Joan Williams: How the Left Lost the Working Class

Joan Williams: How the Left Lost the Working Class

Hear Williams' guidance on how she says liberals can forge a multiracial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals

By The Commonwealth Club World Affairs

Date and time

Tuesday, May 27 · 5:30 - 6:30pm PDT

Location

The Commonwealth Club

110 The Embarcadero San Francisco, CA 94105

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 7 days before event

About this event

  • Event lasts 1 hour

The moving force behind biasinterrupters.org (an evidence-based metrics-driven approach to eradicating implicit bias) brings her perspective to bear on bridging the divide between college grads and everyone else she says has been driving politics to the far right in the United States.

Joan Williams asks: Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Her answer is that changing the class dynamics which are currently dividing American voters could do just that.

Williams argues that liberals often inadvertently play into the hands of far-right politicians intent on manipulating class anger to undercut progressive goals. She says the process can be reversed by offering college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives, and how their lives reflect their privilege, while also demonstrating how working-class values reflect working-class lives. She says the far right connects culturally with the working-class by manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to obfuscate the reality that far-right economic policies often prove disadvantageous to the working-class.

Join us to hear her guidance on how she says liberals can forge a multiracial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

SPEAKERS

Joan Williams, Sullivan Professor and Founding Director, the Equality Action Center, UC Law San Francisco; Author, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back

Moderator TBA

5 p.m. doors open & check-in
5:30–6:30 p.m program
6:30 book signing

$24.25