 There are seats up front, no one ever wants to sit there, but, so you all can come up and sit, Joan, you all can come sit, yeah, I think you go ahead, and that way we just avoid a step. All right, so welcome everyone, I'm Ann Marie Slaughter, I'm the president and CEO of New America, and welcome to how the Trump campaign took the white working class by storm. So we are here to celebrate Joan Williams' new book, which everyone is holding up, and I will say that this book grew out of a Harvard Business Review article that took the world by storm shortly after the election, and many of us reading it were not surprised that Joan Williams had nailed something really important in the national psyche. Many of us, hold on, again, that's where I'm going. Many of us have known Joan for a very long time, indeed, when I was on my book tour for Unfinished Business, Women, Men, Work, Family, I would often start by saying, look, Joan Williams wrote the Bible in this area, she wrote Unbending Gender in roughly 2000, she completely got the ideal worker, the fetish of the ideal worker, how care and the uneven distribution of care was a core part of deep inequality debates. So in the world of women, work, and family, we've been going back to the well for a long time, and indeed then Joan and her daughter wrote a book on the sort of barriers to women in the workplace, and I think 2013, was that, did it come out? Again, a fabulous book really nailing specifically the problems that women face. So none of us were surprised, it's just that she was now taking on a different topic, really she takes aim at the astonishment of many people on the left who voted for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders before, at why so many members of the white working class voted for Trump, and she then in her article and in this book, the subtitle of the book, it's White Working Class, and the subtitle is Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, she really explores the anger and the resentment and fundamentally the disconnect of the white working, of white working class voters against progressives and establishment politicians in many ways against what, at least in Britain, people are calling globalists, people from anywhere, people who have achieved identities and are mobile and global in ways that people who are often stuck somewhere in the same place that they grew up are not mobile and see a world they are not part of and a world that they think has left them behind and they're holding people to account for that. So she's here, so I'm not gonna spend any more time telling you her arguments. Joan is a distinguished professor of law at UC Hastings, she's a foundation chair, she's also the founding director of the Center for Work Life Law and that's not family law and that's not women's law, that is work life law, she's really pioneered that whole area of law and she is going to be in conversation. I'm gonna go this way with Cecilia Muñoz immediately to my right, I love this, our own Cecilia Muñoz who is now our vice president for policy and technology and our director of New America's National Network who spent the last eight years in the Obama administration, the last five of those as the head of the Domestic Policy Council and encountered many of these different issues. To her right, again our own although she has many other identities, Janelle Ross, who is a reporter for the Washington Post but a New America National Fellow and she's writing a book about the racial wealth gap and the truth about its real origins, those origins laid bare by the Great Recession and the book will be published by Beacon Press. She is in her day job, also a political reporter for the Washington Post. And then to Joan's right, Jenna Johnson where the post is well represented, also a political reporter for the Washington Post who covers my, I don't know what to say, my sympathies, she covers the White House and she spent more than a year writing about Donald Trump's presidential campaign, traveled to over 35 states and attended over 170 political rallies and interviewed hundreds of Trump supporters. So we are gonna have a lively conversation and over to you, thank you. We're just gonna jump on in and I have some questions that came up as I was reading Joan's book but hopefully I won't even get to many of those because we're just gonna have this cozy little discussion that you guys get to listen in on for about 45 minutes and then we're gonna throw it open to you to take some more questions. So let's go back to election night. Joan, on election night you were inspired to write this essay that led to this book. Where were you, who were you with, what was going through your mind as you were watching the results come in? Well I mean it was so poignant, I teach at a law school and the women's students at the law school had organized a whole bunch of us in pantsuits that day to celebrate the historic victory of Hillary Clinton and I actually, and meanwhile we're getting more and more worried, I had been living at the Clinton headquarters in San Francisco when Trump won, I was amazed but I was not all surprised. I kind of knew he was gonna win. And so I left this election night victory party at about 7.30 because I said like it's done, I can't even bear this. And I went home to an email from my editor at Harvard Business Review which published the essay which now has been read by close to four million people and then the book. And she said Joan, now you really have to write about the election because she'd been trying to get me to write based on what works for women at work and I was going like the gender dynamic in this election is so obvious it's not even interesting to write about. But she said Joan, you're the person who focuses on gender in class, you're the right person. So I stayed up till one o'clock in the morning writing this essay. And I said a lot of things that are controversial. And my attitude was I've been reigning myself in, I know a lot of this stuff is not gonna be popular but I'm done. We are really up a creek. And we're up a creek not only because of Trump and then I'll let you get a word in an actualized but Trump ain't the half of it folks. I mean there are only 16 Democratic governors. There are two thirds of partisan state legislatures are held by Republicans. And we just went through eight years of a president who I very deeply admire who I say with great admiration and respect accomplished very little that is gonna be lasting because we didn't hold the house. Why are we doing this? The Democrats have what I call a blue coasts and blue dot strategy with an ocean of red in between. That's what's really going on. And that's why I wrote this book. And was there anything after you wrote that initial essay you heard from hundreds of people who were leaving comments and reaching out to you between writing that essay and writing this book did you happen to learn anything new or were there issues that you ended up bringing up in this book that you hadn't quite thought through until you started kind of crowdsourcing this issue? Well I mean the HBR article now, last time I looked, which is several months ago I had like over 800 comments and I personally received 200 personal letters. I hear from people all the time. There are a number of different groups and now I'm on book tour so I've been talking to reporters nonstop. And there are several different, very different reactions to the book. From the most positive reaction is typically from people I call class migrants. People who were brought up in blue collar families and now are in the professional leads. And class migrants go like finally someone is saying this. Finally someone is describing what's going on that's driving American politics. They tend to absolutely love this book. The group that likes it the least are my people out in San Francisco. There was just an interview, I've forgotten whether it was Slate or Salon. Tells you how uncool I am. But that where the, I mean the most negative reaction is why are you coddling these racists, White Lady? Why are you coddling these racists? So we're gonna jump into that question in depth in a little bit here. But I wanna, Janelle, where were you election night? What were you doing? What were you thinking? Of course I'm gonna have to censor part of the answer to that question. So I can remain employed. I feel like I might. I was at home on election night. I worked during the day. I was at home on election night and like you probably about 730, 745. It was pretty clear to me what was happening. I was not like you. Expecting that outcome in any way, shape or form. So I was completely shocked. And really on a personal level, somewhat, I