Joan C. Williams – Distinguished Professor of Law at UC San Francisco – discusses her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Get Them Back at Harvard Book Store. Williams sends out an urgent wake-up call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races, that is driving politics to the far right in America. Williams says that by changing one thing – the class dynamics of our society – we could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic.

According to Williams, the far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals, and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. She explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories, Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. She explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions that disadvantage the working-class.

Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy, a politician or a social justice activist in need of advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge multi-racial, cross-class coalitions capable of delivering on progressive goals.

Speakers

Joan C. Williams

Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality and the author of White Working Class. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, NYT, The Atlantic and The New Republic. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at UC College of Law, San Francisco.

James T. Kloppenberg (moderator)

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Research Professor of American History at Harvard University and he is the author of four books—most recently Reading Obama (2011) and Toward Democracy (2016).