David Paul Kuhn

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David Paul Kuhn
OccupationsJournalist, author
Website www.davidpaulkuhn.com

David Paul Kuhn is an American author, journalist and political analyst. His book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, was recognized by The New York Times as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2020." [1] In 2025, the book was turned into a PBS documentary, titled Hard Hat Riot. [2]

Contents

Career

Kuhn has served as the chief political writer for CBS, a senior political writer for Politico , and as chief political correspondent for RealClearPolitics.

Early in his career, Kuhn reported on the United States for the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Shimbun . During this period, Kuhn covered issues including anthrax, North Korean nuclear negotiations, and the September 11th attacks. He wrote about his experience at the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001, in the book At Ground Zero. [3]

Kuhn has written about the white working class in the context of American politics, the male side of the gender gap, and his perspective on why Democrats struggle to win white voters, particularly blue-collar whites. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

On September 30, 2025, American Experience on PBS aired a documentary titled "Hard Hat Riot" adapted from Kuhn's 2020 book of the same name. [9] Kuhn also co-produced and appeared in the documentary. [10] According to The Boston Globe, the documentary is about “a hinge point in American politics, a major turn in what became the working class’ decades-long shift toward the Republican Party." [11]

Books

Kuhn's first book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, was published in 2007 and received positive reviews. [12] [13] [14] [15]

Kuhn's second book, the political novel What Makes It Worthy, was published in 2015.[ citation needed ]

The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, was published in July 2020. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. [16] The Washington Post book review called it "engrossing, well-crafted," "deeply researched," adding that "Kuhn writes with empathy for both sides" and "concludes with a sharp analysis of how the revolt of the white working-class almost immediately reshaped American politics." [17] The New York Times review called it a "compelling narrative." [18] In The New Yorker , Jill Lepore wrote that The Hardhat Riot was a "riveting book." [19] The New York Daily News reported that the book, which tells the story of the Hard Hat Riot of May 8, 1970, as well as the antecedents and aftermath, is about how a "day changed American politics, perhaps forever." [20] In the Wall Street Journal in 2020, former Senator Jim Webb called Kuhn an "unacknowledged prophet" because "over the past 15 years few writers have covered this realignment" of "white working people" from the Democratic Party to the GOP with "the consistency of David Paul Kuhn, whose warnings about the reasons white working people were moving away from the Democrats were largely dismissed by the news media and party elites." The Wall Street Journal book review by Jim Webb also wrote that the book "insightfully explains why and how" the white working-class tilted "the 2016 election to Donald Trump," centered around the microcosm of a "riveting account of the May 1970 explosion of New York's blue-collar workers." [21] New York magazine's "Approval Matrix" placed the book in its quadrant for "brilliant" and "highbrow." [22]

Despite praise in the mainstream press, The Hardhat Riot has received a mixed reception from academic reviewers. Daniel Schlozman of Johns Hopkins University writes that "Kuhn, a seasoned reporter, brings to bear the advantages and disadvantages of his craft." Schlozman argues that the book, while "consciously imitating the tabloids in their glory days, sheds less light on the milieus of the hardhats and the police. ... Neighborhood, ethnic, church, and union ties, the bread-and-butter of social history, get short shrift." Further, Schlozman contends that a central claim of The Hardhat Riot, that "condescending elites ... who forced 'FDR's everyman' to abandon 'the liberalism that had once championed him' ... is an illusion, based more on hazy recollection than a serious engagement with the limits of the New Deal order." [23] David Austin Walsh writes that The Hardhat Riot "is the first full-length book treatment of the riot ... an engaging, well-written, but frustratingly uneven account." Walsh argues that "Kuhn seems more interested in validating the grievances of working-class whites against New Left radicals and their liberal political allies than in analysis." Walsh finds Kuhn's portrayal of the actual riot the most compelling part of the book, where "Kuhn's talents as a writer - and his ample source base, drawing from oral histories, press accounts, Lindsay's papers, and NYPD records - really shine." Walsh contends, however, that the book largely downplays the importance of racism in explaining the concerns of urban white populations in the late 1960s. Kuhn's arguments, "fly in the face of decades of scholarship about urban segregation and suburbanization - which, based on his endnotes, Kuhn seems to have almost completely ignored." [24]

References

  1. ↑ "100 Notable Books of 2020". The New York Times. 20 November 2020.
  2. ↑ "Hard Hat Riot". PBS.
  3. ↑ Erman, Sam; Bull, Chris (2002). At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories . Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN   9781560254270.
  4. ↑ Kuhn, David (December 26, 2016). "Sorry, Liberals. Bigotry Didn't Elect Donald Trump". The New York Times.
  5. ↑ "NPR "Are White Men the Soccer Moms of 2008?"".
  6. ↑ Kuhn, David (March 22, 2010). "Revenge of the white men". Los Angeles Times.
  7. ↑ Kuhn, David (November 27, 2009). "The Jobless Gender Gap". The Wall Street Journal.
  8. ↑ "NPR "Pollster: Democrats Losing Support Among White Men"".
  9. ↑ Robinson, Jennifer (September 25, 2025). "American Experience: Hard Hat Riot". KBPS.
  10. ↑ "In 1970, a riot broke out between construction workers and anti-war protesters. What happened next changed history". CNN.
  11. ↑ Vognar, Chris (September 30, 2025). "Hard Hat Riot reminds us what we'll lose with GBHs American Experience". Boston Globe.
  12. ↑ Acheson, David (November 11, 2007). "The Democrats' white male problem". The Washington Times.
  13. ↑ "White men can vote". Economist. July 3, 2008.
  14. ↑ Klein, Joe (October 11, 2007). "Does Merle Haggard Speak for America?". Time magazine.
  15. ↑ Polman, Dick (October 28, 2007). "Getting white men to jump". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
  16. ↑ "The New York Times, "Editors' Choice, 10 New Books We Recommend This Week"". The New York Times. July 23, 2020.
  17. ↑ Barbato, Joseph (August 14, 2020). "Student protesters, angry construction workers and a violent confrontation". The Washington Post.
  18. ↑ Haberman, Clyde (July 1, 2020). "The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican". The New York Times.
  19. ↑ Lepore, Jill (April 27, 2020). "Kent State and the War that Never Ended". The New Yorker.
  20. ↑ Cutler, Jacqueline (June 19, 2020). "Five decade old 'hardhat riots' could draw modern parallels". The New York Daily News.
  21. ↑ Webb, Jim (June 26, 2020). "'The Hardhat Riot' Review: What the Riots Foretold". The Wall Street Journal.
  22. ↑ "The Approval Matrix". New York magazine. July 6, 2020.
  23. ↑ Schlozman, Daniel (2021). "Review: The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 52 (1): 144–45. doi:10.1162/jinh_r_01689.
  24. ↑ Walsh, David Austin (2020). "Review: The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. By David Paul Kuhn" . Journal of Social History. 55 (2): 144–45. doi:10.1093/jsh/shaa065.
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