social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.
Williams applied "the Page 99 Test" to her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, and reported the following:
If one turns to page 99 of my book, they will learn a lot about why people believe in conspiracy theories. While this is good reading, it’s only a very small sliver of what I write about, so I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book.Visit Joan C. Williams's website.
I spend a few pages talking about conspiracy theories, and why people like them, because they are an important element of the distrust in government that has been building over the past several years in America. My book, overall, is about how the Democratic Party lost working class voters—and the cultural competence people on the Left are going to have to learn if they want to woo these voters back. The working class has felt powerless for too long when it comes to our government and the decisions it makes. Believing in a conspiracy theory, or declaring that you are going to “do your own research,” on a given topic feels empowering. It’s a welcome feeling for the believer; for everyone else, it should be a sign that inequality is eroding the social fabric of our nation.
Most of the rest of Outclassed walks readers through how we got to a point where the working class is more aligned with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and the many ways that activists and leaders on the Left make unforced errors in their outreach to those working-class voters. College-educated voters need to understand the ways working-class attitudes towards religion, immigration, and traditional gender roles reflect the material conditions of working-class lives. The final section provides a detailed roadmap on how the Left can forge cross-class coalitions on climate, guns, and more. These conversations are the key to winning back working- class voters from the far Right; without these conversations that cut across party lines, we can’t hope to make change in our nation.
--Marshal Zeringue