The U.S. political and cultural establishment is constantly bemoaning the election of Donald Trump as President and is convinced that it will hurt our country. He was elected because of his strong support from blue-collar workers.
I’m not so much afraid that he’ll be a disaster as that he will be ineffective in addressing our country’s many urgent problems.  Primarily I am trying to understand, here and here, why he was elected and what this means for the future.

Here is another clue.  The book “White Working Class: overcoming class cluelessness in America,” by Joan Williams, describes clearly who constitutes the white working class (WWC) and how it differs fundamentally from the class of professional and managerial elites (PME). Here is a brief outline of her argument:

• Definitions. The top 1% (in income) are the wealthy, the top 20% are PME, the next 50% are the working class and the bottom 30% are the poor. The median income of a working class family is $75,000 while the median income of a poor family is $22,500.
• The PME are order givers and value sophistication, boundary breaking and creativity. The WWC are order takers and value stability and dependability.
• Why does the working class resent the poor? The poor get welfare benefits while the working-class may have rigid, highly supervised jobs which are often boring and repetitive which makes their work psychologically challenging. They do not receive welfare.
• Why does the working class resent professionals? Elites seek out novelty, irony and polish while the working class seeks out stability and sincerity. The WWC often see the PMC as phony.
• Is the working class sexist? For working class women becoming a homemaker signals a rise in status. For PME women this entails a fall in status.
• Don’t they understand that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back? This is more or less true but too pessimistic. There is a severe shortage for Americans trained for middle-skill jobs requiring some post-secondary education but not a four year college degree.

Conclusion.  This description should be understood as a general overview of the differences between the WWC and the PME (with many individual and particular exceptions). As such it helps in explaining why Donald Trump received such a large share of the WWC vote.  

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