"Our founders believed that every (man) willing to work for his living should be able to earn enough to own his own house and support himself and his family," writes Hartmann. "That's what it means to be middle class and part of why (Thomas) Jefferson put 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" into the Declaration of Independence.
It's also why the founders put, in the preamble of the Constitution, that one purpose of government is to "promote the general welfare."
The one president who came closest to those words was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the country was down and out during the Great Depression, it was Roosevelt who recognized, in the words of Hartmann "that government can and must 'promote the general welfare,' because only government can create the conditions that make a middle class possible."
Roosevelt's New Deal gave us fair labor laws, the minimum wage, Social Security and regulation of the markets to tame the natural excesses of capitalism. The result was what Hartmann calls "the golden age of the American middle class," roughly between 1940 and 1980, when more Americans than ever before got a fair slice of the economic pie.
That social contract - play by the rules, work hard and you will be rewarded - was gradually whittled away by the Reagan conservatives. "Let the markets decide" was their mantra for everything.
The things that made a middle class possible - collective bargaining and unionization, access to education, affordable housing and health care, a secure pension upon retirement - were seen as obstacles to profitability by a new class of businessmen who took America's economy back to the post-Civil War "Gilded Age" of monopolists and robber barons.
Now, our nation is at a crossroads. The middle class is facing extinction, and it is impossible to have a functioning, healthy democracy without a healthy, prosperous middle class participating in the economic and political life of the nation.
So what should be done? Some of Hartmann's suggestions include a national single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, preservation of Social Security in its current form, a return to progressive taxation and the pre-Reagan-era top rates of 70 percent for individuals and 35 percent for corporations to fund Social Security and reinvest in public projects, changing labor law to make it easier to organize workplaces, a higher minimum wage that is truly a living wage and a national energy program that puts the needs of the people and the planet ahead of the oil companies.
It is an ambitious agenda, but it is absolutely essential to preserve our middle class and, in the process, to preserve our democracy. It is certainly an agenda that the Democratic Party needs to take to heart if it wants to win elections.
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