think the election did a couple of things. I think it really raised some very troubling questions for me about what it is that animates our politics. Really like really provide the fuel. Like what is really driving this country and the decisions that people are making. And then I think secondarily what it is that people don't care about at all that again on a personal level are things that are absolutely critical for my health, welfare and wellbeing. So I was pretty troubled I think in that sense. Professionally it was also alarming in that it was very clear that we had very much misunderstood this election. Or at least I did. Yeah, yeah. So I was working in the Obama administration at the time. I wasn't expecting this outcome but I was nervous enough that I was home by myself with a bottle of whiskey. And got an email at about midnight from the chief of staff basically saying let's all get on the phone. And we all got on the phone at 1205. The senior team. And he basically said look we all can see where this is going. I need you all to get some sleep because we start the transition tomorrow. So please I know what you're going through. I'm going through it too. Go to bed you have to get some rest because this is what we're doing tomorrow. And my story also. I covered Trump for September 2015 on the campaign trail. But on the election night I actually opted to not be at his party. I wanted to be out in the country with Trump supporters. And to me they were always the most interesting part of covering Trump with just this political movement that he sparked that totally took everyone by surprise. So I was in Latrobe, Pennsylvania right outside of Pittsburgh. And there's a thing there called the Trump House which is this woman who's a landlord in the area has this farmhouse on a highway that she painted like an American flag and put a big Donald Trump in the front yard. And people literally would go to the polls and then kind of make pilgrimages to the Trump House to take photos outside and to talk to each other. And unlike in a lot of places in the country especially if you see here in New York where a lot of my coworkers that were that day you could feel this building energy and this building excitement. And sure I was in Trump country but even when I was at the polls talking to people who didn't vote for Trump they weren't voting for Clinton either. And I talked to one guy who was just up in arms that Trump was promising to bring back steel jobs saying it's never gonna happen, how dear he lie to people. And I asked him, well who did you vote for? And he said, well I voted myself because I could do better than anyone at this. And so as the election results came in I mean I remember that moment when he won Florida and everyone around me was like oh my gosh you might actually be able to do this. And I was with very strong Trump supporters and they were just surprised. And they wouldn't let themselves believe it because they really, they felt like they just had gotten screwed over so many times that something was gonna happen and that this was gonna get yanked away from them also. So a photographer and I were at this bar called Sharpies watching the results come in and talking with people. And you know there's this one guy sitting at the bar a guy who had been laid off from an auto company and he was saying maybe I'm gonna stop drinking. Maybe I'm gonna lose some weight. Maybe I'm, and just like in this bar as this historic thing was happening there was a sense of hope there. And people can debate if there's any depth to that hope or not. But for them they felt like they had finally won something after always kind of being the losers on these sorts of things. So Joe walk us through your book called Working White, White Working Class. In the book you talk about elite. You talk a little bit about mentioned the middle class. What do these terms mean? Like when we're talking about the working class who are these people? Well I mean in the United States we literally lack a language to talk about class. So I use the language of Heather Boucher of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and I developed for a report called The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict where we defined low income as the bottom 30% of American households and the elite at the top 25, 15 to 20% of American households. And then in the middle I called them the missing middle after a fetus scotch fold because they're so often missing in policy discussions. The fetus scotch fold pointed out. So they're actually the middle class and I wanted to call this book about the middle class because it is, it's about the middle class. But my editors said that would be very confusing because lawyers making $200,000 a year are deluded that they're middle class. By the way that's top 6% just so you know. They call themselves upper middle class and so it's really confusing because people in the middle class call themselves middle class. They call the likes of us rich. But where I grew up we call these people working class or lower middle class and there are also racial differences in understandings of class. And then the working class term which is generally what the elite refers to as the middle now progressives generally use as a euphemism for the poor in a very elegant way completely erasing this group for American political discourse. Yeah. I can actually read a couple paragraphs that are only three pages into your book that I feel like really get to kind of the heart of the tension that you explore in this book. I might also kind of rub some of your San Francisco neighbors the wrong way. But it says, during an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color and LGBTQ people, the white working class have been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes came. The typical white working class household income doubles in the three decades after World War II but has not risen appreciably since the death rate for white working class men and women aged 45 to 54 increased substantially between 1993 and 2013, a reversal from the decades before. In 1970, only a quarter of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 10% by 2040% did. And in an era when the economic fortunes of the white working class plummeted, elites rode off their anger as racism, sexism, nativism, beneath our dignity to take seriously. This has led us to politics polarized by working class theory. And so the pushback to that is that Donald Trump ran a campaign that he proudly called politically incorrect. And he spent things that have been labeled as sexist, as racist, as insensitive, as offensive. I went to dozens of rallies. I saw Confederate flags. I saw white Trump supporters yelling really terrible things that at black and Latino protesters. I saw people wearing T-shirts that said Trump that bitch. And so how do we kind of balance needing to have this empathy for the working white, the white working class at a time when they need it with the fact that some of these people don't seem to have much empathy for people who are different than them? Yeah, I mean I think it's important to say, is there racism among the white working class? Yes, a glorious tradition of it. On the other hand, one of the things I've been focused on in the last 10 years is racism among the professional elite. And as you know, the most famous study is what I call the Greg Jamal study, where Jamal has to have eight additional years of experience as compared to Greg to get the same number of callbacks. So I think we should call out racism when you see it. I think racism is a very pervasive, but what I really think is unhelpful is to have a white elite looking down at non-elite whites and saying I'm completely uninterested in your economic plummet because you, that other group of whites is racist. That strikes me as snobbism. And the refusal to acknowledge class privilege. I also think it's important not to conflate Trump with all Trump voters. Not a Trump fan is our Joan. Not a Trump fan. Not a Trump fan. I mean that's why I'm out here taking these positions. This is like really shocking what we have. And I mean, of course, just a side diversion. What the Democratic campaign should have done is trotted out a never-ending series of those blue-collar tradesmen who Donald Trump screwed, right? They should have been at every single rally, but moving on to ancient history. So I think it's really important to say that not all of Trump voters are like Trump. You've met them. A lot of them are decent people. Most of them are angry people. They feel like they're the forgotten people. That doesn't mean they're the only forgotten people. They're not. That doesn't mean that they're