Frankly, I doubt that many progressives will take Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal review of progressive takes on reconciliation with the white working class seriously. Maybe I’m being unkind but I think that for every progressive like Kevin Drum or Michael Tomasky there are three who are just waiting for white working people to die.
Consider this:
A more complex analysis of liberal elitism comes from Joan Williams, a feminist law professor whose best-known previous book is Unbending Gender. In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Williams takes her fellow liberal professionals to the woodshed for their indifference to the hard-knock realities of working-class life and for their blindness to the shortcomings of their own cosmopolitan preferences. Married to the Harvard-educated son of a working-class family, Williams is astute about the wide disparities between liberal and white working-class notions of the meaning of work, family, community, and country. One of her proposals for solving class cluelessness is a conservative favorite: reviving civics education.
As long as progressives don’t recognize that today’s feminism is far too separated from most women’s lives and experience there will be a problem. Too much about more women in the professions and boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and not nearly enough about the problems faced by lower income women. Lower income women have always worked outside the home. My maternal grandmother and her mother both worked, the latter as a cook for a wealthy home. My sympathy for that last is with the wealthy family. She was by most accounts an awful cook.
The emphasis should be on marriage, how women are treated in marriage, preserving intact families, working conditions for women in blue collar workplaces, and greater economic growth and employment. The real women’s issues are archetypally conservative ones.
You left out women’s control over their own bodies.
Elite vs. worker/family oriented feminism was a major wedge between Clintonites and Berners during the primary, and that battle continues today. The majority of eloquent, ardent voices on the (real) left seem to be women.
“Maybe I’m being unkind but I think that for every progressive like Kevin Drum or Michael Tomasky there are three who are just waiting for white working people to die.”
Maybe in some areas of the internet, but certainly not in real life. That would be like saying that for every Republican who wants to help the working class, there are three who are just waiting to give tax breaks to the rich and set trade and business policies to exclusively benefit the wealthy.
Steve
And there are writers on the Internet who say just that. Like most of the columnists for the NYT and WP. Or most of the commenters at OTB.