The Sinking Middle Class

A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

David Roediger

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642597271
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Teoría social

The Sinking Middle Class challenges the "save the middle class" rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled.Today's highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand.Much later, the book's sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, "saving the middle class" entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one's personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.

1

LANGUAGES OF CLASS AND THE EXHAUSTION OF POLITICAL IMAGINATION

By the late 1990s, I sat through numerous sessions where well-known national pollsters instructed labor leaders to replace the words working class with middle class.

—JANE MCALEVEY, organizer

A friend who drives buses tells me that in the break room where workers decompress between routes, management puts up signs naming things not to talk about: politics, vaccines, global warming, religion. However, class and union don’t rise to the status of the forbidden, even as drivers talk constantly about work, shifts, pay, managers, and customers. The contemporary United States is something like that break room, both in its rising concern with issues of labor and safety, and in its lack of a strong vocabulary of class and of institutions capable of defending working-class lives. Class and inequality remain private matters, with those of us thinking we are succeeding to an unseemly extent and those sure we are succeeding too little both having reasons to fall silent. We go long stretches without hearing a politician utter the words “working class,” and the poor are seldom with us when laws get made.

The sole exception to this American reticence to discuss class forms the subject of this book. The “middle class” has, since the Cold War, endlessly attracted attention as the repository of US virtue and as what that nation can give to the world. For the last thirty years, “saving the middle class” has served as a fully bipartisan lodestar of electoral politics, even as middle layers of income and wealth have declined dramatically in their fortunes, especially in comparison to those at the top.

Lacking a sophisticated language of class, the United States sees appeals to the middle class supplant calls for justice. The ends of election campaigns feature Democrats making modest populist demands like the expansion of Obamacare or rejiggering student debt in the name of the middle class, while more extreme right-wing populist demands like Donald Trump’s misnamed “middle-class tax cuts” come from across the political aisle. We learn almost by osmosis that moments of political frisson unfold under the banner of saving the middle class—so much so that at times Barack Obama toyed with connecting “middle class” and class warfare, claiming the mantle of “warrior for the middle class.” Some Republicans responded by charging that any talk of class, even of the middle class, pandered to dangerous social radicalism; however, the attraction of vote-catching among the middle proved too strong to allow much movement in this direction. In social movements, especially organized labor, appeals to the middle class so seem the only game in town for talking about inequality and rights that we get, for example, whole campaigns against repressive labor laws conducted in the name of the middle class.¹

The Sinking Middle Class argues that this tendency to read the class experience of the United States by imagining a social structure based on a romanticized middle class inflated in its numbers, homogeneity, and importance serves us poorly. The book attempts to show historically how, especially over the last one hundred years, we got into this mess in thinking about class. The chapters below elaborate on the stories of the historic trajectory of the class structure of the US; of the attempts of elites to aggrandize and flatter a middle class for plutocratic, anti-labor, and nationalist purposes; of the connections of the middle class to dominant systems of racial and gender relations; of the attempts of the left to understand the middle classes; and of the increasing vogue for “saving the middle class” as the key to electoral politics. Only at length can this material receive textured elaboration, but it is nevertheless worthwhile to offer some immediate, if brief, clarity as to the book’s standpoint regarding class, even if it involves allowing generalizations to outrun evidence for the moment. Such directness is necessary in order to avoid confusion from the very outset in a book that both argues that the levels of middle-class identification in the US harmfully distill the results of defeats of working-class movements, and nevertheless holds that we cannot move forward without taking seriously those many people in various social positions who consider themselves middle class.

The cult of the middle class does provide a rare site where we hear the word “class” spoken in the United States, but it does so at the cost of occluding any rounded and useful understanding of the concept itself. In particular, the large part of life most of us spend having others control our time, motions, and (sometimes) emotions remains best accounted for by classic theories of class formation—Marxist ones, to be sure, but also those growing from the writings of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber—that emphasize relations among productive property, lack thereof, and labor. The presence of what Karl Marx called “a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work”—a working class—becomes harder to discern when most of the self-identified middle class has a car, some a house, and a few a boat. They could divest themselves of those and postpone selling labor for a time, though in many cases something as elemental as a health care would soon be at risk, and the class relation of landlord and tenant would often still apply. For most of the self-described middle class, the reality of needing a wage or salary would assert itself within months, as we see when health crises devastate families.²

