Selling Encyclopedias: The Dream of Advancement
Most telling, though, was the discovery that my best prospects had Wallace stickers on their car bumpers. George Wallace ran a populist campaign for president in 1968 that was based on Tea Party-like resentment of Washington and contempt for “pointy-headed” intellectuals who wanted to tell you what to do.
.. Fast forward to the present, where the wealth gap and the bleak prospects of the lower middle class have made that pixie dust even more potent (it’s striking that median household income as measured by the Commerce Department is actually a bit less today in real terms than it was in 1968, when vastly fewer women had entered the work force).