14 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Democrats are spending $20 million to learn how to talk to men. Here's what they should do instead
It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Democrats are spending $20 million on a program called SAM, or 'Speaking with American Men,' to help them learn how to communicate with the demographic that is shifting the political landscape in the Trump era.
'Above all,' it urges, 'we must shift from a moralizing tone.'
But that's what Democrats do best!
The Dems could have saved that money and gotten better advice on winning back voters by spending $30 on UC law school professor Joan C. Williams' new book, 'Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.'
Bay Area liberals — and those like them around the country — are part of the problem. She calls them 'the cultural elites.' College-educated voters who are in the upper 20% of income-earners in this country. You know the type. Perhaps you are the type. The virtue-signaling, sign-posting, Facebook-oversharing, holier-than-thou tsk-tskers among us.
'That's us, most of us in this room,' Williams said during a recent book reading in Berkeley. 'Too often, we don't rail against economic elites, but we also fuel that narrative that we look down on people in the middle over time. They're 'deplorables' (Hillary Clinton's description of some Donald Trump supporters) 'clinging to guns and religion' (Barack Obama's line). They're 'stupid Trump voters who don't understand their own self-interest' (typical liberal Facebook post, an allusion to Thomas Frank's 'What's the Matter With Kansas?'). These are all class insults that just fuel the far right.'
All those pulldowns do, Williams said, is 'reinforce the right's populist scripts that elites are looking down on you.'
And that script is playing nonstop on your favorite conservative media outlet. Williams cites a study showing that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mentioned the term 'ruling class' in 70% of his episodes from 2016 to 2021. Yes, Carlson is an annoying, bow tie-wearing dweeb, but he also hosted a top-rated cable news show. And his relentless messaging was echoed across the conservative world, including by Donald Trump. It was effective. Two-thirds of non-college-educated voters — once the base of the Democratic party — have consistently backed Trump. Meanwhile, only 20% of ads run by Democratic House candidates in competitive districts in 2022 'critiqued economic elites in any way whatsoever,' Williams writes.
Williams notes there are two kinds of populism: 'The left's version of populism: 'They're robbing you blind.' Where the villains are the economic elites, the 1% as we like to call them. And then there's the right's version, which is 'They (the cultural elites) look down on you.''
Republicans do the bidding of the 1% (like the Trump tax bill that disproportionately rewards wealthy taxpayers) by co-opting the working class voters onto their side through culture wars against the cultural elite. 'We keep walking into the same old traps over and over,' Williams said. For 40 years.
Nevertheless, Williams doesn't scold liberals. Instead, she suggests ways to win back working-class voters.
Here's the most important: 'Make them feel seen.'
Feelings rule among progressives, she said. She cites the virtue-signaling yard signs that are everywhere in the Bay Area: 'In this house, we believe: Black lives matter / Women's rights are human rights / No Human is illegal / Science is real / Love is love / Kindness is everything.
'But that empathy and connection is strictly optional when it comes to working-class people,' Williams said, guessing what a liberal might say about them: 'They're just dumb people who are trashing democracy, who are duped by the right.'
Said Williams: 'We are very upset about how people are disadvantaged by race and gender — and completely blind, or largely blind, to people who are disadvantaged by class,' she said.
The backlash: That unfeeling toward working-class voters, Williams said, puts a target on the backs of immigrants and trans kids and people of color, and 'sculpts anger against them,' she said as some may wonder, Why are we less deserving than them?
Williams said if you're asking why working-class voters 'are so angry, they're angry because we have a rigged economy.' Over the past 35 years, the wages of college graduates have increased 83% while those of working-class Americans have stagnated.
And if the left doesn't channel that anger, Williams said, 'We know who will.'
Here's one of her tips for winning them back: Candidates should stop focusing on 'defending democracy.' Defending democracy is low on the scale of needs for someone working three jobs who can't afford decent child care.
'Defending democracy is not best done by talking incessantly about defending democracy,' Williams said. 'And the people who we've lost — non-college voters — they're not too interested in defending democracy, because they think democracy has failed them. We need to focus on economics, not defense of democracy.'
Take how liberals often talk about climate change. Calling conservatives 'climate deniers' may be accurate, but it comes off sounding like 'We're smarter than you.' she said. Instead, progressives can connect with farmers, who can become messengers who can say, 'I can no longer grow what my grandfather grew on this land,' Williams writes. In coastal and fire-prone areas, she writes that progressives 'can point out that insurance companies are already changing underwriting habits due to fires and floods exacerbated by climate change.'
It's a way to unite different classes in a populist way against Big Insurance.
When it comes to religion, progressives often look down at churchgoing non-college grads. That's a mistake, as religion is central to their lives, Williams writes, providing 'for many non-elites the kind of intellectual engagement, stability, hopefulness, future orientation, impulse control, aspirations to purity and social safety net that elites typically get from their careers, their therapist, their politics, and their bank accounts.' She tilted the chapter that contains that passage: 'Therapy's expensive, but praying is free.'
'Religion is very functional in the lives of non-elites,' Williams said. 'Religion is so powerful in offering sort of mental ballast and stability that being a believer actually erases the effects of class disadvantage.'
In 2020, 84% of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump, a thrice-married man who bragged about sexually assaulting women on the 'Access Hollywood' tape. Williams notes that 40% of college grads say they are neither spiritual nor religious.
Williams is not advocating that progressives move toward the center and abandon advocating for marginalized groups that can be politically polarizing, like the trans community.
'Politically, it doesn't make sense,' Williams said at her Berkeley reading last month. 'Raise your hands if you will support a Democratic candidate that gives up on all of the issues that you cherish most.'
Instead, she suggested channeling Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat whom she paraphrased as saying, 'If you get your jollies bullying trans kids, then you really need another job.'
She said Fetterman is using a 'blue-collar style of conversation. It's not fancy, it's not policy based. It's poking fun at somebody. He's doing all the things that Trump does. Trump channels a certain style of American working-class masculinity to victimize trans kids. Some politicians, not all of them, can channel the same style of masculinity to say, you know, if you're bullying kids, you know, you got to find another job.'
The challenge is finding Democrats who can pull that off.