This materialist approach to class leads to the conclusion that there is no singular middle class, but only middle classes. C. Wright Mills, esteemed as the greatest sociologist of the US middle class, insisted that it was the middle classes he studied. I follow him in that, if only to register that the senior partner joint-owner of a law firm and his army of paralegals cannot plausibly be placed in the same social category—he by virtue of his property, and they by virtue of their dress and intellectual labor. Projections of a middle class encompassing 90 percent and upward of population are based largely on self-identification, but even when researchers develop their own “objective” criteria for who is middle class, they throw together people experiencing wildly different social relations in their working lives. Important generalizations about middle-class voting behavior rest on slapdash categories driven by what data is most (or earliest) available—for example, those having attended college or those making over $50,000 a year.³ Or we learn a person’s class from their zip code or their shopping—Target versus Walmart.⁴

In assessing the pre-nineteenth-century United States, the analytical imprecision of leaving out the critical connection of property and labor matters less than it does for the more recent past—if only because in the earlier US centuries most white heads of household were self-employed, working farms or in craft enterprises they owned. But by the late nineteenth century, the employed white-collar middle class had begun to surpass the farmers, entrepreneurs, and free professionals. When we retroactively attach the term “middle class”—few living in the nineteenth-century US identified in that way—to both the employed and self-employed in that period, the connection between labor and productive property becomes obscured.

Insistence on seeing class as made at the point of production, and by what impels working people to that point, leads in the chapters below to sustained consideration of the shifting and situational line between the working class and the middle class. One purpose of the book is, then, to chip away at the unthinking acceptance of middle-class identity by those paid, driven, and surveilled as workers. The ways in which such identification is coerced and cajoled by elites receive emphasis. In politics, for example, the current choice is not so much between presenting demands as a middle-class subject or as a working-class one, but between being intelligible (by doing the former) and ignored (in the latter case). I identify with the lament that Jane McAlevey sighs in the chapter’s epigraph; indeed, it burdens us that so many imbibe an understanding of class that leads away from identifying the causes, and the solutions, of their miseries as significantly located away from the workplace. Such an understanding leads to individual solutions to social ills and misses the collective power of workers. It would be a great and liberating thing if every social worker, every person with a good union job, every clerk, every chemist, and every teacher awoke tomorrow thinking of themselves as working-class people holding interests in common with other workers.

That said, for at least three reasons, the middle class appears in these pages both as an ideological creation and, nevertheless, as a formation worthy of serious consideration and even sympathetic attention. The first of these reasons flows from the fact that consciousness is itself important. Socialist thinkers realized, from early in their attempts to organize labor in factories and transportation—the beating heart of those they saw as key to labor’s advance—that often such employees did not see themselves as a working class and certainly did not actively imagine themselves as bound to produce social transformation. The celebrated distinction between the working class as a “class in itself” (involved objectively in an exploitative relationship with capital) and a “class for itself” (acting to emancipate itself and society) came more from twentieth-century Marxist thinkers than from Marx himself. The distinction reflected an optimism that daily experiences could radicalize workers. It further articulated a knowledge that at times collective actions turned such experiences into something qualitatively greater.⁵ There is little reason not to approach the white-collar worker with similar patience and confidence.

Secondly, there are considerable sectors of the labor force who, in structural terms, are entrepreneurs or otherwise self-employed and uncontroversially middle class. Still others—the plumber who sometimes works as an independent contractor with apprentices and at others for a wage; or the strata of management that is well remunerated but closely bossed and without independent decision-making power—are in what the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls “contradictory class locations,” significantly embodying some elements of a middle-class experience and some of a working-class one.⁶

Finally and most importantly, if hyper-identification with the middle class by workers has in many ways been manipulated by elites, is has also sustained itself over a long period with the active consent and participation of tens of millions of working-class people, including many who identify situationally: that is, sometimes as middle class and others as working class. While a sense of accomplishment and ascent underlies many claims to being middle class, The Sinking Middle Class unearths the considerable extent to which white-collar proletarians faced some class-based miseries earlier than their blue-collar counterparts, especially with regard to the management of their personalities, the extent and character of their overwork, and the depth of their consumer indebtedness. To dismiss middle class testimonies as only the products of ideology is therefore to miss class grievances. For all those reasons, the goal here is both to deconstruct middle class identities and to understand them as having material dimensions.

PEAK MIDDLE-CLASS POLITICS: THE RECENT PAST

At the intersection of Google searching, journalism, and comedy lies a new but already played-out form of social criticism. Search engines assemble sound bites in which every conservative talk show host, or everyone in the “liberal” media,” or every leading Republican politician, or every prominent Democrat says more or less the same hackneyed thing. The echoing comments, put together equally well by Sean Hannity’s or Stephen Colbert’s staff, both imply a conspiracy of “talking points” being foisted onto the public and an utter lack of substance and conviction in what is being parroted. No such montage would lead to more revealing and plentiful results than one constructed around a search for the phrases “defending the middle class” or “saving the middle class.” Indeed, that rallying cry crosses the partisan political divide. Democrats and Republicans vie for the lead in terms of promises to stand up for the putatively noble but chronically fragile middle strata of the class structure. Both parties praise the middle class as the broken heart of the nation and hold that only they can mend it.

