White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author

by Mark Cuban

  Still another class divide concerns social networks.61 Elites typically have a narrow intimate circle but also have a broad network of acquaintances—“entrepreneurial networks,” sociologists call them. Entrepreneurial networks help professionals get jobs, customers, clients, business partners, and business opportunities around the country or even in other countries.

  Elite socializing thus cultivates the ability to get along smoothly with a broad range of people and impress them with your sophistication. Elite children are taught from a very young age to shake hands and look strangers firmly in the eye,62 because their futures rely on the ability to form and maintain entrepreneurial networks. Studies show that between 51% and 70% of professionals get jobs through personal contacts, so they “network” and host those aforementioned dinner parties.63 This is part of the self-actualization ethic so central to elite life (see Table 1).

  This peculiar combination of the personal and the strategic strikes the working class as insincere. So does the kind of politicking required for career success in professional and business careers. Working-class entertaining is designed to denote a space apart from jobs, not be an extension of them. The goal is not to impress people you don’t know well, but to comfort those you do with abundant portions of familiar dishes—think Old Country Buffet, not Chez Panisse.

  Blue-collar jobs often involve technical rather than social skills, and the working class takes pride in their technical expertise, not their ability to influence other people. A pipe fitter criticized “shirt and ties types” for “too much politicking.” “They are jockeying for jobs and worrying about whether they are making the right moves and stuff. I feel that I don’t have to get involved in that.” Working-class men often see professionals as phony and value their own ability to call a spade a spade. Said a man who had left Wall Street to be a firefighter, “In big business, there’s a lot of false stuff going on.” Said an auto mechanic, “You know what I hate? Two-face. I can’t stand that. You’re a fake, you’re a fake. Why be a fake?”64 “Middle-class game-playing bullshit” was the verdict of one class migrant.65

  Irony versus sincerity is yet another class divide. Both black and white workers value sincerity and direct talk because they believe it sets them above the (fake, suck-up) professionals. The professional elite values irony and polish, because this sets them above the (inarticulate, unsophisticated) working class.

  So much of what the professional elite identifies as normal life the white working class sees as the display of class privilege. Take the standard professional-class ice-breaker: “What do you do?” It makes sense in a class context where personal dignity stems from economic power and professional achievement. When people ask me, I reply, “I’m a law professor.”

  But that kind of honor is available to only a few in the working class—to firefighters, police, soldiers. For most, the dignity work affords is from what it allows you to buy and whom it allows you to support, not from the job itself. “What do you do?” is not the first question at a party. I remember attending my class-migrant husband’s high school reunion when, with a regrettable lack of code switching, he posed the “What do you do?” question to a classmate. The classmate’s face got very red as he came right up into Jim’s face and hissed, “I sell toilets.”

  This helps explain why, in working-class communities, attention often shifts from what one does to who one is—to character. Working-class whites seek to “keep the world in moral order,” to quote Lamont, often measured by adherence to “traditional” values.66 “I was seldom entirely clear about what was meant by tradition,” admits Sherman, but the rural whites she interviewed were all for it. For them, it meant both rural rootedness and family values, which meant the two-parent family, the stability of family life, and the high value placed on family caregiving.67

  For people whose jobs deny them prestige, “family comes first” is a common refrain. As a retired mill worker told Sherman, in his life everything was built around family. Having a “successful nuclear family was one of his life’s greatest achievements,” notes Sherman. Connecting to tradition through aspirational family structure allows working-class whites “to claim moral and personal success when they have few other opportunities to achieve some version of the American dream,” she concludes.68 This is why family values are so resonant.

  The high value placed on traditional family values creates another clash with the professional class: among elites, a key way they show sophistication is to signal comfort with avant-garde sexuality, self-presentation, and family dynamics. The avant-garde arose in the early nineteenth century as an artistic movement that “pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.”69 What began as transgression among nineteenth-century European artists now defines the cultural world of the twenty-first-century American elite: it’s a point of pride not to be one of those petty bourgeois who’s shocked by sexual transgression. I knew I was born to live in San Francisco when, driving down Market Street, I spotted a man sporting sturdy shoes—and nothing else. I was uncomfortable—and delighted.

  Securing approval for a new range of sexualities is a cause now embraced by progressives and mainstream conservatives alike (as evidenced by the partnership of Ted Olson and David Boies in arguing a landmark marriage equality case). Ted Olson’s championship of marriage equality in the Supreme Court dramatized that mainstream conservatives have joined the progressive elite in embracing acceptance of formerly transgressive sexualities as being open-minded and sophisticated rather than narrow and provincial.

