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- [00:00]
Joan C. Williams
I think I mentioned last time I developed this new class bubble quiz and we have new data from it. And the question that shows with eerie accuracy not only whether you are a college grad, but whether your parents are college grads is the question. Would you prefer to eat in a family style restaurant with generous portions of traditional favorites or a truly authentic ethnic restaurant?
- [00:32]
Galen Drew
That's the most predictive question.
- [00:33]
Joan C. Williams
That is the most predictive question. And it predicts a very hefty percentage of partisanship as well, whether you're a Democrat.
- [00:52]
Galen Drew
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drew. Shortly after I launched this podcast, I had a guest on who caught folks attention. Her name was Joan C. Williams, a law professor at UC San Francisco, and she joined me to talk about her new book, how the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. She spoke straightforwardly about why the cultural values of America's liberal elites and working class are different. As she said, working class values reflect working class lives. And she described how a strict adherence to elite values by liberals creates challenges for a Democratic Party in pursuit of a majority coalition. After all, less than 40% of American adults have a college degree. Well, it turns out that Joan became something of a listener to this GD podcast herself. A few weeks ago, she sent me an email saying that she listened to an episode I did about whether there are electoral moral advantages to being moderate. She told me she had just written an op ed in the Boston Globe about what politicos mean when they talk about moderation and that there are many different types of moderation, not all of which have the same electoral advantages. So I told her to come back on the podcast and talk to me about it. And that's what we are doing today. And speaking of liberal elitism, Joan joins me from Siena, Italy, where she has been writing about class divides from the 13th century and how they relate to class divides today. So, Joan, welcome back to the GD Politics podcast.
- [02:22]
Joan C. Williams
Delighted to be here, Galen.
- [02:24]
Galen Drew
In the episode that prompted you to get in touch, Laksha Jain of Split Ticket talked about numbers that he'd crunched showing the electoral advantages of moderation. His data showed that between 2018 and 2024, Blue Dog Democrats, aka moderates, did about 4 percentage points better in their House races on average than than New Democrats and about 5 points better than progressives. Likewise, Main Street Republicans, aka moderates, did about 4 points better than Freedom Caucus Republicans. So to set the table here, do you broadly agree that moderation, at least in the form taken by Blue dogs and Main Streeters is electorally advantageous.
- [03:09]
Joan C. Williams
It depends on what you mean by moderation. It depends on what races you're talking about. I think that the sort of war war between the wonks, the wonky war.
- [03:19]
Galen Drew
War is so that's wins above replacement and whether what the wins above replacement value is for moderation.
- [03:27]
Joan C. Williams
For moderation.
- [03:27]
Galen Drew
Come on, join the battle.
- [03:28]
Joan C. Williams
Joan There you go. Well, it's a number crunchy war, right? So they're looking across lots of different races, but I think they're mixing apples and oranges. Often the message is either that centrism is great for the party and Democrats should go in that direction, or that there's a much smaller advantage for Democrats to go moderate, which is interpreted to mean centrist. The problem is that when people use moderate, sometimes they assume that it means centrist. And that's actually the research doesn't bear that out. A lot of people who are coded as moderates as political scientists, and actually the New York Times just recently did this in a editorial. So it's not just political scientists that when they hold a combination of liberal and conservative views, holding a combination of liberal and conservative views doesn't mean you hold consistently centrist views. It just doesn't mean that. And in fact, you know, some more number crunchy data, which I know you love, which is that only 25 to 30% of the variation in expressed political opinions is explained by the liberal versus conservative axis. It's just not a very useful way to explain people's views, and it's especially not a useful way to explain less educated people's views because they're less likely to be consistently conservative or consistently liberal. So there's just a lot of apples and oranges being thrown around and, you know, we're not making a grapefruit cocktail.
- [05:29]
Galen Drew
I like the metaphor. So what you're saying is that it's not that moderation is not electorally advantageous, it's just that we have to pin down which kind of moderation we actually mean. If it means taking the left wing position and right wing position and averaging them out, that probably doesn't get you all that much. But taking some positions on the right, popular positions on the right, and popular positions on the left might get you closer to a majority coalition, Is that what you're saying?
- [05:59]
Joan C. Williams
Yes. And certainly, you know, if you're running in Brooklyn, you probably don't have to do that, but if you're running in Kansas, you probably have to take some positions that are straight down the line liberal and also reach out to embrace some positions that are not straight down the line. Brooklyn progressive. Well, that's really true. I mean, that's, that's by definition true.
- [06:26]
Galen Drew
We'll get into this a little bit more, but I actually, since we last talked, wrote a piece in the New York Times titled why Democrats Need Their Own Trump. And in some ways it gets to the value of running against your own party. So if you are in Kansas, you probably need to run against that Brooklyn vision of liberalism or progressivism or the Democratic Party in order for people to understand, oh, you're not one of them, you're different, you're somebody I can trust. That's something that Donald Trump did a lot of in 2016, was trashing his own Republican Party in order to frustrate perceptions and get people on board who might otherwise not have been on board. But I want to go back for just one second about something that you said, which is that maybe just a third or even less of the variation amongst people's political views can be described by the left right axis. Where's that research coming from? What exactly does that mean? What are the other types of, of considerations that people make when they are landing on, you know, liberal conservatism, whatnot?