not the recipients of white privilege. They are. For those two generations after World War II, when they had access to good middle-class jobs and good housing, African Americans didn't have the same access. That's the white privilege. But isn't the answer that all hardworking Americans should be entitled to good housing and good jobs, not that none of them are? That's a few minutes up there. I know and I are exchanging glances and you can tell we're both dying to get into the race question and I am too. But before we fully dive in, I think there is an additional layer of pushback that I feel super compelled to say. I agree with your premise that we haven't had enough of a conversation and that elites, and this includes policy-making elites, that there's a lot that they or we don't understand or have chosen not to understand or refused to understand, but so in general, I think it's a really, it's an important book, it's a helpful book, it's an important conversation to be having. I have to say though, as somebody who's sort of fresh out of the Obama administration, that while I think the critique is fair, I also think there are ways in which it's not fair with respect to policy-making and what the administration was trying to do. I think we can be faulted perhaps for not breaking through on a lot of questions and a lot of the policy that we put forward and certainly we didn't succeed in getting pre-K for all and we, while we succeeded with the Affordable Care Act, obviously that's still very much in question. But I will say that, and just to use an example, a tiny example from my colleague, a former colleague, his name is David Seamus, he was essentially effectively the political director in the second term and had a communications role in the first term, walked around every day with the cover of his binder, we all had binders, was a graph from the poem that he was doing about what was happening to this very group of people that you're describing, economically, and with a quote that he picked up from a focus group, which was, I feel like I'm working harder and I just keep falling through the behind. And that was his animating statement for every day and he would show it to everybody else to make sure it was our animating statement. But more importantly, we got constant reinforcement of that from the president himself, who he got his famous 10 letters a night that he would read and we would regularly get a copy of a letter from a nurse or from a white working class dude who would say, I didn't vote for you, but here's what I'm worried about. And invariably, it would say, these are the people that we're working for. He didn't want us to forget because it was an animating principle for him and it was as a policymaker in that administration. I know it was animating for us and what we were trying to accomplish and we can have and we probably, we certainly shouldn't have today a conversation about how well or terribly we succeeded in that effort, but I will say that it's reasonable to push back on whether or not this is a subject of policymaking because at least in my experience it is. It is not and I agree that there is also a bubble, that there is a lot that we don't understand. As important as the race question is and I've been in the civil rights movement my whole life so I, to me, it's tremendously important. I also think it, we run the risk of it also obscuring what you just said, which is that there are commonalities across race of what the economic trends for the last many decades have meant to, and it turns out that while there are important differences that you just described, there are important similarities between communities of color that have been taking it in the trend economically for a really long time and the community that you described and your book doesn't do this but the conversation frequently does suggests that we gotta choose, that we are somehow encouraging people to think about African-Americans and Latinos and that they should be the subject of policymaking because of historic and current discrimination and that that must come at the expense of working class whites or we should switch from one to the other and that I think is an enormous mistake and you're not making it in the book but the conversation that tends to swirl around this question frequently goes there and that's something we should resist. One point. Yeah, go for it. Here's the epigram for the book from Martin Luther King. Equality means dignity and dignity means demands of a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week. That is an agenda that would totally appeal to the white working class, absolutely at the front and center and the working class of color and low income people. A job with a paycheck that lasts through the week, that's where the Democrats should be. I guess maybe add a few things. I am gonna join in expressing absolute interest and agreement in what I think you described very eloquently in this book which is a real disregard for the tremendous sort of economic suffering and decline that a number of people in this country have experienced in particular white working class people in the middle of the country and the south without question, those things are real. And certainly I would also agree that it probably is unwise to make assumptions about every Trump voter's sort of total character portrait but I guess I'm gonna say this. One, I think that we would probably collectively as a country but certainly in our politics do well to let go of the idea that if a person is racist they are nothing else or if a person is motivated or animated by racist ideas that they are nothing else. There are plenty of people who to borrow a phrase that Emory used, they have multiple identities. Quite frankly, they are teachers, they are parents, they are racist. They are many things and the reality is, sorry, the reality is that are, you can say this about Trump voters. There are two groups that lead distinctly in that wheelhouse. One group is a group that has suffered tremendously economically and it has operated since at least the 1950s but frankly at least the 1960s moving forward into the present in such a way that they have allowed themselves to be regularly and predictably manipulated by racist appeals and that was the engine of the Trump campaign and getting people so wound up and excited. The other half of the Trump voter sort of pool may or may not suffer that sort of economic fate but certainly decided at the end of the day that those elements of the Trump campaign were not so repugnant that they could not cast a vote for him or what they believed that he would do. So those things have to be acknowledged, I believe very firmly. Secondly, I think they have to be acknowledged because how can you then begin to figure out one, how do you sort of politically market policies to people who anytime they hear anything about jobs, about looking after people's sort of health, overall welfare, well-being, immediately what those things signal in their minds are that one, lazy people that they look down on are somehow going to get more than them or get over on them even though the data and reality does not support any of those ideas and then two, therefore I don't wanna hear anything about it but I am, if I am that voter and I am that person who is animated by that kind of racist thinking then you are going to be open to the alternative proposals. Let's get rid of quote unquote socialized medicine and let's take it back to the market, this is where we will all thrive even though we know exactly what the healthcare coverage rates were like before, right? Like we know those things. So I think we have to face the really ugly, like really complicated truth in order to really begin to, one, acknowledge people's very real economic suffering but two, then figure out real solutions that don't involve simply blaming people. Brought up, which we've actually talked about in the newsroom before is just a lack of understanding about what the government does. Joan, in your book you actually quoted the 2008 survey where they asked Americans if they've ever used a government social program or not and 56.5% said they had never used a government social program when in fact, 91.6% had. This includes disability, the mortgage interest deduction, student loans, tax exemption, and then these entitlement programs that get all of the attention, healthcare, food stamps, housing assistance. And I actually found, I can't believe almost every rally I went to as I was going around and talking with Trump supporters, kind of after time I would find people who would say that one of the biggest things they wanted Trump to change as president is the entitlement