
After Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, the left-wing writer Joan C Williams noted that what Democrats didn’t understand about blue-collar America was the “class culture gap”. The white working class resented professionals but admired the rich because they dreamt not of being middle class, with different food, codes of behaviour and pastimes, but to remain themselves — just better off. But Clinton, Williams said, epitomised “the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite”. She was the teacher or doctor, social worker, lawyer or manager bustling into the lives of ordinary people, certain that a college degree meant they always knew best. To liberals who said such voters were stupid, that Trump would use them and then forget about them, Williams replied, but isn’t that what the Democrats do too?