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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TALK TRADITIONS OF THE BRAHMIN LEFT  
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Sean T. Byrnes
September 25, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ Outclassed is a monument to the very elitism it seeks to challenge.
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_Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them
Back_
Joan C. Williams
St. Martin’s Press
ISBN: 9781250368980

Over several weeks this spring, the _New York Times_ offered two
revealing reports on the mindset of the Democratic Party’s leaders.
The first indicated that major donors were gearing up to “spend tens
of millions of dollars
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to “find the next Joe Rogan” in an effort to counter the
popularity of right-leaning podcasters and improve the party’s
reputation among younger, less affluent voters. The second declared
that leading Democratic figures were withholding endorsement of Zohran
Mamdani
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the party’s nominee for mayor of New York City. This reticence
emerged even as it became clear that Mamdani had earned his
surprisingly decisive primary victory in part by appealing to just
those voters whom donors had hoped to reach, through just those means
they had hoped to use: grassroots online media. Readers of both
articles, in fact, might reasonably pause to wonder whether each
referred to the same political organization, as the nattily attired
assemblyman from Queens would seem to be everything Democrats could
hope for in 2025. Instead, some donors are apparently kicking the
tires on every possible general election alternative, up to and
including the scandal-ridden, MAGA-curious sitting mayor, Eric Adams.

Those looking to better understand this apparent contradiction could
learn much from Joan C. Williams’s recent book _Outclassed: How the
Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back_. This is not
because her argument—that Democrats need to show more respect for
the culture and material needs of working-class voters—is
particularly enlightening. Though certainly part of the story, it’s
also an idea some decades past the point of novelty. It’s instead
the book’s failures that are illuminating. At turns banal,
well-meaning, and thoroughly off-putting, _Outclassed_ is a monument
to the very elitism it seeks to challenge. Williams jokes that, given
the reception she expects for her ideas, the phrase “I’ll never
have lunch again in San Francisco” would make a good subtitle for
the book. It’s an inadvertently searing indictment of her target
audience.

A law professor and social scientist, Williams might be fairly
described as an expert in DEI, the much-maligned corporate shorthand
for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In addition to her
extensive research on the topic, she has also helped advise companies
seeking to create more inclusive workplaces and published books aimed
at educating corporate executives. As such, she has long worked as an
elite who speaks to other elites about how they might better treat
those who are less elite.

_Outclassed _takes on this dynamic. Williams assumes her readers are
from the “Brahmin Left”—highly educated, generally well-off
Americans with progressive views on cultural issues—and the book
reads much like a corporate diversity training delivered to senior
managers alongside white wine and a light collation. One can almost
see her pacing across a TED Talk stage, alerting her audience to their
unacknowledged biases toward people she calls variously “the missing
middle,” “the lower middle class,” and “blue
collar”—namely those non-college-educated voters who, while not
necessarily poor, confront an increasingly precarious economic future
thanks to anti-union legislation, neoliberal market deregulation, and
resulting globalization. Competing for wages against a rising middle
in places like India and China, working Americans, she reveals, have
seen their share of national income plummet. Rightly identifying
elites in both parties as the cause of their difficulties, these
voters have adopted an “anti-elite” posture, which Donald Trump
ably harnessed in 2016 and 2024 through a mix of empty gestures toward
economic populism and nativist attacks on immigrants.

The problem for Democrats, Williams explains, is that this
anti-elitism works particularly well against them. This is
because—in addition to embracing neoliberalism as much as
Republicans—they have also become the party most associated with
progressive social causes, which, she argues, are a twofold political
liability. The first issue is that many in the “missing middle”
associate causes like marriage equality, transgender rights, and even
secularism with the condescension of the highly educated and well
off—and it is true that the more educated one is, the more likely
one is to be both wealthy and culturally progressive. The second
problem, as she puts it, is that “college-educated voters’ values
and preferences currently dominate the Democratic Party.”
“Progressive activists,” as Williams calls those like herself, are
the most influential of these voters, and they are “outliers in many
ways.” As few as 8 percent of Americans, she suggests, hold views
fully in accord with those of progressive activists. Elite culture, as
the name implies, is not majority culture.

