New York Times columnist and would-be Oregon gubernatorial candidate Nicholas Kristof showed off his expertise in U.S. society and politics over the weekend with a tweet that drew a pretty spectacular ratio: As of this writing, six likes and one retweet versus 211 replies and 191 quote tweets. As Kristof opined on Democrats’ problems with “working-class voters” (as is so often the case, add the word “white” in there to cover what Kristof really means—Democrats do pretty damn well with Black and Latino working-class voters), writing, “as Democrats increasingly become the party of the educated, they often come across as condescending to working-class voters,” someone asked him, “Can you define what you mean by working class and educated, and why they’re so often taken to be mutually exclusive of each other?”
Kristof’s response: “Working class is typically defined by education, i.e. lacking a university degree.” To be fair to Kristof, this is one way working class has been defined by pollsters and the media. But to be fair to the reality we live in, we have to talk about how badly this definition holds up in today’s United States.
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First, let’s consider the source:
Kristof is now back at the Times, to bring us more quality takes like this.
Clearly this is someone who never, ever speaks without having first done due diligence on the facts, and in this case, he seems to have missed out on what’s been going on in the economy over the past 13 years, since the Great Recession. To whatever extent Kristof’s definition was ever accurate, since the Great Recession, the share of recent college graduates in low-wage jobs has risen and there’s been a “dramatic structural break in the employment rate of young college graduates.”
Noam Scheiber is following the trend of people with college degrees working at places like Starbucks and REI and active in the union drives at those employers. He’s interviewed an REI sales lead with bachelor's and master's degrees in education, an Amazon warehouse worker with an associate degree in computer science, a Starbucks worker with a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance. These people are not at all uncommon in the economy if you’ve been paying any attention for the past decade-plus. In addition to working at what are not considered middle-class jobs, many of them have significant amounts of student debt as well. And what about the close to 15% of people who have some college but have not completed a degree? Where do they fall?
As the person whose question elicited that response from Kristof responded:
But Kristof isn’t interested in breaking out of a mental image of “working class” based on stereotypes from the 1970s or even the 1950s: white, male, doing manual labor in a factory or construction site or mine. Today’s working class—even if your definition of the working class is much less sweeping than “anyone who sells their labor”—looks nothing like that. As many people observed:
Another set of people correctly noted that there Kristof’s assessment erased more than a few people on the flip side of the equation:
And a third set of people wanted to introduce him to the writings of Karl Marx, who had a few things to say about what “working class” means, along with other important theorists of class:
The problem here is that while Kristof may have gotten dunked on for just voicing his flawed assumptions straight out, he was representing a very real set of assumptions regularly made by people like him—people with very big platforms and ability to shape the news. So, even though in 2020, exit polls show that Donald Trump won voters with incomes over $100,000 while President Joe Biden won voters with incomes under $100,000, we still hear endlessly about Democrats’ problems with the working class. Looking at education by race, Trump won white voters with no college degree while Biden won voters of color with no college degree. But we are going to hear more about white voters with no college degree than about any other group. We should hear about white no-college voters—because they are legitimately a large group and an important one—but not as overwhelmingly as we do, and they should not dominate the imaginations of our pundits in the way that they do.
[Update: Kristof left The New York Times to try to run for Oregon governor, but has now returned to the newspaper.]