In Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the reader will find a nation riven by abiding class prejudice. Both have written explicitly with the goal of forcing readers to confront the deep, ugly, and ultimately destructive effects of elite snobbery towards working-class or impoverished white people. They both believe that educated readers tend to minimize or ignore how much class matters and has mattered in American history and to deny their own class biases; these books are meant to make that denial harder to sustain.

Isenberg and Williams also mean to explain why the white working class feels increasingly beleaguered culturally as well as economically today. Isenberg takes a wide historical approach, beginning with the first English explorers and settlers in North America in the sixteenth century. She traces a continuous pattern of social sorting by which elites set apart a stratum of white citizens who are looked at as “rubbish” or “waste” or simply as “white trash” – as a kind of noxious surplus of lazy, licentious, and dirty people with no economic use and nothing to redeem them culturally. Isenberg demonstrates how, from Jamestown to the Civil War to Sarah Palin (whom she calls “the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket” (303)), anxieties about the intrusions of this kind of person into the mainstream of American life have peppered some of the pivotal moments in North American history and shaped their outcome.

Williams's book operates very differently, answering a list of common misperceptions about the white working class, such as “Is the working class just racist?” or “Why doesn't the working class get with it and go to college?” These misperceptions are really just prejudices, she argues; they are impositions of “professional–managerial elite” values on a very different set of living circumstances. These arrogant substitutions of elite standards for practical solutions to real problems are driving the increasing resentment and distrust that divide US politics today, and they are, she argues, to blame for the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

It is difficult to contradict Isenberg's and Williams's stark vision of utter class polarization, and one only has to dip a toe in social media to find abundant examples of elitist callousness towards economically disadvantaged whites. Yet both authors focus so intensely on the absolute experiences of working-class anger and elite snobbery that there is almost no room for a picture of class that takes into account its nuances and shadings. While at times class is experienced as an us-versus-them phenomenon, the relentlessness of Isenberg's and Williams's insistence that this is and always has been everywhere the case leaves little space for actual class struggle, the back-and-forth of cultural as well as political and economic interplay and contestation, with sides advancing and retreating along broken or jagged lines. Instead what the authors present looks like trench warfare. What emerges is often not so much a feeling for the lived experience of class among the white working class, but rather a catalog of insults and slurs that have been directed at “poor whites.” The upshot is not a solution to “class cluelessness” or a revelation of “the untold story of class” but rather a politically and intellectually fatiguing realization of how petty and cruel wealthy whites have been. That is a lesson well worth learning and remembering, but not at the expense of making the class system of the nation seem more stable and monolithic than it really is.

The “white working class” of Joan C. Williams's title is not what you might expect it to be. She reveals that she didn't even want to refer to the subject of her book as the “working class” but rather as the “middle class” or even, perhaps, as what she has elsewhere called “the missing middle” (a term used by Theda Skocpol in a 2000 book by that name).Footnote ¹ Statistically defined, the group she has in mind has “household incomes above the bottom third but below the top 20%,” along with “families with higher incomes [i.e. in the top 20%] but no college graduate.” This wide segment of the nation “is the middle 53% of American families … [with] incomes ranging from $41,005 to $131,962 [and a] median income of $75,144” (10). Below this group is what she refers to as “the poor,” and she acknowledges that it is this group that most “progressives” tend to think of as the “white working class.”

Williams's use of numbers throughout the book is strange, and in this instance reveals a tendency to expand the reach of her conclusions. Her 53 percent figure is drawn from a previous paper she coauthored that did not specify race, so 53 percent is the figure for households of all races, not just white households. Retaining the 53 percent number inaccurately, Williams allows the “white working class” to stand in for the whole “working class,” causing nonwhites to evaporate in a stroke and whites to command the “middle” uncontested. Williams wants to make bold and broad claims, and at one point in the book openly acknowledges that she has, in order to “make the text more readable … made blanket statements that actually reflect tendencies, not absolutes” (17).

The goal of making a text more readable and of making bolder, even questionably rooted, claims opens the question of audience, and that can be fairly easily answered. White Working Class came out of an article that Williams wrote for the Harvard Business Review that she “started on election night when I realized that Trump was about to win the presidency” (6). Despite that rather specialized platform, the piece was widely read by people all over the world and up and down the class pyramid. Williams corresponded with innumerable people who replied to her ideas with a variety of emotions, additions, or counterarguments, and from that informal ethnography, Williams expanded her essay into the present book.

