thesis of Outclassed in a nutshell:

Liberals need to stop assuming that government redistribution to the poor is the key to alleviate inequality. Instead, what Americans want—the poor, the professionals, and the Missing Middle—are stable jobs, with benefits, that pay enough to sustain a stable middle-class life for everyone, regardless of race of education level. (161)

That statement makes me feel like standing up and cheering. But I would add, and I know Williams would agree, that a political candidate or party has to do more than blithely say, “We’re for stable jobs.” That just sounds like you’re asking for someone’s vote unless you have at least some concrete proposals about how you plan to bring those jobs into existence. It would help if you also had some past history consistent with such advocacy. Kamala Harris looked untrustworthy when it emerged that in the past she had supported such measures as “defund the police,” only to waffle about them in the present. Non-college voters aren’t stupid, and they know all about politicians who will say whatever’s popular at the moment just to get your vote.

And what is the plan to bring such jobs into existence? There’s the rub. The Democratic Party avoids this issue because it has no real answer. But that is a bit unfair, because no one else has the answer either. Trump is trying through his usual bullying techniques to bring back manufacturing from overseas. But the reason the factories are overseas is that the companies can then pay exploitative super-low wages. How is that supposed to happen over here? Williams is confident that it can be done, and claims that it actually has been done:

Post-war Germany was hyperaware that widespread prosperity was the best insurance against a return to fascism, so they built a robust manufacturing sector that offered sustained access to good jobs for those without university degrees. To this day, many blue-collar workers earn as much or more than white-collar workers. Germany never went down the college-for-all route; instead, they offered social honor and a stable middle-class life for people without university degrees. (110)

So let’s become Germany. I’m all for it, despite being an academic. But we would have to alter the way business works in America. The “big donors” that fund the upper echelon of the Democratic Party are unlikely to be enthusiastic about cutting corporate profits going to shareholders in order to help the non-college educated class. What’s in it for them? The New Deal’s success in reigning in the business practices of the Gilded Age only succeeded because the whole system had collapsed. Do we need to hope that Trump actually succeeds in crashing the economy and bringing about a new Depression before the grip of the corporations can be loosened? In other words, are we willing to face up to what has to happen? What has to happen includes the following: (1) a restructuring of corporations so that their main goal is no longer ensuring profits for shareholders at the expense of employees and the public; (2) a cap on obscene CEO salaries; (3) a reform of the banking and financial institutions—in other words, re-regulation; (4) an extension of the social safety net, Scandinavian-fashion—in other words, healthcare for all; (5) a return to subsidizing higher education the way we used to so that students do not face crushing student debt. None of these things are radical, new, utopian fantasies—they are all things we used to do, and that is how they should be sold to the voting public. We are not “social engineering” in the way conservatives always say is ungrounded and dangerous. We are making America great again by returning to what made it great when I was young. In a way, it is a type of conservatism, a return to the real traditional values. Yes, things like expanding the safety net and subsidizing education will raise taxes, and reining in corporate profits will raise prices. But if people had decent jobs with decent pay, the taxes and prices would not be such a catastrophic burden. The oligarchy that now rules the country will fight all of this every step of the way. It will be slow and ugly. But it is the American task for our time.

The subsidizing of higher education is the only item on my list that might seem targeted at the professional elite rather than the working class. But actually, I disagree. When Williams opposes the idea of “college for all,” what she is really opposing is the anxious pressure that forces young people to go to college, the message that it’s either a college degree or flipping burgers at McDonalds for minimum wage. She does not make as clear as I might wish that there is a difference between that kind of pressure, which I agree is counter-productive—students who are enrolled only because they or, more likely, their parents, think they have to be are not likely to do well—and providing an option for working class students, a real choice between college and trade school, or just finding a job. We should not assume that working class people do not value education. That risks exactly the kind of elite condescension that Williams is so admirably wary of. This is an old story, as old as the establishing of the first working class colleges in England at the beginning of the 20^th century, the forerunners of such things as land-grant colleges in the U.S. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) is about a young man who teaches himself Latin and Greek because he wants to go to university and become a scholar. But he is unable for lack of opportunity to escape from his job as stonemason. These were exactly the circumstances of Hardy’s own life.

Some working and middle-class people are anti-intellectual, often out of defensive insecurity, because they have been made to feel ashamed of their supposed ignorance. But others both hunger for learning themselves and admire those who are knowledgeable. I once referred to myself as “teacher” in front of my working class mom, and was pointedly corrected: “You’re a professor.” Yes, mom. And my dad, a lathe operator in a steel mill, did not complain about the government spending his tax money sending things into outer space when there are problems enough here. He, my brother, and I all watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series and shared a sense of wonder about the stars and the inconceivably vast universe. In fact, my dad had wanted to be an astronomer when he was young, but the education involved was out of the question for a young man from a working class immigrant family in Midvale, Ohio. I wish my dad had been able to gain the higher education he hungered for. And I never assume my students are as anti-academic as they put on. I remember an African-American football player who admitted privately, in an essay, that he liked to read but hid this from his teammates. Real men don’t read books.

