In "What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class," Joan C. Williams draws on her personal experience of her husband's working-class background to explain the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Williams' thesis is that its "the class culture gap" (2016). She argues that Trump's victory, against even his own party's professional leaders, reflects a deep feeling among the working class, not to be confused with the poor, that professionals such as doctors, lawyers and academics look down on them and their economic aspirations to be if not super-rich like their hero Trump, at least comfortably off through hard work. Williams says this resentment of people like Clinton and also the Republican leadership is what has driven Trump to the White House.
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My response
The way the Williams relates her personal experience to support the thesis she is arguing for reminds me of the writing exercise did in Skillful yesterday, where we related our personal experience to the ideas in the reading to support a main idea about ourselves, the idea stated in the topic sentence of the paragraph.
But I also like William's article in the Harvard Business Review because it seems to me one of the best explanations for what has happened in US politics over the past year. I had, like most of the professional class, including most of the media, been sure up to the time the results were announced that the American people would not elect Trump. How wrong we all were! How wrong I was! Naturally, I want to understand how I could have been so wrong.
Being wrong doesn't worry me too much. I've often been wrong about things in the past, and I'm certain (although of course I can't list any) that some of the beliefs I hold now are also false. Among the large set of things I believe, it would be incredible that all were actually true beliefs. Unfortunately, my beliefs don't come conveniently labelled as "true" or "false."
And now we have to live with Trump for four years. Unlike some of my shocked friends, and the mobs of street protesters, I think that Trump's election was entirely democratic. Just because he did not get the majority vote, which went to Clinton, does not make his election undemocratic, and having spoken, the voice of US citizens must be respected, however much we might not like it. The ugly street protests in various US cities, so very like the anti-democratic PDRC mobs that helped stamp Thailand's evolving democracy into the dirt under jackboots, are not a healthy democratic response to the election by the United States of Donald Trump.
I look forward with interest to the doubtless interesting times to come over the next four years.
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Reference
- Williams, J. C. (2016, November 10). What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
127 words in the summary paragraph. Safe.
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