  The professional class seeks social honor by embracing the edgy; the white working class seeks social honor by embracing the traditional. The focus on character, morality, and family values is a key expression of class disadvantage; we all choose baskets we can fill. This attachment to tradition is part of what the white working class shared for so long with Burkean conservatives.70

  All this is crucial background to understanding why working-class whites resent professionals. The professional-class values of sophistication, boundary breaking, and creativity are all useful for getting and keeping a job if you’re an order giver who has to signal initiative. Working-class whites value stability and dependability—dispositions useful for getting and keeping a job if you’re an order taker.71

  For many in the working class, becoming a member of the professional class is an ambiguous achievement—you have more money, yes, but you also have to adopt new folkways, like two-facedness. The dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable—just with more money.72 Brashly wealthy celebrities epitomize the fantasy of being wildly rich while losing none of your working-class cred. Trump epitomizes this—after all, his original fortune was made in garish casinos that sold a working-class brand of luxury (aka “garish bad taste”).73

  Bridging the class culture gap is difficult—for professionals as well as the working class. The first step is to recognize elite folkways as just that: folkways, not “good taste.” Many habits of the professional elite—from artisanal religion to a life of self-actualization—require a college education. America doesn’t provide that, so we need to take the working class as we find them. We don’t fault the poor for failing to value the same things the professional class values. We need to extend that courtesy to working-class people of all races. Many of our truths just don’t make sense in the context of their lives.

  CHAPTER 5

  Why Doesn’t the Working Class Just Move to Where the Jobs Are?

  ONE BIG QUESTION pundits and commentators mull over is this: why don’t people facing hard economic times move to where economic times are better? If you live in Detroit, Michigan; Millinocket, Maine; Camden, New Jersey; York, Pennsylvania; or Yuma, Arizona,74 why not move to an area where the economy is growing? At best, elites are puzzled. At worst, they’re patronizing and even scornful. “Donald Trump cannot deliver new jobs like pizza wherever you live,” said Glenn Helton,* decrying the “stubbor
n immobility of the white working class.”

  Part of the reason is the power of “clique networks,” as sociologists call them, where everybody knows everyone else and ties run deep.75 This has a practical side to it: in the working class of all races, family ties also involve material help with child care and home improvements—things wealthier families buy. Clique networks help protect working-class families from their vulnerable market position.

  The folkways of elites are very different. Professionals’ national job markets also mean they often end up far away from their families, and family relationships among adults typically involve purely emotional ties: families support one another by talking things through. If working-class networks are narrow and deep, professionals’ are broad but shallow.

  A class-migrant professor tried to explain to a colleague why he saw his distant family so much more than his colleague saw his (who lived closer): “It’s a blue-collar thing. . . . Middle-class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young close to home.”76 Tearing a working-class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley.

  The professional elite values change and self-development; working-class families value stability and community. The professional elite associates change with challenge, excitement, opportunity, and innovation. But for families a few paychecks away from losing their homes and stable middle-class lives, respect for stability reigns supreme. “I associate change with loss,” said a class migrant whose father was evicted from apartment after apartment. Moving to a new city or state is often appealing for someone from the professional elite, and an alarming prospect for someone from the working class. (By the way, the working class shares this with low-income Americans of all races, who also tend to stay close to home, for many of the same reasons.)

  Moving for a job doesn’t strike the professional elite as a big deal, because the professional elite relies heavily on work to shape identity. A study of health professionals in Massachusetts found doctors’ lives shaped by what sociologist Mary Blair-Loy calls the “work devotion schema”: high-level professionals are expected to “maintain a single-minded focus” on work in which “[a]ny nonwork activities pale . . . in significance . . . [to] professional responsibilities.” This ideal has its roots in the Protestant work ethic, in which work was viewed as a “calling” from God.77

  For many in the professional elite, work becomes a totalizing experience. “Holidays are a nuisance because you have to stop working,” said a corporate litigator. “I remember being really annoyed when it was Thanksgiving. Damn, why did I have to stop working to go eat a turkey? I missed my favorite uncle’s funeral, because I had a deposition scheduled that was too important.”78

  Working-class men find this obsession with work off-putting. Thus a salesman decried overly ambitious people who “have blinders on. You miss all of life. . . . A person that is totally ambitious and driven never sees anything except the spot they are aiming at.” Working-class men dismiss work devotion as narcissism. An electronics technician criticized people who are “so self-assured, so self-intense that they don’t really care about anyone else. . . . It’s me, me, me, me, me. I’m not that kind of person at all, and that’s probably why I don’t like it.”79

  But elite men embrace work devotion as integral to manliness. Working long hours is seen as a “heroic activity,” noted a study of lawyers.80 For Silicon Valley engineers, working long hours turns computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. “There’s this kind of machismo culture among young male engineers that you just don’t sleep,” one engineer told Marianne Cooper.81 “[S]uccessful enactment of this masculinity,” she concludes, “involves displaying one’s exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one’s commitment, stamina, and virility.”82

  For elite men, ambition and a strong work ethic are “doubly sacred . . . [as signals of] both moral and socioeconomic worth.”83 Work, in some sense, is their religion. Recognizing that may make us less condescending about Americans who worship a different God and arguably have a healthier relationship to work.

