We’ve been here before. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno diagnosed what he called a “jargon of authenticity” in German culture. Shallow claims to authenticity were weaponized as justifications in and of themselves for otherwise inexcusable, or unexamined, ways of thinking, talking, relating, and behaving. Faced with the struggle and conflict of the modern world, authenticity was not so much found as strategically deployed. Jews, cities, “sinful intellectuality” were all deemed inauthentic, and as a result the jargon could serve to provide people with substitute templates that would reflect it instead of their real character: it would offer “patterns for being human … which have been driven out of them” and a mode of “reflected unreflectiveness.”
The similarities are eerie: Adorno identifies German authenticity language as “a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once—sub-language as superior language. … While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates.” Then, as now, the simple and old-fashioned—the “authentic,” the “real”—are held up as noble and timeless, in contrast to the soulless, dangerous, diverse complexity of the modern city. The jargon that Adorno identifies is a fake authenticity imposed from outside. Culturally conservative, rural, pure character is a product of the jargon, which people are led to accept as authentic. Importantly, these are the same traits the authors of the books reviewed here ascribe to the WWC, thereby forming their own jargon of authenticity.
Many liberals, shocked and dismayed by the 2016 election, also seemed to understand the populist revolt in this way. How did it happen that “authentic” Americans—working-class ones, even—were so pivotal to the success of the divisive Republican campaign of a multibillionaire? How to understand this exotic culture next door? These six books try to answer that question, and in the process reify the WWC’s authenticity.
The most recent among them is Joan C. Williams’s aptly titled White Working Class, which is an expanded version of an essay she addressed to urban, liberal elites. Williams, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, acts here as more of an anthropologist. A self-described “silver spoon girl,” she claims direct knowledge through her marriage to a bona fide “class migrant”—someone who moves between the working class and the wealthy—a position that recurs in several of the other books as well. Working from the premise that the 2016 election was about “populist, anti-establishment anger that welled up,” she presents a caricature—a sympathetic one, to be sure, but still a caricature—of working-class views, values, and experiences.