Quotes About Working-class

Coming from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That's his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn't realize that it's a distorted picture. If

The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.

A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey's argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy. For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.

But to write off white working-class anger as nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.

businessmen learned quickly that working-class tourists had money to spend, too. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in numbers.

As went Yamhill, so went much of white, working-class America. One of the strongest predictors of support for Trump in any county was the share of whites with just a high-school diploma or less.

Yet once he was in office, Trump cold-shouldered the working-class voters who had supported him. He gave lip service to jobs in coal and manufacturing but took no significant step to assist workers, and he made things worse by chipping away at the Affordable Care Act. It was one more scene in a long drama of politicians' betrayal of America's working class.

Not since the Great Depression has America experienced the kind of working-class stagnation that we've seen in recent decades, and it has fed polarization, racism and bigotry, gnawing away at our social fabric.

The first lesson of our journey and theme of this book is that to a degree unnoticed in more privileged parts of America, working-class communities have collapsed into a miasma of unemployment, broken families, drugs, obesity and early death. America