  Moving for a job makes sense in this context, if you know a million former college classmates in Chicago anyway. But moving means something very different for working-class people. Remember the fellow who hissed, “I sell toilets”? It’s safer to hang out with people you’ve known forever who will not judge you on your often-inglorious job. Familiar faces provide a buffer against humiliation.

  Then there’s the question of what moving away might imply: that you care more about your job than your community. Part of the reason the working class doesn’t move to where the jobs are is because of these deep ties to their communities. And this communitarian streak manifests in other, clearly laudable ways. Households earning $50,000 to $75,000 give away far more of their discretionary income (7.6%) than do households earning $100,000 or more (4.2%).84 The middle-class Maryland towns of Capitol Heights (majority white) and Suitland85 (majority black) give away a higher proportion of their incomes than the tony suburbs of McLean, Virginia, and Bethesda, Maryland.86 Remember how Vance’s father’s church bought him a car when he was unemployed? These were not affluent people.

  Sherman describes a white rural family that sheltered and fed, over the years, some 200 local kids who were escaping physical abuse or parental addiction. This was a serious financial strain, but nearly half of the 55 people Sherman interviewed had cared for children who were not biologically related to them.87

  Non-privileged people, whether poor or working class, tend to be more rooted than American elites. Their lack of market power means that they rely on close networks of family and friends for many things more affluent folks purchase on the open market, from child and elder care to home improvement projects. Moving would eliminate this safety net, and having to pay for child care might well erase the economic benefits of moving.

  At a deeper level, non-privileged people invest much more of their identities in their close-knit families and communities than do more privileged ones. Poor and working-class people derive social honor from their reputations in communities of people who’ve known them “forever.” Moving for them is not like moving from New York to San Francisco to crash in your college roommate’s apartment while you found a start-up among people who have been trained since childhood to build fluid careers based on fluid networks of personal and business acquaintances. It’s throwing away the only relationships that give you the prospect of social honor, the only social life you know how to create, and the social safety net that has seen you through.

  Among the poor and the working class, social lives often revolve around family. This begins early: Annette Lareau notes that children often play with cousins and that “it would be hard to overstate the importance of family” in white working-class lives.88 For decades, my sister-in-law went grocery shopping every weekend with her mother, which I thought was bizarre until I decided it was brilliant. Now I go to Costco every weekend with my son, but I don’t know anyone else who does anything like that. A man described to Hochschild that he “had grown up in a dense circle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all within walking distance of each other.”89 Again, there are material reasons that make it harder for working-class people to just pull up roots and move.

  Blue-state families are better off than red-state ones, who have higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower ages of marriage and first birth,90 as progressives delight in pointing out as an example of hypocrisy. But that’s not the point. Family values are about aspiration. Until about 1980, young adults in the working class were like college grads: they waited to have children until they were married. But now Americans who are not college grads don’t wait.91 Instead they behave more like the poor, who have been having children out of wedlock for quite a while.92

  Why? Americans tend to associate marriage with the white picket fence—a stable job, stable ho
me, stable life. If you feel that stability is attainable, you wait until you have it before marriage and kids. But if Americans feel that’s not a practical goal, or only an extremely long-term and aspirational one, they tend not to marry. The decline in marriage is a symptom of the working class’s economic decline—not, as some argue, its cause.93

  The rootlessness of the PME makes sense in their lives: they have friends and classmates throughout the country or the world, their job markets are national or global, their family ties are chiefly emotional rather than practical or economic—and when someone in the professional class moves, they can maintain those emotional ties through unlimited international data plans.94 But both the poor and the working class of all races typically are deeply rooted, both by disposition and necessity. You can’t provide child care for your grandchildren via Skype.

  CHAPTER 6

  Why Doesn’t the Working Class Get with It and Go to College?

  EDUCATIONAL LEVELS DO NOT just reflect social class, they are constitutive of it. Graduating from college is a class act that both enacts class status and reproduces it.