program. That they felt like there are a lot of lazy people out there who are getting help that they're not getting, that immigrants, that refugees, that everyone's getting help except for them. And then I would ask, well, what's new for a living? And they were on disability. They had been hurt in the job and were on disability. And so I would ask, well, are you worried about that getting cut also? I mean, that's also an entitlement program. And they weren't because there was a feeling that they had earned it, that they had worked, that they had paid into the system and that they fell on a hard time and that they earned what they were now getting. So let's talk a little bit just about the huge disconnect here. General, why don't you start? Well, first of all, I actually, one thing I want to say is I don't blame Obama for any of this. I think Obama came from a white middle-class family, right? He understood this, he totally got this. Bill Clinton gets it equally. I blame Democrats for not being able to hold the house so that you guys couldn't get done what you should have been able to get done. That's who I blame. I blame me, not you. But it's an interesting question that Democrats haven't been able to make stick, that the two longest periods of, the point you made was, how come Democrats aren't owning the jobs issue? The two longest weeks of job growth in our recent economic history were under President Obama and President Clinton. But you're right that that's not understood. Well, but actually, it kind of is. That's my point. It's a messaging, I mean, and it's like, I was just up on the hill and they were saying, like, well, we talk about jobs all the time and I'm going, yeah, it's item 17 and a 19, and a 357 item list where as Trump comes and says, you are the forgotten people, I am listening to you, I hear you want jobs, I'm gonna get you jobs. Now, it's a lie, but they feel like, oh, he hears me. So answer your question. Means, I think, let's just stay on that for a minute. I mean, what could Democrats be doing to own this issue more? I mean, is it just messaging or are there actual things that they should be doing? I mean, most of my messages for Democrats are messaging issues like climate change. I think the way we message climate change is a recipe for class conflict and is corroded support for environmental issues globally. But I think that when it comes to the jobs issue, I think we have to say, again, I was on the hill and somebody was saying, the only thing that this whole broad coalition of us agree on is jobs. I'm going like, from your mouth to God's ears. I do think that we should make a very concrete proposal and say, and this is based on a really wonderful book, everybody should read, it's called America's Moment by Rework America, it's out of the Markle Foundation. What we need is a new education to employment system. The college for all did not work. Two thirds of Americans are not college grads. We need to be talking about good jobs for people who are not college grads. The Democrats are often seen as the party of college grads. We've totally got, so what we need is an alliance. You know, the Obama administration did some of this, but again, you guys didn't have the Congress. You have alliances where community colleges get together with businesses. I mean, you can say this, you guys did it. We just, that needs to be, well, tell them what it is. Well, so it's a combination of things. One part is updating high school to make sure it's engaging and project-based. And my colleague, Christina's nodding her head because she's an education specialist and fellow with us, but that actually project-based learning, hands-on learning, the kind of learning that helps you see how you're gonna be applying what you're learning in the real world needs to start much earlier. It needs to happen earlier, particularly in high school. This isn't an effort that we spent a lot of time on without a lot of help from the Congress, but with a lot of help, local help, because there are local business leaders and local school districts who understand that. This notion that some level of higher education is gonna be necessary in order to be successful. This is when President Obama put forward the free community college proposal. It was aimed very specifically, not just at 18-year-olds, but also made, would be made available to adults. But the kinds of jobs that we're talking about are not $15 an hour jobs. Again, that's the whole point, that we spent at least as much time talking about making sure people had preparation to become welders, which are good middle-class jobs as making sure that they have access to higher education. Now, again, I think some of this is a messaging problem, but that it's not for a lack of policy focus or policy ideas, but we are in a situation where, and I had some sympathy for the campaign in trying to do this, and look, I'm a policy one. This is what I do, right? You can put forward the ideas. It requires explanation for how you're gonna make it happen. If you're thoughtful about it, and if you mean it, you have to talk about how you're gonna make it happen and how you're gonna pay for it. That's what makes policy proposals real. It's really easy to get up there and say, don't worry, you're all gonna have a job, but unless you have the wonky nerdy details for how it happens and how you pay for it, it's not true. And communicating the wonky nerdy details turns out to be devilishly difficult. Well, it seems to me there are also two things here. One is, I used to live in a Southern state, which I'm not gonna name because I don't wanna, I guess, pick on this place or pick on a particular company. But I used to live in a Southern state where the single largest employer in the state was a humongous big box retailer that exists everywhere that you can probably guess who that is. And as a result, you can imagine that the average household income and all of the things that go along with that were shaped by that. So while I certainly, who can argue with the logic of we'll have to be much more thoughtful about what sorts of preparation that people need for the jobs that will exist in the future, who can argue with that? It's quite logical, right? Although people did, look what has become of the debate about Common Core. And then again, and what was that debate? It was in essence that this is a way to inculcate our children with liberal ideas, right? So let's think about that again. I would say you have to be honest about what is animating people's thinking and therefore how they act and behave politically. But I would also say that we're probably going to have to have a much more detailed nuance and probably difficult conversation about the jobs that do exist right now in communities around this country. Why so many people are paid so poorly, have no benefit, don't even have sick days. We have to have that conversation because that's also about the here and now. And until you begin to talk to those people and make them feel that their struggles are not only understood and real in something that the government is trying to respond to, you leave them at minimum vulnerable to a really skillful political effort to convince them that a very simple proposal, I'm just going to bring these jobs back, can work for them. So I guess my larger point is that I don't think that, I guess I don't think that most people are upset because they don't, well, I'll leave it at that. Let me stop there because I'm going to, yeah. I really admire what the Obama administration did in this regard, but I'm proposing something maybe a little bit different, which is that the government go to local employers and say, let's help you invent the new generation of blue collar jobs. Let's help you figure out in alliance with Silicon Valley how to upskill not only blue collar jobs, which by the way require technical training now, but also pink collar jobs and minimum wage jobs. And I'll give you a couple of examples. One is that we should have going to employers and saying here, what are the specific skills you need in your workforce? Because there's a documented lack of Americans trained for middle skill jobs. Why? As someone who's been a university professor since he was 28 years old, we have focused on college too much. Very important, not the only thing. And so we should go to employers, say here are the skills that you need, work with the community college and say we're going to develop a certificate program, not a four year degree, but a certificate program with family friendly hours and rate because these people are gonna have families that's much shorter that will provide a certificate where the employer will hire you because he