ABSTRACT
The chapter draws on the ‘successful societies’ perspective to address one of the major challenges currently preoccupying Western societies: right-wing populism. It takes Joan C. Williams’s incisive volume, White Working Class (2017), as its substantive focus. Emphasis is placed on Williams’s advocacy of changes to the Democratic Party’s policy discourse as a means of forming alliances between liberal progressives and the white working class. It is argued that the successful societies approach, combining the meta-resources of social theory and moral and political philosophy, can provide a more penetrating level of analysis to complement Williams’s position.
