The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History

by David R. Roediger

Joe Biden’s current emphasis on the “American middle-class” is typical of centrist Democrat strategy. It is used as a cudgel to defend the party against more radical demands that could win over working-class voters and non-voters. For Republicans, it provides a foil for disingenuous appeals to the “white working class.” Donald Trump’s 2016 victory made full use of such rhetoric.

Yet, as David Roediger makes clear in a pointed and persuasive polemic, this obsession with the middle-class is relatively new in US politics. It began with the attempt to win back so-called “Reagan Democrats” by Bill Clinton and his legendary pollster Stanley Greenberg. It was accompanied by a pandering to racism and a shying away from meaningful wealth redistribution that continues to this day.

Drawing on rich traditions of radical social thought, Roediger disavows the thinly sourced idea that the United States was, for much of its history, a “middle-class” nation and the still more indefensible position that it is one now. The increasing immiseration of large swathes of middle-income America, only accelerated by the current pandemic, nails a fallacy that is a major obstacle to progressive change.

“No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination.” —Nikhil Singh

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology, American History, Class Issues

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world's oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literary Pairing. Read Insurgent Supremacists with The Sinking Middle Class
by Anne Winkler-Morey | Feb 11, 2022 | Blog, Sustainable Economies

Traveling the spine of the United States from Minnesota to New Mexico during the Omicron surge, I have been reading two books: Matthew N. Lyons’ Insurgent Supremacists: The US Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire and David Roediger’s The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History As I passed through urban and rural spaces, and “red” and “blue”states, these books illuminated my understanding of what is real and what is manufactured about divisions among people in the economic 60-90% bottom of the United States.
In the material world, the 60% — 198 million people who own 3% of the US wealth—share so many interests; like the need to reign in corporations, advance environmental justice, decriminalize addiction and mental illness, decrease class sizes for their children, obtain universal healthcare and have access to tuition-free higher education. And peace. War and its post-trauma is, materially speaking, not good for children and other non-elite human beings.
So why are we – the 60%, (or even the 90% who own only 30% of US wealth) — so divided? Some of our differences have a basis in reality: we oppose or support reproductive rights, for example. Yet as Roediger argues, though we hear much ado about the growing red/blue divide, when it comes to class and race, both Republican and Democratic party leaders have been pushing the same fictive agenda. Both wring their hands and write best-selling books about the fate of the “middle class.” This majority sector, who are somehow in the same economic category can range in annual income from 24,000 to 144,000. Or in some calculations, up to 250,000. And that is not even talking about wealth. In other words, in economic terms, the phrase is almost meaningless. Yet most of us believe we are in it.
Roediger shows how the phrase, as these political pundits discuss it, often infers a modifying “white.” Sometimes it is a stand-in for “American,” and/or “class-less,” used to support the dangerous myth of US exceptionalism – that the country with some of the largest inequalities, is a country without economic classes. Now that is some BIG LIE.
Roediger argues that this middle-class that the pundits want to revive, is not only materially unreal, but the fiction we uphold by trying to live it, is not worth saving, unless you are a capitalist. Capital needs a base of people who overwork and overspend. To strive for, or live a middle-class lifestyle, is to suffer from a level of anxiety that is not humanly sustainable. (To understand how this works, one just needs to listen to the rhetoric around the economy and holiday spending. What is good for the system is not good for the financial, physical or spiritual health of the household.)
But listening to politicians of the two major political parties, the middle class is what makes America either great (Democrats) or is the America that was great and needs to be great again (Republicans).
Generally, Democratic and Republican pundits have not mentioned the working class. This, Roediger argues, is a holdover from the Cold War, when maintaining the myth of a classless society was paramount. Recently, however, both parties have become quite obsessed with the “white working class” a phrase in which, Roediger notes, the accent is on the “white.”
Since the Civil Rights Movement, the major parties have avoided official use of the word “white,” but, especially since Trump’s victory in 2016, both parties have been talking openly about how Democrats lost the “white working class.” To get them back, pundits on both sides argue, Democrats must appeal to their whiteness. (And, often, their cisgender maleness, and heterosexuality). No talk of immigrant rights, of defunding police, of monuments, of ethnic studies in K-12 schools, of the rights of transgendered people, for example.
Here is where pairing Sinking Middle with Insurgent Supremacists adds an essential perspective. For, appealing to “whiteness” to win the white working class, is essentially endorsing the arguments of right-wing supremacists. If you subsume issues of racial equity to woo the white working class, you are serving them white nationalist or white supremacist Koolaid. In a goblet.
White nationalist OR white supremacist? What’s the difference? Read Insurgent Supremacists to find out. Indeed, Lyons shows that rightwing insurgents are an ideologically diverse bunch with a panoply of (often convoluted) theoretical frameworks. Bringing Roediger in, one can see how these ideologies emerge as one type of reaction to a lifestyle of high anxiety, over work, overconsumption, and dangerous debt. Indeed, Lyons argues, demonizing the far right is not just unhelpful but inaccurate. They are “regular human beings” attracted to organizations that speak to their “hopes, fears, grievances, and aspirations.” (p. iii).
Insurgent supremacists have one precept in common, an idea also inherent in the very concept of “white working class” – that people are inherently unequal. For if all people are created equal, then there is no such thing as a white working-class interest, only a working-class interest.
The 60%, the 198 million poor people, working class people, people on the aspiring middle class hamster wheel, live in urban and rural places, red and blue states. They are a multiracial, multi-ethnic, of diverse faiths and no faith. Lyons shows how racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, are adopted by rightwing insurgent groups in their quest to make inequality natural. These isms, or course, help to keep the 60% in their economic place. Capital divides to conquer.
In upholding and championing inequality, the right-wing insurgents are, for the most part, upholding the status quo. But the insurgent supremacists also challenge state and empire, in contradictory ways. Some advocate for a stronger state, others for dismantling statism. They are concerned about US Foreign policy, some encouraging intervention, others deeply opposed. Some side with elements of the left on police repression. On gun rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, their positions are all over the map but make “sense” within the kind of inequality they peddle. (For example, some groups favor abortion for people of color and not for white people.)
As we struggle to take back the narrative and fight for real advances for the 60%, we need to understand how we are being manipulated by the political classes in power and be cognizant of the worst manifestations of both rhetoric that creates a “white working class” and a system that destroys the emotional health of those aspiring to middle class. For perspectives that show much of the current political debate dished out by mainstream political pundits to be irrelevant to the bottom economic majority, I recommend this pairing: Insurgent Supremacists and the Sinking Middle Class. If you can read them while on a US road trip, all the better. If the pandemic is over and you can hang out in cafes and talk to people, that would be best.