has confidence in the certificate. And we should metric these programs not on people trained, but on people placed. That's what we need. And that's not true only for blue collar. It's also true for minimum wage. Again, this America's Moment book is very important. And one of the things that it talks about is what's called the tablet pilot. And they gave home healthcare aids, typically low income women of color, paid crap, pardon my language. And they gave them tablets with 15 healthcare screening questions that they filled in and it improved healthcare outcomes because the information got to the doctors much quicker. They decreased healthcare costs, same reason. And if handled correctly, they could pay those gals more because they're upskilling those jobs. That is the model. We are not neoliberal. This is the result of this economy where there's great knowledge jobs and crap minimum wage jobs. That's the result of economic policy, industrial policy, not the inevitable result of globalization. If you think it's inevitable, I have one word for you. And that word is Germany. The last time you bought a pair of scissors, they were made by a middle skilled job being paid a family wage in Germany. Why not here? If you want me to answer, I can answer the means tested program thing or do you wanna go on? I know what to do. Sure, go for it. This is one of the very controversial things I say. I know it's controversial. I think means tested programs are a recipe for class conflict. And I think they're one of these things that plays into the hands of Republicans and has served massively to discredit government in all its functions. And the reason is, I mean partly it's racism. We know that reason, right? And that's there. But that's not all that's there. Partly I tell the story in the book of my sister-in-law who was at the time working as a Head Start teacher in Waterbury, Connecticut. And she was paid $12,000 a year to provide free childcare for people in Head Start. She told me the story one time. She was absolutely livid where one of the moms was late picking up the kids. And she had to pay not only for childcare, she had to pay a dollar a minute when she was late for her childcare. So this woman who was not paying for childcare was late, which was of course free to her. And she showed up with a bag from Macy's. And this made my sister-in-law absolutely go ballistic. Now, I understand what's going on. I've studied poverty for a long time. There's an amazing article about why sometimes people with very modest incomes buy a particular consumer item and how important that is to them. I do not judge the woman who showed up. But I understand why she was angry. And I think that's what means-tested programs do. I'm not saying we shouldn't have any means-tested programs. I'm not saying we shouldn't support the poor. I am not saying that. I am saying that the recipe for us as Democrats is universal programs. And look at Obamacare. Obama, and you know I admire him, but bless his heart, all he ever did was talk about the 20 million people who were uninsured. So he messaged this program as a program targeted to the poor. And I'm going, Barak, how about the middle class? Well, why might Obamacare be saved? It's because of the universal program. It's because of, you can keep your kids on their insurance till you're 26. It's because of the pre-existing condition. Those are universal programs. Look, they are so sticky, not even the Republicans who own everything can get rid of them. Let's just listen to that message. I think we're all right. And on that note- Same with you, too. Cecilia, jump in. Yeah, on the exchange smiles with my foreign and current colleague, Charmagedness, who worked on healthcare policy and the administration, among many other things. And the reason we were smiling is because it's so enormously frustrating that people heard a part of the president's message and not the rest of the message which we were involved in helping communicate. In particular, about the tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people that had healthcare that got protections as a result of the law that we feel like we talked about till we were blue in the face. But for some reason, it's not what people heard, right? So the notion of the protections if you have a pre-existing condition, the access to preventive care without having copays or co-insurance, all of these features of Obamacare, all of which benefit everybody who has healthcare, including the people who had it before the law was passed. But that is, it's not where the conversation ends up, which is why we have this discussion. I'm not sure if I can, maybe two things. One, while I can imagine if I were your sister-in-law that I would be really upset also about that Macy's bag, I would say that there does come a point for our country and it's welfare where you have to say that my personal irritation with a woman in her Macy's bag is not a basis for policymaking. Like it's not, and if that does become the basis for policymaking, instead of saying to yourself, how can we as a country realize or maximize what we get for our public investments? Or how can we make sure that those who have the least have some sort of minimal standard, like say, access to preventive care? You know, if you step away from that conversation, it's almost a concession to the idea that a kind of angry at minimum, maybe even nasty undercurrent in politics is not only acceptable, but the right way to move, like through the world. And that is very, very troubling to me. I guess that is what comes to mind for me when I think about the idea that in order to sell things that they have to be universal. I understand the logic, but it does. It underscores the point that you made earlier, which is that we do have this notion, there's this sort of collective notion that other people are getting over in a way that I'm not, and those other people are probably black or brown, and that that is an absolute undercurrent. And the conversation that we don't have or that we don't succeed in breaking through with is what the realities are of that situation, one. But two, also that this isn't just about altruism, that it's also that our collective future is better if that kid is in that Head Start program, right? That this is not something that is done by some of us, for others of us, that are isolated. That these are investments that we make, which actually affect us collectively. But also that this is the coming majority in our country. And it's a pretty good idea. As we are flippant and dismissive about or angry about some people and the very existence of their needs, those people also come to define our country in its actual sort of state of affairs. And the longer that we remain a country where people are being actively manipulated and animated politically by the idea that some people should be at the bottom, the longer that we put ourselves in a position where we're actually quite weak, sort of in a broad way, which is the other thing I was going to say earlier, and I thought myself, which is I don't actually believe that all of Trump's voters are upset about perhaps having to work at a big box store, but rather that they now have the same jobs as people that they view as beneath them. That's what I think is happening. Okay, one more time. We're gonna take it very quickly. I don't think this is just an anecdote. There is 30 years of sociology that says that these means-tested programs have really soured the attitude towards the government, and I also don't think we should abandon the poor. I mean, I live in San Francisco where I, I'm among God's forgotten every single day, and I feel shame that that's the kind of society that we live in. I do think we should understand that those kinds of programs produce class conflict and we should try to control for it and we should go universal wherever we can. All right, you guys ready for some questions? Oh, very eager. All right, the woman in the front row here. I'll consider just what you said at the beginning. Most of the governorships, the state government, how are we going to get elections to turn things around? Gerrymandering, I don't know how we're going to remove the Republicans. That's, look, the answer is engagement. We own this democracy, and if there is, I am a person who my glass is always half full, that's been a little harder in the last several months for me, but I do think that, I listen to my children describe the results of the election. I have adult daughters, and they are thinking about democracy and the institutions of our democracy in a way that they haven't before, and I see this a lot that, and you see it in action around the country through groups like