The Geography of the Class Culture Wars

• Publication year: 2011

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 34, No. 3SPRING 2011

The Geography of the Class Culture Wars

Lisa R. Pruitt (fn*)

I. Culture Wars Across the Rural-Urban Axis 770

II. Class Complications in Rural America: The Well Off, the Workers, and the White Trash 791

III. Politics, Policy, and Work-Family Struggles in Rural America 804

IV. Making Amends: Work as a Bridge to Somewhere 809

As suggested by the title of her new book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, Joan Williams takes class seriously. Class matters, Williams argues, because "socially conscious progressives"(fn1) need political allies to achieve progress with their agenda for work-family reform.(fn2) Williams calls us not only to think about class and recognize it as a significant axis of stratification and (dis)advantage, but also to treat the working class with respect and dignity. Emblematic of Williams's argument is her challenge to us to "[d]iscard[ ] Marxian analyses from 30,000 feet" and "come down to learn enough about working-class life to end decades of casual insults."(fn3) In other words, be nice and play fair. It's a tried-and-true way to win friends and influence people.

In this Essay, I seek to enhance Williams's powerful and pathbreak-ing discussion of the white working class in three ways. Part I brings geography explicitly into consideration by arguing that the culture wars-which I believe Williams aligns correctly along a broad and fuzzy line between the working class and the professional-managerial class- similarly align along the rural-urban axis. Just as liberal elites shun and ridicule the white working class,(fn4) they similarly express disdain for rural and small-town residents.(fn5) Indeed, among denizens of the largest cities and "coastal elites," rural Americans have become a proxy for the working class-the uncouth, the uncultured, and-yes-the illiberal.(fn6) I contend that social progressives reserve their greatest contempt-and increasingly also their ire-for whites in rural America, the vast majority of whom are working class.(fn7)

Based on this argument that the opposing sides in the class culture wars are now represented, broadly speaking, by the rural and the urban, I take up three other issues. First, in Part II, I disrupt Williams's broad-brush class dichotomy-"professional-managerial" and "working class"-by introducing other classes and subclasses that are particularly relevant in rural contexts. Specifically, I show how Williams's implicitly metropolitan class taxonomy parallels a similar divide in nonmetropoli-tan communities, and I discuss the role of morality as a basis for differentiation among factions of the white working class in both types of settings. Then, in Part III, I argue that cultural and political disdain for rural folks prevents law and policy-makers from seeing and addressing the distinct challenges facing the rural citizenry-including those associated with work-life security. I conclude in Part IV with thoughts on what might provide common ground between the professional-managerial class and the white working class-ground that could provide a bridge of understanding that would permit political détente and, ultimately, cooperation.

My thoughts about Joan Williams's book and the class culture wars are informed by my own rural upbringing,(fn8) as well as my status as a "class migrant," which Williams defines as "individuals born and raised working class, who join the upper-middle class through access to elite education."(fn9) In addition, my comments and analysis rely heavily on two sources-one conventional, the other not-that complement Williams's fine work. First, I draw on Jennifer Sherman's 2009 book, Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America.(fn10) This book provides a rural-specific counterpart and complement to Williams's more generalized explanation of why morality and family- and therefore cultural issues more broadly-are so important to the white working class.(fn11) The second, rather unorthodox source is journalist Joe Bageant's 2007 book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War.(fn12) Bageant's insights as a cultural critic-though articulated in a sharper tone and with a more anecdotal method-are uncannily similar to those that Williams and Sherman document in academic fashion. Finally, I illustrate how President Obama has endorsed the core ideas of all three authors.

I. Culture Wars Across the Rural-Urban Axis

In two marvelous chapters, "The Class Culture Gap" and "Culture Wars as Class Conflict," Williams provides a primer on class, discussing how it may be identified and measured, and presenting data on education, income levels, and occupation.(fn13) More significantly, she synthesizes every major ethnography of the white working class in the late-twentieth-century United States, thereby serving up for the reader a composite portrait of this milieu. In doing so, Williams touches on a wide array of cultural manifestations of class, from how we raise our children, to our leisure pursuits, to what we eat, to our attitudes about religion.(fn14) Williams's analysis is based on two broad classes, which she labels the "working class" and the "professional-managerial class." In comparing and contrasting the tastes and folkways of these two classes, Williams makes the point that the professional-managerial class-no less than their working-class counterparts-wear their culture on their proverbial sleeves: "Our understated clothes, educational travel, and our teeny tiny portions of food-all are ways that those of us in the upper-middle class enact our higher class status for all to see."(fn15) But Williams goes a step further by also challenging the hierarchy of tastes and folkways, which holds that upper-class cultural practices are objectively superior to others. She contends that working-class "beliefs and lifestyles make as much sense in their context as our folkways do in ours."(fn16) In short, Williams does not assume that the upper-middle class are "class-less" or that theirs is the default culture. She thus does with regard to class one of the things critical race and feminist scholars have done for race and gender respectively: challenge the notion that whites don't have race and that men don't have gender. Also similar to critical race and feminist scholars, Williams demonstrates that an aspect of privilege is the opportunity to render that very privilege invisible.

Williams offers this scholarly contribution regarding class in relation to her interest in work-family issues because she says progressive elites (hereinafter "we" or "us") need to understand and appreciate the working class if we are to make them our political allies. Williams cites ample evidence of the disdain in which the professional-managerial class hold the white working class, observing for example that "redneck jokes may be the last acceptable ethnic slurs in 'polite' society"(fn17) and that academics "who would never utter a racial slur will casually refer to 'trailer trash' or 'white trash.'"(fn18) Williams decries such class-bashing by liberal elites: "The most refined fuel for class resentments is the culture of casual insults leveled by progressives toward the white working class. Changing U.S. politics will require an embargo on such insults."(fn19) Williams elaborates on several steps that the professional-managerial class should take: The first is to institute the same kind of taboo against insulting white workers as now exists against using racial innuendo and insults. The second step is to accept the fact that class is a key axis of social disadvantage in American life and to learn more about life in the Missing Middle [among the working class], so that we do not inadvertently offend potential allies by signaling that we are clueless about our class privilege. The third step is to identify aspects of non-elite culture that offer useful insights for the upper-middle class.(fn20)

Williams is absolutely correct that class is a critical axis of disadvantage in the United States,(fn21) even as it has been overlooked by scholars or simply collapsed into analyses focusing on race, gender, sexuality, or some other basis of identity.(fn22) Williams's indignation on behalf of the working class is well-founded, but she overlooks a recent shift in these class culture wars that she otherwise so aptly describes: the culture wars are now largely being fought-at least rhetorically-across the rural- urban divide.

Most recently and prominently, President Obama's perceived representation of the urban elite and Sarah Palin's frequent invocation of small-town America galvanized the geographical culture wars in the 2008 election cycle. As New York Times columnist David Brooks observed a month before the election, "[N]o American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite."(fn23) Frank Rich also identified the trend, referring to Palin's "deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent" in what he called the "signature line" from her convention speech: "I guess a smalltown mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."(fn24)

Other journalists and pundits not only reported from the front line, many ultimately joined in battle...