Thus, Williams warns her readers, the Democrats have effectively made
themselves into a minority party. They no longer speak to the very
real economic crisis of the missing middle, while focusing their
energies on cultural issues that, despite their importance as matters
of justice, are not pressing concerns for a consistently large enough
group of voters. She does not recommend abandoning the cause of
greater social equality, of course, but calls instead for pairing it
with a renewed focus on the “bread-and-butter” issues that matter
to non-elite voters. President Joe Biden made progress on the policy
front, she suggests, by moving away from neoliberalism through his
pro-union stance and initiatives like the Build Back Better Plan.
However, he and Kamala Harris botched the delivery, failing to
successfully “adopt blue-collar talk traditions,” as she
recommends, or sufficiently hammer Republicans for catering to the
rich.

This is all thoroughly reasonable. It’s also something of a retread,
echoing points that have long been made by others. In 1969, for
example, Kevin Phillips was infamously among the first to propose that
a new Republican majority was emerging among working-class voters
alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for the Civil and Voting
Rights Acts—ideas that would help animate Richard Nixon’s Southern
strategy for securing Republican hegemony in the early 1970s. Writers
on and near the left such as Stuart Hall and Christopher Lasch took
note as well, sensing early in the neoliberal era that parties of the
center-left across the non-communist world were risking their
electability by not only failing to defend the material position of
working people but also actively working to cut away the
redistributive structures that supported them. Hall warned in 1979
that “in the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic
initiatives, the state is increasingly . . . experienced by ordinary
working people as . . .  a powerful bureaucratic imposition,” one
they would happily throw off if it didn’t directly deliver to their
needs. Writing a decade later in _The True and Only Heaven_, Lasch
similarly observed that “to people who have become the objects of
liberal contempt, these cultural pretensions look like mere social
snobbery.” Indeed, as Raymond Williams demonstrated in 1973’s _The
Country and the City_, capitalist development—and its constant
disruption of traditional ways of life—had long given “progress”
writ large a bad name.

Given that the problem persists, there certainly is a need for work
that delivers this old argument in new and compelling ways.
_Outclassed_, however, fails to do so. As much as Williams should be
applauded for her efforts to save the Democrats from themselves, the
flaws of her book reveal as much as her thesis—demonstrating some of
the same patterns of thought that prevent the Brahmin Left from a full
reckoning with the problems she outlines.

The rather cringeworthy line about “blue-collar talk traditions”
is a significant tell here. Though Williams spends large portions of
the book trying to make working-class voters more sympathetic to those
on the Brahmin Left, she does so by reducing them to their economic
station. Conservatism in the working class is, for her, primarily a
response to economic precarity, not a result of sovereign individuals
making free choices in values. The missing middle “cling to guns or
religion,” in Barack Obama’s infamous words, primarily because
they are less economically well-off than elites—an expansive claim
she supports with data about how education level is a strong predictor
of one’s cultural views. She also shows a fondness for cliched
tropes: blue-collar Americans associate “change with loss” because
“their fragile hold on middle-class life makes change seem risky,”
and “religion provides for many non-elites the kind of intellectual
engagement, stability, hopefulness . . . and social safety net that
elites typically get from their careers, their therapists . . . and
their bank accounts.”

Class impacts culture, to be sure, but the presentation here is often
vastly oversimplified, regularly devolving into what one could call a
vulgar Marxism without the Marxism, where every conservative
predilection can be ascribed to economic precarity—up to and
including an unfortunate interlude in which Williams ascribes her
husband’s reticence to rearrange their home as due to his
working-class origins. These breezy personal asides are tossed in
among a kaleidoscopic whirl of social scientific data without full
contextual discussion of each study’s methodologies or whether
findings from one contradict those in another (as the reader often
suspects). Some of these studies seem like the worst of their
disciplines, pushing the boundaries of the term “science” and
testing the reader’s credulity. One study, for example, apparently
asked “every fourth passerby” to assess their own skin tone and
politics, data that was then run through the researchers’ own
(evidently innovative) scale of skin colors, to somehow prove that
“Latino Americans who think their skin . . .  is lighter than it
really is skew Republican.”

