Have Democrats lost white working-class voters over “messaging” errors? Williams suggests a new approach. Excerpt from “Why Are Democrats Embattled - And How Can They Win Again?,” June 3, 2011.

JOAN WILLIAMS, Distinguished Professor of Law, Founder/Director, Center for WorkLife Law, University of California Hastings; Author, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter

The proportion of the white working class that identified as Democrats fell from 60 percent to 40 percent from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. The percentage that voted Democratic in presidential elections fell absolutely precipitously in a similar period. This trend has continued in recent elections. Workers who describe themselves as painters, furniture movers, servers, were far more likely than professionals to report that they were going to vote for George W. Bush. Obama lost big among working class whites with an 18 percent deficit, about the same as Gore’s four years earlier.

The common explanation for this among progressives is crystalized in the book What’s the Matter with Kansas? It’s that Republicans have led these voters like sheep to vote against their own self-interest. I want to note that the conventional wisdom is that these voters are dim-witted. That’s a conventional stereotype that privileged people have of blue-collar folks. It’s the kind of stereotype that working class people notice.

It didn’t used to be that way. If you look at Coit Tower or Rincon Center, those wonderful WPA murals that we in San Francisco love so much, what you see is that white working class men were the center of the progressive imagination. Fast forward to Homer Simpson, who, as Wikipedia helpfully reminds us, embodies several American working class stereotypes. He’s crude, incompetent and borderline alcoholic. You know, I find Homer Simpson funny too, but then so did whites watching minstrel shows.

The elites value new and exotic foods; the worker values comfort foods, and plenty of it. The elites value education, and build up human capital and go to Europe or Costa Rica. Workers go to Vegas or Disney, instead. All this helps to explain why working class Americans resent the educated and admire the rich. Workers aspire to live the lives they were brought up to live with the tastes they already have, just with more money. They don’t want to turn into the educated elite; that would feel like a betrayal. So workers want to own their own little business, and they admire people who have built big ones. That’s why proposals to tax the rich just don’t have political traction. I’m not saying we shouldn’t; we just should understand how to message them.

Progressives need to be far more self-conscious about the way we enact class status, very unselfconsciously. This comes out in our references to food and our references to leisure activities such as hunting, and our references to our vacations. Remember the flap over Michelle Obama’s vacation?

Another principle is that Democrats need to choose universal programs over means-tested programs. In this we will have pushback from economists who say, “Why should we give rich people benefits such as Social Security? Why don’t we just translate Social Security into an anti-poverty targeted program?” The reason why Republicans do that is because they know that that spells doom for any program. Look at the history of Social Security and Medicare compared to the history of welfare benefits, Head Start and Medicaid. That’s why I almost fainted at one point when I heard the president talking about Medicaid, we need to defend Medicaid. Do we choose to message that as defending Medicaid or Medicare? Again, means-tested programs fuel class conflict.

Question & answer session

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What role do you think education plays in some of these discrepancies in thinking?

WILLIAMS: It’s a complex question. First of all, one of the things that’s confusing to Obama is that the African-American community actually values education more than the white community, if you look at it sociologically. So he often assumes that access to education is the absolute trump goal for everyone. Of course, we have systematically defunded public education for the past 30 years. Some people say this is part of a conscious Republican strategy to get a less informed public electorate. I don’t know if it’s a conscious strategy. But I know the result has been a less informed electorate.

QUESTION: What do you make of the movement of certain governors to dismantle public employees’ collective bargaining rights, and might this help Democrats?

WILLIAMS: The assault on unionization has gone from the private sector to the public sector. My best information is that in Wisconsin, there was a very conscious Republican strategy to try this out as a trial balloon to see if it was going to work. There was a conscious decision about who would take the political hit if it didn’t work, and there was an agreement that it would be the governor of Wisconsin.

There’s an assumption on the part of progressives that now we’ll really show that workers have to stand together and that this is an assault by Republicans. There is some of that. But it signals a divide-and-conquer strategy. I see the Republicans saying, “You lost your health insurance, you don’t have very many hours, your husband got a pink slip; why should they have all the privilege?”

QUESTION: Regarding your thesis, with the emphasis regarding the working middle-class white population: The changing demographics of the country, the increasing Latinos, the increasing Asian population, you think your thesis applies equally to those groups and, conversely, because of the changing demographics, is it as important to be focusing on the things that you brought up regarding the white middle class?

WILLIAMS: For a long time the conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party was, “Forget the white working class. They’re a bunch of racists, anyway. Let’s get out the poverty vote and the single moms.” How’s that working for you? Have you seen those people’s childcare situations and their job schedules? I mean, come on. Those people are trying to survive day to day. Also, I think that’s undignified for us as professionals to write off. I mean, we’re white people. Are we going to write off other white people? “We won’t deal with these white people cause they’re too racist?” White people are racist. If you don’t believe it, go take the Implicit Association Test. Writing off a different type of white people because they’re racist is just a simple expression of class privilege.

In terms of changing demographics: The class culture wars are going to get more acute, not less, and that is because of Latinos. Democrats have a real opportunity right here to blow it or win it, and that is with Latinos. I grew up partly in Latin America; they are pretty conservative when it comes to these family values. Certainly as a first step, caricaturing anyone who doesn’t agree with us on these hot-button issues that we feel so very deeply about as simply ignorant is not wise. 

QUESTION: Why is Sarah Palin so successful, and how can she be stopped?

WILLIAMS: You know, I really like Sarah Palin. I think she’s brilliant. She knows exactly how to mobilize class conflict in the United States. She knows exactly how to get the progressive elites to put their foot in their mouths. The way to stop Sarah Palin is for us to stop being so stupid, frankly, and to stop falling into the same traps again and again and again, because you know, her playbook is not long. It’s just effective.

Who are the real Americans that she talks about? The white working class. If we defuse the moves in Palin’s playbook by stopping being so clueless about class, she would lose her appeal. She has high negatives anyways. She is Sarah Palin.