indivisible and others, that people are engaging in questions of gerrymandering, in engaging their state legislatures and engaging congressional races, because I think there was this sense of we sort of took the institutions of our democracy for granted, and a lot of people aren't doing that anymore, so these are not intractable problems. We own the solutions to those problems if we show up. I mean, I'm living in a state that either is a majority minority or very, very soon will be, but I think it, with great respect, I think it's comfort for us to look at that and go like we just have to wait until, you know what I mean, I won't have to say it in public, but it's said all the time in private. No wonder these people are angrily, by the way. But anyway, that great ocean of red, that's not gonna go majority minority anytime soon, and the gerrymandering comes from the absolute command in that ocean of red of Republicans. The only way we're gonna get anything done in Washington, much less outside it, is by talking again to the white working class, and I'm doing that now because I think that's the best thing we can do is repair this relationship with this group, not only for people of color, but also for women, LGBTQ immigrants, you name it. If I can just add a counterpoint, I feel like I probably talk about this book way too much, like I should receive pay for this, but there is a book called Brown is the New White that was published last year that I really find fascinating in that. In essence, what he does is sort of challenge the orthodoxy of this idea that the Democratic Party absolutely has to reclaim white voters, white working class voters. The fundamental, if the party were to fully animate the voters that it can count on right now, which is largely a sliver of more educated white voters, and basically all of your active voters of color that you could, if you can animate those people to show up for midterm elections, then you can begin to address the issues like makeup of legislatures, et cetera, deal with issues like gerrymandering and exactly what election districts look like, et cetera, et cetera, and there are of course some initiatives on that front, whether or not they'll be successful, and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, is operating one of them, is a question, but I guess I would just say this is where I think a lot of the frustration comes from with the idea that liberals in particular, the Clinton campaign made a fundamental era in engaging in such overt identity politics and putting questions about race and gender and equality front and center because that fundamentally turns off the white working class voter. That may be true, I wouldn't dispute that, but I would dispute whether or not we should sort of lean into, or whether people should be leaning into that or frankly say, well, if that's who you are and where you wanna be politically, so be it. And move on. I wanna salute the New America Foundation for going into this. I've read your book. I was the general counsel of the Senate Banking Committee, I was on the Banking Committee for 15 years, so I know the politics. Working for the Democrat. I was an assistant secretary for trade under President Clinton. I was 10 years under the China Commission, which is a think tank for the Congress on China. And I think in your book you say on page 41, the decline in marriage is a symptom of the working class economic decline, not the reason for it. I think you got it exactly right. And the other, you said that working class women by 28 percentage points voted for Trump over Hillary. White working class women voted for Trump. So here, I think an important part of what has happened here and that needs to be focused on is when we move from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, which is described in this new book, The Golden Passport about the Harvard Business School. And there are two key chapters in there that describe this phenomenon. I was on the Banking Committee and I saw it happening. And then, so the corporations, their interests have diverged from the national interests. They can make their CEOs and their shareholders wealthy by outsourcing jobs and in impoverishing communities and destroying families. But it's good for the shareholders and these guys and the wealthy people made wealthy by this have captured both political parties. There's a book called Listen Liberal, which they explain all this. And Stan Greenberg has written a terrific article on the American prospect about this whole phenomenon. So it's really, it's not identity politic. We need to talk about class politics and what is happening in this country and how we're impoverishing and screwing our own people. Trump at least said this is an important issue and the Democrats didn't because we're so beholding to the money classes to finance our campaigns. So campaign finance reform has to be a key part of how we're gonna change this system so that our country is working for more Americans. I don't know if you guys think of that. I've thought about this a long time. I don't think it's about the goal at all. I do think though that it's as important as the point Janelle just made is as well. It's important also to look at this has to be about more than those, so I'm a progressive, I'm a Democrat, I work in Democratic administration, but this has to be about more than elbowing the other folks out of the way to make sure that we get hold of the elected institutions of the democracy. It has to be about engaging in the conversation because ultimately there is commonality of purpose among different groups of people who have been taking it on the chin economically and we are moving away from each other at a point at which if we can actually engage around those commonalities, we can get much further as a society and not have 49, 51 elections all the time. So first of all, these are the conversations we need to have, they're hard, they're really hard, and but we have to have them, but so Janelle there are two things you said that really troubled me, one was, which is as it should be, frankly, I mean if we're gonna have a real conversation, but one was when you said people aren't, white working class people aren't upset because they're working at Walmart, they're upset because jobs at Walmart are beneath them, meaning they're for people of color. I truly hope that, I'm hearing you, I'm truly hoping that's not true, that is not my perception, my perception is they've got really shitty jobs, excuse me, and that's the problem. I do understand as a Southerner that for a very long time poor Southerners were manipulated by wealthy Southerners to think well I may be poor, but at least I'm above African-Americans, that's not the words they use, but if so, so A, I hope that's not true, B, if it is true, it is also the result of deliberate manipulation, which I think has to be recognized because otherwise it is a these are simply bad and racist people full stop, but so first point, but the second, and this one really I think gets to the heart of this, if you were a white woman and you said, well, you know, we just need to wait because those people of color, we're gonna outnumber them, I wouldn't wanna get anywhere near you. I mean, I would never wanna be part of a party that said that, and similarly, even if it's true that, and I don't know that it's true across the country, but even if it's true that we're gonna become a majority minority, something that I think is fantastic as part of the country I love, if that means excluding people who are in the same economic situation as many of those people are today because they're white, then I don't wanna be a part of that party either, so I think the part about identity politics is not, I'm not a woman, I've benefited from those politics, but surely there has to be something more. I can't celebrate a country that is only a set of groups that have power. I cannot stand up for that country because that same ideology is the ideology that stands up for Aryans, or for Christians, or for God knows what. It has to be an ideology that stands up for all human beings, similarly situated, so I just wanna, I think that is part of the discourse, we just need to wait, but that's not a party I wanna be part of. I would never, you will never, ever, ever hear me suggest that we shouldn't have great compassion and concern for human beings, whoever they are. I wouldn't say that I do take real issue with the idea of comparing the identity politics with people who have seen their lives, their livelihoods, where they live, where they go to school, how much schooling they get, how much healthcare they get, how much pain medication they get to this day and