Recommended: White Working Class

From the conclusion of Joan C. Williams new book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (ISBN 978-1633693784) , a serious look by a competent liberal academic at the dynamic that defeated Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump.  I think she has nailed it. I strongly recommend this book as you try to understand what is happening, not only in America but in Europe as well (emphasis mine):

this book describes a relationship gone bad: that be­tween the white working class and the PME (Professional-Managerial Elites) . Empathy is a good place to start, but remedying this relationship will require more. Like all good family therapy, it will require not just that the family “troublemaker” learn to behave. What’s amiss is the family dynamic that cast the “trouble­maker” in that unhappy role. Changing that dynamic re­quires change on the part of the family members who are “not in the wrong.”

 It’s a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss “the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,” this is a rec­ipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. If you like what that dynamic is doing to the country, by all means continue business as usual.

I don’t, for two reasons. The first is ethical: I am commit­ted to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. Another key message is that elite truths don’t make sense in working-class lives. Working-class truths do, and my hope is that I’ve provided a window into why. If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.

 Once the elite cast the white working class outside of its ambit of responsibility, the elite did what elites do. They ignored those who print their New York Times, make their KitchenAides, tell them at the doctor’s to undress from the waist down. The professional class first stopped notic­ing, and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness.

The more rabid liberals are trying their best to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump, in hopes that they can replace him (eventually) with one of their own. My reading of the situation is that if they succeed, the mass of people who voted him in will see this as the elites destroying one of their own, and it will redouble their fury at the elites, with disastrous results for the Democratic Party and dangerous results for all of us.