Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics?
A particular vision of the American dream has shaped elections for decades. What happens when people stop believing in it?
.. Last spring, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of respondents who identified as middle class or upper middle class dropped 12 percent since the 2008 financial crisis; nearly half of those polled identified themselves as either working or lower class.
.. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill equipped American politics is for a post-middle-class nation
.. The new middle-class utopia did, of course, exclude most nonwhite Americans.
.. in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56 percent, and blacks on average earned 53 percent what whites did.
.. Democrats’ hold on the white middle class was balanced precariously on the racial status quo — which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart. George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964 in protest of Lyndon B. Johnson’s turn toward civil rights, performed well not just in the South but also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot.
.. Ronald Reagan’s campaign aired its “Morning in America” ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale — the son of a small-town Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an austere, Scandinavian morality — spent the last days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an “America of fairness.”
.. Speaking bitterly of Reagan’s commercial, he told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one’s hurting. No one’s alone. No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But Americans liked the picket fences and puppy dogs.
.. not being black was what constituted being middle class.”
.. This is where you draw the line if you’re interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth — not whether you have a yacht docked in St. Bart’s, but whether you’re doing better than you were five years ago.