What would liberal education have to offer for those in the working class? Liberal education has at least three levels one which it functions to expand people’s horizons and expand their very sense of identity. (Those who sneer at such things as elitist luxuries are dangerous and to be avoided. They generally have an exploitative agenda). The first level is typically encountered in the freshman composition class that every student has to take. Ideally, students learn what actual good writing is—namely, what Jacques Barzun called “simple and direct” in his book of that title. Students arrive from high school having been trained to write in a “formal” style, which is not a real style but a kind of unintentional parody of the style of high-level specialized scholarship. The first step is to liberate them from this false demand, which is taught in high school mostly because teachers have been trained that way themselves. I demand that students write conversationally, as they talk—if it isn’t how you’d say it, don’t write it. Tune out slang and street language and bad grammar, but otherwise “Just talk”—my mantra. This not only cleans out a lot of writing problems at the beginning, but it gives them their first indication of voice. Even good formal prose should have the sound of a human voice in it, heresy though that may be in some academic quarters. The demand for a kind of mandarin formality in academia is in fact not, after a point, driven by a need for scientific or logical objectivity but by a class pressure—this is how you talk like the in-group and get ahead. Moreover, students are allowed to use personal anecdotes and address personal themes so long as they do so in a way that involves relating their individual experience to the themes and information in the source essays of our textbook. In that way, they learn to read critically, analyzing the sources and quoting from them correctly—but as a means to the end of wrestling with an issue that means something to them. In doing so, they discover the sound of their own voice—they learn that they have a voice, and that it is an important part of their identity.

On a second level, students learn general knowledge about how the world works, including educated vocabulary they can expect to find in writing of substance, what E.D. Hirsch called “cultural literacy” a generation ago. But they also learn that facts are always embedded in ideologies. They learn there are various value systems and cultural practices, some quite different from what they grew up within—and learn that not everybody sees things that are “obviously true” in the way they do. People can value “tradition” all they want, but we cannot afford to have people dismissing any lifestyles and values that are different and strange to them with a kind of suspicious hostility. It is unfortunate that this sensitivity to difference has become associated in the culture wars with upper-professional elitism, but it does not have to be that way. On the other hand, I would say that history and literary studies do have a bias, one that alienates the anxious Middle, and that is a preference for a kind of ironic skepticism. This is the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that I have spoken of in recent newsletters. Make no mistake, I am all for the continuing attempt at a bitter honesty that confronts the racism, the sexism and misogyny, the imperialism, the authoritarianism that pervades American history but also the history and literature of any culture.

But such skepticism needs to be in creative tension with a sense of ideals that Americans and humanity in general have aspired to, that are possible even if we haven’t yet achieved them. This is what the American Dream really means, not money and success. The American Dream does include the idea of a good job for everyone, but it also rises to the dream of democracy and freedom, and on that level to a kind of patriotism that is not just jingoism. We have become cynics because of all the government lying—about Vietnam, about Iraq, high words distracting from dirty politics. Martin Luther King at the end of his life was in the process of expanding a movement for racial inequality to include economic and class inequality. Who knows how much influence he might have had as the United States was tempted to turn towards neoliberalism? But his “I have a dream” speech articulates a vision of a common humanity of the sort also celebrated by Whitman. That too needs to be part of higher education, not just the “demystifying” of the various ideological lies.

A third level of liberal education reaches the height at which literature intersects with religion in the area of mythology. This is my home ground as a teacher—oops, as a professor. Some students are hostile to religion, to Christianity in particular, because they only know its negative side. Christianity has come to mean fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, right-wing Catholicism, all ideological perversions of Christianity. But, as someone who teaches Dante, Milton, Donne, Blake, and Dylan Thomas, not to mention the Bible itself, I have seen that a lot of students are eager for real knowledge about Christian ideas, about the various possible ways in which Christianity has understood itself and its own message. This may lead to where modern astronomy and space exploration have led us: to the sense of a dimension of being that is either transcendently beyond or mysteriously below the level of ordinary experience—to a sense of wonder.

When I began teaching 40 years ago, we had a thriving Weekend College designed for older, working students. Employers often paid for older students to go back to school in order to gain the college degree they hadn’t attained when younger.

Not only was it more economically feasible, but there was more time. The Great American Speedup had not yet achieved full velocity. It was still close to the time when, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, thinkers like Northrop Frye were able to speak of a coming age of leisure in which people’s jobs were not so all-consuming and exhausting and they would come flocking to higher education looking for the meaning of life. Those speeches were not naive—the ideal perspective that informed them was perfectly possible. It was greed, fanaticism, and the will to power that turned us away from that path towards overwork, anxiety, income inequality, and their inevitable consequence, the culture wars. To return to a better path, we will have to confront powerful interests. Trump is trying to destroy higher education because he knows that the expanding eyes of true vision will see through all his lies.

The ideal America would not be a classless society, which is impossible, but one in which classes were united as what Blake called Contraries: “Without Contraries is no progression.” What Williams is urging is solidarity, a union not born of sameness and agreement but of conflicting values that nevertheless look across the gulf of difference and recognize the other with respect and a sense that we are in this together, for better or worse. Her book is an informed and ultimately moving attempt by a lifelong activist to achieve that recognition.

Reference

Williams, Joan C. Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. St. Martin’s, 2025.