‘How’s work going?,’ Liz asked as we caught up over lunch at Farmacy.
‘It’s fine. I was given some really boring admin to do to prove I’m doing my job properly so I bribed a colleague to do it for me with a bag of weed.’
‘Do you even know a dope dealer?,’ Liz laughed.
‘No, I asked another colleague for his contact. In the end I just handed over some cash and we were all happy.’

We moved onto more serious discussions: how the US election results have underlined how much of a bubble most of us – educated and employed – live in.

Perhaps most shockingly, Donald Trump’s victory proved that the US is more sexist than it is racist. And it’s a very racist country. Why would any women vote for a man who openly describes women as sexual objects and stands accused of sexual harassment?

White working class (WWC) women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%, which suggests that uneducated women have internalised sexism. As Hannah Fearn wrote in The Independent, ‘the forces of feminism can seem like the pressure to give up what little power they [WWC women] do have (in the home) in favour of the chance to progress in a sphere where they have very little power and know they are unlikely to obtain much future power (the workplace).’

Joan C. Williams, writing for Harvard Business Review, also explored the class culture gap: the WWC resents professionals but admires the rich. What’s more, ‘WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.’

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