But if the essay reached many of the white working-class people Williams was writing about, it is not clear that she wrote the book with the same goal in mind. The book is more directly addressed to a group she refers to as the “professional–managerial elite” or PME, an update, perhaps, on Barbara Ehrenreich's “professional–managerial class” (PMC). Ehrenreich and her sometimes coauthor Arlie Hochschild are two of Williams's main touchstones, particularly Hochschild's recent Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), but Williams also draws on her own groundbreaking research into the challenges of work–life balance for women on different class lines.Footnote ²

Williams targets this PME because, she argues, its members bear the responsibility for what she calls “a relationship gone bad: that between the white working class and the PME” (129). As the white working class's economic fortunes declined, she argues, “the professional class first stopped noticing, and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness” (130). Repeating a widely circulated statistic showing that the vast majority of Americans still identify as “middle-class,” she states that “Americans curry a convenient deafness when it comes to class” (9), analogizing, perhaps, class deafness to “color blindness.” Elsewhere she resurrects an idiom of the Cold War in referring to a “class comprehension gap” (4), which nicely intimates a certain weaponized menace and high stakes for this condition.

The specter of the Cold War is, however, a comforting figure, for Williams believes that it was during the decades following the Great Depression that the “relationship” between the white working class and the PME was at its healthiest. “Over the past 40-odd years, elites stopped connecting with the working class, whom prior generations had given a place of honor” (2). Referring to Federal Art Projects and Hollywood classics like The Grapes of Wrath and On the Waterfront, she enthuses that “elites worked hard to understand working-class men's striving and their pain” (2).

Nancy Isenberg, as we will see, would vehemently disagree, and it is hard to understand how Williams can make such a statement so flatly, given the enormity of “class callousness” and outright hostility to the New Deal that existed among the elite during this period, but perhaps the answer lies in the murkiness of Williams's definition of “elite.” For her, the PME is not very different in composition from the ordinary targets of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh – it is primarily an artistic and bureaucratic elite rather than wealthy executives. It's Tina Fey from 30 Rock and not Alec Baldwin.

Williams can be stunningly impressionistic and anecdotal when she tries to nail down the worldviews and mores of this PME: her observations on how the PME feels about the white working class or about the economy come from “my PME friends” and “where I live in San Francisco” (27). And despite that slim sample size, Williams makes an enormous claim for the responsibility that her PME friends bear for the state that the nation is in today. In reference to Donald Trump's victory, she quotes one correspondent who bluntly told her, “I've also concluded that we liberals own 99% of the responsibility for Trump's election … we need to own that.” “I don't blame [Trump] or his voters one bit,” the correspondent continued. “He's just a con man who saw an opening, and they're just supporting someone who gives them a voice – we're the ones who failed” (65).

This is a strange – though not unfamiliar – line of reasoning: it imagines liberal elites as a kind of guardian-angel class dedicated to preserving the republic from demagogues, an image that has recently had as its apotheosis the elevation of figures like Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau as the saviors of decency and cosmopolitanism. Within the logic of this worldview, US liberals have shirked their responsibility to chase away the political flim-flam men; they have stopped watching over their white working-class charges and therefore bear as much responsibility as a nightwatchman who fell asleep on the job.

However, while it is completely reasonable to argue that the Democratic platform in 2016 was inadequate to the real needs of large numbers of voters, that is an argument that could be made without reference to Trump. To look at the 2016 election in this way treats Trump as the penalty that liberals must pay for their snobbery rather than as a person who actively misled voters about his and his party's true policy intentions; it sees his voters as gullible losers rather than as responsible adults. To wave all that away as somehow understandable presumes that the “con” itself is just a part of a game of cops and robbers, where it's just the job of criminals – or in this case, of demagogues – to victimize society, and the job of the police – the liberal elite – to try to stop them.

The seeming naturalness of treating politics as a “game” is, perhaps, the point. Williams is all too willing to accept that some things just are the way they are – “Look, I wish manliness worked differently” (91), she states at one point in acknowledging that there is a serious problem with sexism among many Trump voters. At another point, she argues that the PME should stop looking down on the white working class for being racist because there is plenty of racism among the PME as well. That racism is socially endemic is a totally valid and important point, but her argument goes nowhere: she shrugs the issue away by quoting the musical Avenue Q, which has a song titled “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” (61). Rather than a social problem, racism – like manliness – appears to be a congenital condition.