Such insistent appeals to a middle class so distended and ill defined that it cannot be associated with any particular set of demands have so come to dominate US politics that it is hard to imagine presidential elections without them. Nevertheless, as this book argues, “save the middle class” vagaries had a distinct origin in national politics: during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Though drawing on older anti-labor initiatives and popular language, especially as developed to serve Cold War aims, the cult of the middle class as election fodder is only reaching its thirtieth birthday. Even so, this means that a majority of the current electorate has cast ballots only in campaigns utterly dominated by vacuous appeals to the middle class.⁷ The Sinking Middle Class aims to show that it is possible to imagine a politics that is not so overwhelmingly electoral, not so eager to embrace myths about the national past, not so wedded to unserious class analysis that begins from a cobbled-together middle, and not so disastrous in furthering the inequalities to which many who think of themselves as middle class fall victim.

The 2012 presidential election best captures the relentless political appeals to the supposed center of the social structure. That election serves, therefore, as a good point of departure for a book seeking to explain how we get stuck in such political monomania and what we lose in our inability to move past it. In February 2012, the political scientist Cal Jillson concluded that President Barack Obama had “settled on a message of middle-class support.” Jillson correctly predicted that the Obama strategists, knowing they “were on to something,” would be systematically pursuing the issue throughout the campaign. Obama, who before that point had hardly been silent regarding his love for the middle class, redoubled his commitment by declaring himself a “warrior” on its behalf in pursuing reelection. Practically the first act of his first presidential term had been to set up the Middle Class Task Force, led by Vice President Joe Biden. Charged with getting “the backbone of this country up and running again,” the initiative identified a “strong middle class” with a “strong America.” To speak even louder about those in the middle class in 2012, Obama insisted, was not about “class warfare.” Instead, it concerned the “nation’s welfare.” Obama argued, first at a small high school gym in Kansas, then to the nation, that the “make or break moment for the middle class” defined the stakes of the election. By July 2012, a typical short Obama campaign speech would feature more than a dozen invocations of the glorious, precarious “middle class.”⁸

The Republicans faced the difficult fact that polls showed Obama clearly besting GOP candidate Mitt Romney in terms of being trusted to look out for middle-class economic interests. Reporting on the number of Romney’s lavish homes and estates did not help matters. Romney’s decision was to match the Democrats’ emphasis. He insisted that after almost a full term in office, with increasing misery among the middle class, the Obama administration could hardly claim to be effectively battling for forgotten Americans. Romney drew on “class” appeals similar to those of the Democrats, while he declared initiatives like the Obama task force to have been calamities that led to further erosion of middle-class standards. The two presidential campaigns even shared a definition of middle class: those whose annual income was less than $250,000—sometimes Romney mentioned $300,000—a category that applied to upward of 96 percent of the population. The 96 percent was not so much a class as it was a nation; to wage political war on its behalf seemed good patriotic politics.⁹ Those hovering between partisan cheerleading and political journalism spread the word, from Lou Dobbs’s slightly earlier War on the Middle Class, on the right, to the liberalism of Stanley Greenberg and James Carville’s almost-parodic It’s the Middle Class, Stupid.¹⁰

Here was a “middle” that included pretty much everybody, leaving out only a relative handful of the fabulously rich and, if taken literally, nobody in poverty. Obama deftly liquidated the issue of how a country with such astronomical rates of poverty could be almost all middle class. He defined the middle class as “not only folks who are currently [in] the middle class, but also people who aspire to be in the middle class.” Thus, he continued, “[w]e’re not forgetting the poor.” At the same time, political rhetoric about the losses of the middle class tempted the rival camps to offer more precise, if contradictory, definitions, at least in communications within the campaigns. Indeed, Obama’s chief economist held in January 2012 that the middle class was no longer a majority in the United States. It had dwindled, the adviser said, from 50 percent of the population to 42 percent over the last four decades, though some surveys placed the figure of those still self-identifying as middle class at double that. Romney’s camp predictably emphasized that if there were a decline, much of it had occurred under Obama.¹¹ An appeal to the middle class, political scientist Mark Sweet wrote, worked because “most people describe themselves as middle class.” The political wisdom that winning the middle-class vote predicted electoral victories could hardly have failed, ...