Williams appears genuinely interested in making working people appear
sympathetic, but her presentation still comes off as hopelessly
condescending. Blue-collar Americans seem mere caricatured products of
their dispossession and little else. It doesn’t help matters that
she regularly goes out of her way to prove her Brahmin bona fides—at
times letting the mask of understanding slip, as when she ridicules
Christians who believe in the virgin birth for holding to something
that “is just so obviously nonsense.” The possibility that a
Latinx working-class Catholic, for example, might, of their own
volition, be in possession of a cosmology more sophisticated than the
middle-brow secularism of many on the Brahmin Left is, apparently, not
worthy of consideration.

It’s startling that Williams assumes this will play well with
readers (even Nancy Pelosi, after all, is a Catholic), yet her success
as a writer and consultant would suggest she knows her target audience
well. Indeed, though she tries to give the impression that her book is
quite subversive, it is hard to imagine someone on Martha’s Vineyard
spewing their iced tea all over the veranda because of the idea that
poverty causes conservatism, for example, or the suggestion that
liberals should shift their tone and offer a smidge more to working
people to win elections. The book’s lack of specific policy
recommendations—beyond the endorsement of Bidenism as a good first
step—further reinforces this impression. While Williams alludes to
the fact that more radical policies will be required to regain working
class voters, these policies are never discussed in detail, perhaps to
avoid upsetting her readers with talk of higher capital gains taxes.
The result is that, for all her insistence that _Outclassed_ is not
just about messaging, messaging is all that one is really left with.

The real issue for Democrats, however, _is_ the policies. Biden and
Harris didn’t lose because they failed to talk “blue collar,”
but because their policies were not blue collar. However admirable
efforts like Build Back Better may have been, they were far from
aggressive enough to address the very real crisis facing the average
American as they struggle to make rent, find time to spend with their
children, or dream of a better future on a sweltering planet. Williams
tries to make this point, but she buries it under an avalanche of data
about class and culture, leaving the policy element vague, and letting
elitism and the culture wars obscure her nominal focus on class
privilege.

This is unfortunate because, in the end, Democrats don’t lose
elections because they care about the culture wars too much. If they
truly did, they would be swarming to endorse Mamdani, a cultural
progressive across the board. Democrats lose elections because they
care about the money of rich Americans too much. Their issue with the
would-be mayor of New York is not his views on transgender rights or
even, as party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries have implied
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his imaginary problem with “antisemitism”; it’s that he is a
social democrat. Democrats may have left neoliberalism behind, but it
is not yet squarely in the rearview mirror. Not unlike Williams in the
book, party leaders seem aware of the problem they confront yet unable
to transcend the worldview that causes it. As a result, while willing
to toss working people a few more bones than Republicans, the
Democratic establishment seemingly believes that it is enough to show
up on a handful of picket lines, reshore a solar panel factory or two,
and call it a day. Maybe a podcast would help. Free buses and
state-run grocery stores, however, are a bridge too far, even if they
might win an election.

If it’s Williams’s book that finally drives home the message that
more radical steps are required, it will be a worthy contribution. Yet
it’s her joke about becoming a pariah in San Francisco lunch circles
that will likely provide _Outclassed_’s lasting insight—one as
revealing as the non-endorsements of Mamdani. Democrats may currently
be the better choice, but Republicans are far from the only enemies
working Americans face.

SEAN T. BYRNES is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in Middle
Tennessee. His work has appeared in publications including _Time_, the
_New Republic_, _Diplomatic History_, and _Jacobin_. His newest book,
_The United States and the Ends of Empire: Decolonization, Hierarchy,
and World Order since 1776_, will be published by Bloomsbury in
January.

* Politics
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* the Democratic Party
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* Culture
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