By treating politics as a game, Williams can blame liberal elites for not playing the game well – thus allowing the demagogues to win. This maneuver is neatly captured in a line like “Progressives have inadvertently made sexism an anti-snobbery weapon, too” (78). Boys will be boys, in other words, and rather than accept that, liberals have tried to protect society from boyishness, angering the boys and, in the end, failing to protect anyone from les enfants terribles. Or, as another example, Williams argues that it is the fault of liberal elites that the welfare state has been gutted – and not because some, like Bill Clinton, actively have sought welfare's demise. Clinton she exonerates as “the last Democratic president to truly understand the white working class” (23), and that's why, she argues, he wanted to end “welfare as we know it.” It was rather the liberal defenders of Great Society-like assistance to the poor who were the welfare state's real enemies, it turns out, because they didn't understand that making more aid available to the truly destitute than was available to the working class would end with the massive unpopularity of programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

In Williams's view, it seems, the working class just naturally will resent aid to the poor; resentment is never stoked or created by other interested parties, like, say, the wealthy who would like to see their federal taxes slashed. Similarly, Williams's assumption that an ineradicable substrate of racism lies naturally within all of us means that the white working class will just reflexively resent respect and resources directed toward racial minorities. Williams argues on a number of occasions that these PME guardians did not just lose interest in the white working class but were actively distracted by their new emotional and moral investments in people of color, women, and LGBT people. By assuming that white working-class anger will be the inevitable result “when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss ‘the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America’” (4), she makes both moves seem equally wrongheaded. That is definitely not her intent (as she notes frequently), but the pattern of her thinking allows for little room to see how one half of this sentence can operate independently of the other. “We won't know how much racism falls away until we stop insulting working-class whites and try including them within our ambit of responsibility” (71).

Again, Williams never asks whether some of this anger and racism has been coaxed and incited by interested parties, a position that seems increasingly out of touch with the overtly inflammatory media landscape of InfoWars, Breitbart, and Fox News. Capitalizing on any instance of “liberal condescension” or even – as in the notorious case of the “War on Christmas” – making up new indignities foisted on their godly viewers, these media outlets manufacture and sell outrage, a phenomenon Williams evidently cannot see. For her, the PME have brought all of this resentment and anger and racism and sexism upon their own heads.

This one-sided account of the origins of the populist anger we see so potently today does, however, lead Williams to some sharp analysis of particular instances of white working-class frustration and to some very perceptive prescriptions for how liberals can work to restore a sense of unity and common purpose to the nation. These mostly focus on messaging rather than on structural reforms, which is, perhaps, reasonable given the current political balance of power. First, Williams argues that Democrats have been far too shy about making a positive case for the good that the government already does for many people in all classes. Drawing upon research by Suzanne Mettler and others, she demonstrates how many benefits go to the working class (even in the ampler definition she gives) while remaining essentially invisible. (Mettler refers to this as “the submerged state.”)

But even more importantly, Williams contends that the liberal PME “can communicate that we believe that the injustices experienced by working-class whites are ones elites have a moral obligation to address” (68). Throughout the book, Williams lays out many painful and jarring stories of working-class adjustments to lives disordered by economic forces outside their control. She is absolutely right to argue that elites – not just the Tina Fey elites but the Alec Baldwins as well – have a moral obligation to address that pain and its causes. But she leaves that category of “injustices experienced by working-class whites” wide open to a variety of maladies that have a far more tenuous link to reality. Is someone's anger at having to “press one for English” an injustice that elites have a moral obligation to address? Or is that anger the result of other forces at work, of deliberate incitements by parties who benefit from a polarized nation? These are questions that will have to be answered, and that will likely provoke strong disagreements – even among the “professional–managerial elite.”

Nancy Isenberg's White Trash is an example of a new wave of publicly engaged history that has injected a new vitality and sense of purpose into the field. Like Williams, Isenberg writes for a broad audience, and her book is also full of boldly stated claims. Yet Isenberg also brings to bear a wealth of painstaking research and a familiarity with an impressively broad range of primary sources, as well as a specialist's detailed knowledge of the Founding Fathers and the early republic. Seeing historians with this kind of deep knowledge find a large audience is invigorating.

That depth of knowledge is not without its blind spots, however, and most of those come from Isenberg's awkward handling of race. Like Williams, Isenberg embraces the possibility that an enhanced focus on class will require scaling back long-standing liberal presumptions that racial prejudice has the longer and uglier history in America. “Class had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race” (2), she writes, throwing down the gauntlet to critical race theory.

