How can the Democrats catch up to Trump?

Once upon a time, there was a peaceable kingdom called the “postwar economy.” This economy provided broad prosperity through unionized manufacturing jobs. Dad went to work at the factory while Mom stayed home with the kids. You could buy a house, car, and modern appliances on Dad’s wages. Inequality was low. But this Eden was poisoned by racial division, mismanaged policy, foreign entanglements, and cultural conflict between the intelligentsia and the working class. A demagogic politician stormed to prominence by stoking the fears and resentments of hardworking Americans who were tired of being called uneducated bigots by condescending elites. Those elites looked on in horror and disbelief as their fellow citizens flocked to this authoritarian reactionary.

The politician, of course, was George Wallace, and the year was 1968. And it was Pat Buchanan, 24 years later. Or, if you prefer, it was Donald Trump, another 24 years after that. The first two failed, being marginalized first in their respective parties and then from the political system. But Trump’s version of nostalgia—the rhetoric of Wallace and Buchanan, updated with more vulgarities and a campier affect—came to dominate first the Republican Party and now the country as a whole. Our debates now hinge on the best plan to “bring back” the kinds of jobs our fathers and grandfathers supposedly had. Despite every misstep, overreach, and blunder, and despite nagging baseline unpopularity, Trump still sets the agenda across the spectrum of American politics. Democrats and leftists are stuck in the lagging eastern end of the baggage train back to Eden.

America’s liberal intelligentsia has been struggling to articulate both why they have ended up in this position and how to regain the political and policy initiative. In Outclassed, Joan Williams joins this busy conversation with a case for how Democrats can, in effect, catch up to where Trump and the global far right have tried to lead. Williams—who directs the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco and a project on educational polarization called Diploma Divide—wants progressives to understand the roots of discontent among a demographic she interchangeably calls “routine workers,” “working-class people,” “noncollege voters,” “non-elites,” and “missing middle” Americans. This group forms the base of Trump’s support, and within it he made inroads with voters of all races in 2020 and 2024. The rhetorical and cultural habits of college-educated progressives turn these voters off, Williams explains. Then she sets out to fit left-wing economic populism into rhetorical frames that these voters will supposedly find more appealing.