What Does Political Moderation Actually Mean?

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Shortly after I launched this podcast, I had a guest on who caught folks attention. Her name was Joan C. Williams, a law professor at UC San Francisco, and she joined me to talk about her new book, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.”

She spoke straightforwardly about why the cultural values of America’s liberal elites and working class are different. As she said, working class values reflect working class lives. And she described how a strict adherence to elite values by Liberals creates challenges for a Democratic Party in pursuit of a majority coalition. After all, less than 40 percent of American adults have a college degree.

It turns out that Joan became something of a listener to this GD podcast herself. A few weeks ago, she sent me an email saying that she listened to an episode I did about whether there are electoral advantages to being moderate. She told me she had just written an op-ed in the Boston Globe about what politicos mean when they talk about moderation, and that there are many different types of so-called moderation, not all of which have the same electoral advantages.

I told her to come back on the podcast and talk to me about it and that’s what we’re doing today. And speaking of liberal elitism, Joan joins me from Siena, Italy where she has been writing about class divides from the 13th century and how they relate to our class divides today.