White Working Class

CHAPTER

13

Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values and Allies?

“SHOULD THE PARTY continue tailoring its message to the fast-growing young and nonwhite constituencies that propelled President Obama, or make a more concerted effort to win over the white voters who have drifted away?” asked The New York Times.²⁵⁴ In anxious emails with my friends, the most common fears are that all the talk about the white working class will come at the expense of groups who have been at the center of the progressive imagination: people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, women. A class migrant who made a career as a partner in a large law firm wrote that after Trump’s election, her younger brother and others were ...