[Elly · Rating 4 out of 5]

damn that was wild

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why reinvent the wheel, when you can copy paste the same observations from the last decade and you are good as new with another book? Roediger is a government bureaucrat who wants the tenure, and he has to publish, say the rules of the game. Now, some other guy, a mediocre less known, called Marx was making the same assumptions. And from before that Marx, every decade some other mediocre discovers that ”the middle class” has the nerve not to obey his very whims.

[Amaris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was enlightening! I now understand that the ‘middle class’ was a term created as an electoral campaign strategy. It was very interesting to read how this category came to be. I appreciated Roediger’s argument that what binds people who self-identify as middle class is the fear of ‘falling’, and that most of us are— for all intents and purposes— working class.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written history of class in the US. Roediger helped me with an understanding of the political appeal of the middle class and why the concept is so important to the ruling class.

[Rhiannon Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.








The title and summary of this book really drew me in but overall I really struggled with the book as a whole. At only 264 pages, the book is dense with history and details but not exactly a riveting pageturner. This would be a great piece of supplemental reading for a political, business, or labor studies college course where each page and topic could be dissected and discussed, but I wouldn't recommend it as a general knowledge book for the average reader. Even after taking several related courses in college, I found myself struggling to find some concrete takeaways in this text other than the fact there is no universally agreed upon answer to the question "who/what is the middle class in America?"

For a bit more insight into the content of the book, I've included the chapter titles below.

1. Languages of Class and the Exhaustion of Political Imagination
2. The Pretenses of Middle-Class United States
3. How the Left Has Lived with the Problem of the Middle Class
4. Falling, Misery, and the Impossibilities of Middle-Class Life
5. Middle-Class Votes
6. Stanley Greenberg, Democratic Neoliberalism, and the Rightward Drift of US Politics
7. Doubly Stuck
8. The Middle Class, the White Working Class, and the Crisis of US Neoliberalism



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[Ari Stillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Sinking Middle Class does what its subtitle outlines: proffering a political history of middle class woes, though the drift to the Right remains unsatisfactorily established or elucidated. At its best, the book draws from relevant literature pertaining to the middle class and connects it to contemporary class issues. Roediger notes historical and highly politicized qualifications for the manufacturing of middle class identity while naming shared misery and anxiety as the ties somehow binding an atomized class together. At its worst, the book engages in cryptic poetic language that doesn't encourage clear comprehension and glosses over important points leaving the reader with unanswered questions that should have been clearly addressed. For example: What is the relationship between salary and wage-labor to class identity? While Roediger has certainly done his research, in-text references at times lack the necessary qualifications to contextualize claims made. An entire 40-page chapter is given to the biography of a political consultant, Stanley Greenberg, who by the end of the chapter I am no more enriched for reading it. While the author used Greenberg as a lens to discuss identity politics and the middle class shift to the Right, this end could have been pursued more directly and succinctly without boring the reader. Overall, I walk away from this book with a better understanding of the history of the middle class but without definitive answers for which I picked up the book in the first place.