compare a politics built around concern for those things to Aryanism. Those things are not equivalent and it's troubling to me that in these discussions, that there would be any kind of movement towards comparing those things, but more importantly, assuming that in people forming their politics around the needs that are very much connected to who they are, that they are fundamentally engaging in some kind of sinister practice. Second, the reality is that in 2042, which is not that far away, this in fact will be a minority majority country that doesn't mean that no one else matters. Of course it doesn't, if I said that, then it would make no sense for me to have said many of the things that I've said before this moment. Clearly every person matters. What I am suggesting is that one, there does have to be a real recognition that the fate of people of color in this country truly shapes the fate of the country moving forward. Those are mathematical realities, those are certainties. And two, that the desires of the white working class voter who has consistently, and this is the thing that Trump probably gets both too much blame and too much credit for, white working class voters and frankly white voters have consistently as a group voted in their own ways around identity concerns. Those concerns being precisely the things that you were describing, but at least in part those things have long animated our politics. What Trump did perhaps that was a little differently is be much more overt about that, give it a different label, let's be intentionally politically incorrect, but those things have been part of our politics certainly. Certainly, and their sense of what they merit and what they, not only what they merit but what they are entitled to. They group of white people in America. The reality is, of course would it be healthier if we had a politics that said, as an American you are entitled to, as an American who works you are entitled to a reasonable wage that is going to allow you to provide for your family. You are entitled to reasonable healthcare that is going to allow you to go to that job or to send your children to a decent school. That would probably be a much more productive conversation, but I don't know that that is an appeal that can be made. I think the last administration tried that, I don't know that that's an appeal that can be made. So that book, Brown is the New White just says, this is the reality that we have right now. Work with the political coalitions that you do have and then perhaps put the idea of broadening that coalition on the list of priorities. But instead, what we do, right, is we have continual conversations about how can we prioritize white working class people. Yeah, let me just say that you're, I'm not saying that we should prioritize white working class people over everybody else. I've never said that in the past. I'll never say that in the future. And I don't even think of this as identity politics. I think of it as the distribution of social power and social honor. And I think we distribute social power and social honor very unequally. I think there's a hierarchy between men and women. I think there's a hierarchy among races. And I think there's also a hierarchy based on class. Which is more important? Now that's a truly boring question. None of them should exist. I do not endorse any of them. What I'm looking for is what Cecilia is looking for. And I think what we're all looking for is a way to bring fundamentally decent people together. Now, the alt-right came out for Trump. Are we going to welcome them into our coalition? No, we're not talking about those people. But there are a lot of fundamentally decent people who are right now, they're not being their better self. And one of the reasons they're not being their better selves is because they feel that liberal feeling rules mandate empathy and compassion for a whole series of groups, but not them. And so insulting that whole series of groups that we all care about very deeply is a way of putting their thumb in the eye of the elite. And what we do when we do nothing in terms of or very little or ineffective in terms of a positive message and obsessed with attacking Trump, what we do is marry these people to Trump even more deeply. That's what we did during the campaign. Why we're still doing it, that is beyond me. We have another question that I'm curious to know. Yeah. I'm Basil Scarlass. I used to deal with international trade issues, but what strikes me here is what you said, Ms. Williams, about Germany and the need to create universal programs. And of course, no program is universal unless it includes clearly the middle class. And they are critical in supporting changes, introduction and support of such programs. Some ideas I heard and I think there are others. Access to daycare, sick leave, perhaps even minimum vacation times. All of these, I wonder, is it possible, do you think, to convince broadly the American public to accept these programs? These exist in Germany and there are many others as well. I mean, I think that's one of the Democrat, I mean, I speak as someone who is one of the very early work family people. I have worked for paid leave forever, my entire professional life. I think that one of the things, one of the miscues in the Democratic Party is that when we talk about, we've talked about economic issues, we talk about paid leave, minimum vacation, all of those things are super important if you have a job, if you have a benefited job. 95% of the jobs someone at the AFL-CIO just told me yesterday that have been created in the past 10 years are non-standard employment. Either they're not full time or they're not benefited. Now, are white people angry about this? You bet they are. Are people of color angry about this? You bet they are. The African-American middle class lost those jobs a generation before the white folks. Now, I get it, I get it, that it only becomes an issue suddenly when the white folks, okay, I totally get that, I see it, I don't deny it, but it's an issue now. It's an issue that people of color care about, whether they're poor or middle class, just along with whites. I forgot who that is, I'll go right there, thank you. My name's Eleanor Starmer and I worked on rural development issues in the Obama administration at USDA for many years. I'm also from a tiny town in New Hampshire in a region where the timber industry is tanking. And I wanna ask your insights on rural America. And I say that recognizing, of course, it's not monolithic and it's hard to make generalizations, but I've been following the coverage since the election really closely and have been disturbed in part just because of how many stereotypes are being put forward, but also because I think in many ways that the division between rural and urban just drives another wedge between rural working class people and others that doesn't need to be driven. On the other hand, coming from a rural place and working on these issues, I recognize that the challenges in rural places are very different and a lot of times the policy prescriptions also need to be different. I'm wondering how you, in your work, have encountered distinctions or commonalities between rural and urban places and how you're thinking about those issues in general. I mean, rural people are really important because again, I'm not just focused on winning the presidency because I just looked at a man I admire more than anyone else that I've known in American politics and look how little he could accomplish with all of the brilliance that you see representing in this room because we couldn't carry the house. We need to address that ocean of red and a lot of the people in that ocean of red are rural people. I think there's a lot of similarities. I just promised my friend I wouldn't use this phrase but I will not on the record. Rust Belt folks and in de-industrialized areas and rural areas, I think what they hold in common is that they feel that they've been forgotten and they feel that they don't really embrace the prescription of if you want a really robust economic future, get your act together, move to where the jobs are and go to college. I think both of those groups of people find that very, very off-putting. They're deeply rooted. They're deeply rooted of all non-elite people whether regardless of race, regardless of whether they're middle class or poor. The social networks are very small. They're clique networks. They're not like broad, shallow entrepreneurial networks. Their identity and their economics depends on remaining within the clique networks. Why do African-Americans remain in inner cities? It's not because of, as someone wrote me, the stubborn immobility