Isenberg, however, draws a picture of class that resembles the contributions of critical race theorists far more than it resembles any Marxist. One of the largest claims she makes is that class – at least for the white underclass – has always operated in North America through a crude biological logic of “breeding.” This basically eugenic mental framework has remained unchanged throughout the history of English settlement in North America, and it has always used the same traits to define a stratum or “breed” of whites as a stagnant cesspool of indolence, lust, dirt, and stupidity. Defying America's self-image as a land of opportunity and class mobility, Isenberg insists that the (white) class system of North America has always presumed an immobile bottom layer.

Isenberg recovers a diverse lexicon of terms by which Americans have articulated this idea. Not only do we find the familiar “white trash” of the title, but also more archaic epithets like “lubbers” (“stupid, clumsy oafs” (46)), “offscourings” (“human fecal waste” (37)), and “mudsills,” a term first used by southerners to insult Union troops, who were presumably fighting because they were too poor not to, in total contrast to the aristocratic officers of the Confederacy, who were fighting for honor. Isenberg tends to lump these terms together as all meaning the same thing, a choice which the reader may find questionable, especially as she moves on to terms that still have currency. She acknowledges that “not everyone agreed that the two were synonymous,” but also treats “redneck” and “white trash” as more or less all referring to the same kind of person, and throws in “hillbilly” for good measure.

But the eager amalgamation of these varied terms is less problematic than the way that Isenberg tends to tell this story of elitist condescension mainly through the words of the elites; White Trash is not a social history in the traditional sense. Especially for the early part of the book, Isenberg looks to the iconic figures of American history for what they said about indigent whites, and often seems to take their word as an accurate reflection of how class actually operated. The obiter dicta of Benjamin Franklin or William Byrd are taken almost at face value. Isenberg is relentless in scouring the historical record for the nasty things that American statesmen have said about poor whites.

This focus on elite views is worth critiquing not because it is better to keep these skeletons hidden in a filiopietistic closet but because it closes off any exploration of the instability of class identity or any real understanding of the frequently precarious nature of class power. It is, in short, debilitating: by overstressing the solidity of elite power, Isenberg almost renounces the possibilities for finding sparks of creative resistance and even considerable achievement among the nonelite. “White trash” becomes a category of abjection rather than – as is clear when one reads between the lines of many of those elite epithets – a massive problem of governance.

There are two occasions in the book where something like actual class struggle breaks out amidst the name-calling. Isenberg's chapter on the Civil War is riveting precisely because she details how Union soldiers and many northern politicians took up the slur of “mudsill” as a badge of honor with a quasi-revolutionary fervor. Their response to southern snobbery was to make the Civil War into a class war – at least in rhetoric and sometimes, as with some of General Sherman's actions, in fact. The second instance is in Isenberg's retelling of Orval Faubus's defiance of the Supreme Court's desegregation mandate. Isenberg is masterful in demonstrating how Faubus mixed class and race together, tacitly threatening to use his credibility with the “white trash” of Arkansas to foment civil disorder that could easily spill over into white middle- and upper-class neighborhoods.

In both cases, Isenberg allows for an intricate intertwining of race and class that she mostly tries to prevent. In making such a strong case for the immense importance of class, she is often bound to assert its priority above race (or gender). This can sound a little awkward, as in these statements about the crisis that led up to the Civil War:

There is almost certainly a better way to make the case that class tensions were integral to increasing sectional pressures than by saying that “we are not told the whole story.” This is a line that, taken out of context, could be happily quoted by a neo-Confederate.

Neither Isenberg nor Williams is out to diminish the importance of race in American history, but both share an idea of whiteness that boxes them into corners whenever they wish to say something about the ways that race and class interact. Both see whiteness as essentially static and inert, even as historians, sociologists, and literary critics have produced innumerable studies demonstrating the fluidity and instability of whiteness as a category. Isenberg doesn't even cite such classics as David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness (1991), Nell Painter's The History of White People (2010), or Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color (1998). Isenberg and Williams therefore see race as basically exogenous because for them whiteness is a stable – if stratified – category.

This is not a foundation for anyone to build on in seeking a better history of the white underclass in American history. Books that have “white” in the title can no longer afford to be so innocent about race, even if they are seeking to add complexity to our understanding of class.