- [07:30]
Joan C. Williams
That's a 2025 article by a guy named David Brookman who teaches at Berkeley. And it just says that people's political opinions are more complicated than just down the line liberal or down the line conservative. And let me give you an example, which is this is from other political science research by a guy named Kerr, that the middle status voters that are veering to the far right, both in Europe and the United States, they embrace progressive economic values, but quite conservative cultural values. And there's another strain of political science called the representation gap that says that one of the reasons that the far right has been so successful across Europe is because none of the centrist parties, neither centrist left nor centrist right, was offering this particular cocktail of progressive economics and cultural conservatism until the rise of the far right. And that's what Donald Trump did, as you point out.
- [08:45]
Galen Drew
Yeah, but I guess that's still on something of a left right axis, right. It's marrying more left wing economic views with more right wing social or cultural views. Like, are you saying that the way that you talk or the way that you dress or the different kinds of life social values that you project also play into sort of how you understand yourself politically and how you understand politicians politically?
- [09:11]
Joan C. Williams
I think the technical meaning of that research was simply that if you Just say, is this a conservative package or is this a liberal package? You're missing a lot of information. One of the pieces of information, for example, you're missing, as you point out, is how do you communicate? What talk traditions are you tapping? Democrats. And this is true of the left in Europe as well. They have become the party of college grads, as we know. And their talk traditions are that they're displaying their sophistication, the subtlety of their thinking, the broadness of their vocabulary, their command of data, their respect for science. All of these are all the things.
- [10:05]
Galen Drew
We really hate here on the Genie Politics podcast.
- [10:07]
Joan C. Williams
Exactly as we talked about last time. Yeah. So when Democrats, for example, were talking during the pandemic, they were going very heavily into. We just rely on the science. We have to defer to the science. We have to defer to Dr. Fauci. We have to defer to the professionals. That is a talk tradition that is completely uncontested in my circle, and I suspect in yours. But if I also.
- [10:39]
Galen Drew
I also represent at the time, in particular, a younger group of people who wanted to get back to socializing, but point taken.
- [10:47]
Joan C. Williams
I represented a very small, older group of people who thought that we were going too far. But that talk tradition is heard really differently from. From people who are not college grads. They hear, number one, you're not my audience. Number two, they hear people talking down to them and condescending to them. So they hear both that they're irrelevant and that they're disrespected. Now, that is part of political speech that is not captured by the liberal versus conservative typology.
- [11:26]
Galen Drew
Yeah, no, I think that's an important point. In your email that you sent me, you said, okay, so you're just putting everything into this bucket of moderation. I think there are actually four or five different types of moderation that are worth parsing out and being specific about which kinds are helpful and which kinds are not. So I want to give you the floor for a second to sort of lay out that thinking, and then we can interrogate some of those different forms of moderation.
- [11:51]
Joan C. Williams
Okay. Well, the first, we've talked about the assumption that moderation means being centrist. And that was, for example, an explicit assumption of that recent New York Times op ed that just came out in favor of moderation. I think it was this week or last week, the assumption that moderation meant being centrist, the second kind of moderation, and I hear this a lot in, you know, I live in close to Silicon Valley, that moderation means what tech entrepreneurs think of as moderation. And that is like, well, Jeff Bezos, for example, personal liberties and free markets, in other words, conservative economics and liberal cultural values. That is actually not going to help Democrats win back the working class. That's exactly the opposite. Opposite of what these middle status voters, this middle 50% that's now veered to the far right, that's exactly the opposite of what they want. So when I hear tech entrepreneurs talking about the need for moderation, it's just like that is not going to work. One of the things that this is actually the same guy, David Brokeman did a study of tech entrepreneurs and found that they were very liberal on cultural issues like guns, abortion, lgtbq, super liberal on global globalism, very liberal on redistribution, and more conservative than Republicans on issues related to fair labor markets, like making it so the gig workers get treated like regular workers. You it's too hard to fire someone is something that had high endorsement among this group. The government regulation does more harm than good. So all of those fair labor market policies these moderates are virulently opposed to. And that again, that's not gonna work because there's different research that shows that although elites tend to favor government redistribution, this middle 50% tends to favor pre distribution, which is just a fancy word for fair labor markets. So that that kind of moderation isn't going to help Democrats either. It's going to take them again rapidly in the wrong direction.
- [14:22]
Galen Drew
Right. A handout is easily maligned, whereas crafting laws that make it so that people make more money to begin with are supported by a broad cross section of the American public, is what you're saying.
- [14:35]
Joan C. Williams
And particularly middle status voters, which is exactly the voters that Democrats have lost.
- [14:41]
Galen Drew
And I know we talked about this before on the podcast, but can we just define again what a middle status voter is?
- [14:47]
Joan C. Williams
I define middle status. I don't even use the term working class and middle class people are too confused about them. So I define middle status as the middle 50% by household income, higher than the bottom 30%, truly low income, but lower than the top 20% which is really the professional managerial class. Those are the middle 50%. These are people in routine white collar, blue collar and pink collar jobs. Those are the households that we're talking about and they tend to have a pretty skeptical attitude towards redistribution. They want hard work to pay off.
- [15:29]
Galen Drew
Okay, so we've gotten through two forms of moderation, which again I want to interrogate a little bit more, but we have three more to get through. Okay, so let's lay them out.
- [15:37]
Joan C. Williams
Okay. The third I think is the Liberal Patriot form of moderation, namely gets go back to the New Deal Coalition, the New Deal Democrats.
- [15:47]
Galen Drew
All right, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and listen to the full episode. Joan and I spoke for about 50 minutes and got to the bottom of what moves she thinks the Democratic Party ought to make to become appealing to the middle 50% of Americans. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join the paid subscriber chat and most importantly, keep this podcast going. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com, see you there.