of these people. What do you think? Trump can deliver jobs to their front door just like pizza? Note the disdain. No, it's because the people living in those dense networks, they have dense relationships. That's the only way they can get quality childcare. The only way they can get quality elder care. That's why the African-American ladies who are in inner cities remain there. It's safer there for them. It's the right economic decision. That doesn't mean their jobs there, but that means that we have to deliver jobs to the networks that create the economic stability for people and frankly create the social meaning in their lives because their social honor stems from being understood as a good person in this small social network. I mean, I was just living in the Netherlands. What do you do? That upper middle class question. I'm a law professor. There's my honor. I tell in the book, and then I'll shut up, a story of going back to my husband's high school reunion when he, with a regrettable lack of code switching, although he grew up in this blue collar environment, asked a colleague, not a colleague, a former classmate, what do you do? The guy said, I sell toilets. Well, if you sell toilets, you want to keep in a small group of people who don't judge you by your job, who know you're a good person, a person to be reckoned with. That's why middle class people and low income people, there's economic reasons why they want to remain where they are. They're also very important social and social honor reasons. And we need to respect that. They are not going to move to Berlin, folks. And I would just jump in having spent a lot of time in rural communities. And my parents live in a very small town in eastern Iowa where they run a weekly newspaper. This is not anything that you don't already know, but rural towns are hurting right now, especially in the Midwest. In a lot of red states, there's been a lot of tax incentives programs and tax cuts that have decreased the amount of tax revenues that these states are bringing in. In the state of Oklahoma, I was in a small town there for a while, there's no extra money for anything. And senior centers are having to just great together donations because the county and the state aren't giving them money anymore. Rural airports are suffering, grocery stores are closing. I mean, it's kind of decades of state and local decisions have kind of set them up to fail, especially if the one big employer in town moves somewhere else or does something differently. And it's something that the Trump administration needs to keep in mind. The budget that they've put forward right now would really hurt a lot of rural communities. And they're really lobbying their lawmakers to change that. Oh, yes. But I'm wondering if you could just help me out a little bit. When someone says, the candidate says, we want to make America great again. Tell me what year or years was it great? Between the two of you, you were in the campaign and you wrote the book. What years helped me out? The way I understand that is a couple of different ways. First of all, white working class people are much more patriotic than the elites are. And one of the reasons they are is that everybody tends to stress the social categories that give them honor. And one of the social categories that gives this group honor is being Americans, and they're very, very proud of it. So I think that's part of why Make America Great Again was very appealing. I also think they're thinking back to those two short generations after World War II when high school educated guys could get solid middle-class standards of living. Now, for African Americans, that was, and I'm exaggerating, but that was roughly one generation, not two generations. What year was that? Right after World War II. Right working class men started the slide in 73. I imagine African Americans started a generation before. I think that's what they're looking back to. There are polls, there was a poll that came out in 2016, I think it was the Public Religion Research Institute, that polled people on this very question. What is this sort of great period that you're enamored of and wish that we could get back to, and the answers seem to be roughly about 1950, 51 somewhere in there, and of course, even if they were not alive, and of course, for me, of course, what that immediately raised was, well, of course this was a period when, I'll just use myself as an example, there would be no credit cards, no credit, no secured way to vote. In fact, I probably would not be able to vote. Segregated schools, segregated public facilities. This does not sound great to me. Now, however, in fairness, I do, and this is something I really do appreciate about your book, this idea that people find honor in different areas of their life and that people find, and therefore, this is where they assign value in sort of public spaces and public ideas. I have no doubt, especially because of some of the emails that I received after I wrote about that poll, that people genuinely believe, that some people genuinely believe that the 1950s was just like a much more wholesome time, and certainly also a time when there was greater economic prosperity for people with more limited education, so therefore it was a good time. But it still brings me back to the very first thing that I said, which is that also means that these are people who at minimum feel that total exclusion of some people is just not that big of a concern. It's just America was great then, and that's fine because it was great for me, and that's it. The phenomenon that you described, which are accurate, was not on their radar then and probably not and not something that they're thinking about now. I think of it as a response to the notion that everything's changing because everything is changing. In this time of really enormous change, that the economy is changing, what work is like is changing, and demographically we're changing. And so it's a little bit code for, there's a lot going on that makes me uncomfortable, that's scary, and I don't like it, and I want it to stop. And to me that's part of what that expression indicates. I don't know that people are thinking through, yeah, I remember that this was a good time for my parents and my grandparents, and they were economically secure. They may not be taking the rest of the leaf and remembering that their grandparents, African-American neighbors were not in the same situation. They're not, right? Or the African-Americans on the other side of the tracks were doing nearly as well. It may be that they may not be thinking that through, but it is an expression of discomfort with a lot of changed circumstances, including that people with names like mine and people who look like Janelle are more visible and more present and more vocal. In 1963 I got arrested trying to get a card at an all-white library in my home state, and I'll say it, Columbus, Georgia. And so things may have been great for white people on that city, but I was denied a card not because of any bad thing I had done, just because of the color of my skin. I couldn't change that. I was born black. And so if we're going to cure this thing, we've got to have a dialogue, and it's got to work for everybody, not just some people. Something that is interesting that I think certainly exists, and there have been some proposals to this effect. They haven't gone anywhere, unfortunately. In the previous Congress, I guess we'll see what happens with this Congress, but there have been some proposals regarding that are more universal in nature in that they as sort of set a standard, I guess, sort of create economic opportunity zones with this idea that can get dangerous because then you start to get into the issue of tax revenue and kind of giveaways, theoretically, however, that sort of aim to encourage business investment, the relocation of jobs to areas of the country where unemployment is highest, where needs are greatest, and the truth is those two areas, generally speaking, the areas that tend to fall within sort of these criteria are urban areas and rural areas, right? Sort of the polar opposite of one another in many ways, I guess, in the sort of mind's eye and the public imagination, but they share a lot in common in terms of their economic situation. What you were describing in terms of what's happening in rural America has been the condition of many urban areas since roughly 1973, right? I mean, there are many, many books, but When Work Disappears was written about this very phenomenon, right? All right, so we've hit the end of our time, but thank you guys all for this wonderful conversation and for all these wonderful questions. It was really interesting.