Roediger has a go at the whole lot. He unpacks history to interrogate the baggage carried. He brings in pollsters and shysters and the Bushes and Clintons and Obamas to make sense of how the term 'middle class' is used to con people into voting. He consults surveys, the Fortune in men's eyes as they view their post-war future lifestyles. He talks about old-timey working-class types, the butler and milkmaid and the milkman who ran off with your mother (haben sie liebfraumilch?). He gives us Marx snarks, amorphous masses and shape-shifting shibboleths, anodynes and literary anecdotes, Trump's deplorables and other basket cases, and hints at the revolution ahead when we let the middle class go fall, fell, fallen. F*ck it, let's face reality together.
Roediger is a professor of history at the University of Kansas. He has a long history of critical thinking and compelling articulation about race and class politics in America. His previous studies include Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. What makes Black and White is not so black and white. The Sinking Middle Class is an Introduction on the language of politics and an Afterword on the White Working Class sandwiched around chapters on the political Uses, Pretenses, Problems and Miseries of the Middle Class. As Roediger writes, "Each is meant to be short enough to read in three or four coffee breaks."
Roediger's first consideration in The Sinking Middle Class is to consider the language itself. Where did the term come from? What are some of the assumptions that come with its dissemination? Who's in charge of its meaning and placement within the social narrative of class history? Roediger writes,
The term itself found little use until the last ninety years and not commonly until the Cold War...The strata we might retrospectively call the middle class of the nineteenth century (farmers, free professionals, and shopkeepers) differed utterly from those of twentieth (clerks, salespeople, employed professionals, and managers).
As we become more and more entangled in electricity and speed-of-light communications it can be difficult to 'remember' the slower, black-and-white ways of the pre-Internet.
We can intuitively recall a striated class structure -- poor, lower middle class, upper middle class, and rich, with degrees of leaching into the contiguous class. One knew he belonged to the lower middle class (if he thought about it at all consciously) when he couldn't afford to send his talented kid to Groton School, but wasn't struggling too much to put a roof over the family and lay out three squares on the table for the family. But, says Roediger,
Over the last thirty years self-serving, vague, and often empty political rhetoric regarding saving the "middle class" has provided the language for rightward political motion finding its way even into unions. Put forward first by the Democrats, it has debased how we understand social divisions in the United States and sidelined meaningful discussions of justice in both class and racial terms.
Somewhere along the line upper middle class on down got grouped as one body -- for political purposes, but it's a fatuous grouping.
You might see it as a way of forcing bloc-voting; a lazy way of approaching the social, economic and moral issues of the day -- by trivializing nuance and difference (even as the same old class exclusions applied). And we use the news to deliver these messages, led to believe the ads are objective and balanced bits of information. Roediger lays into this McLuhan effect. Writes Roediger,
The US writer Waldo Frank [writes] in The Re-Discovery of America that "THE NEWS IS A TOY"--that is, a seemingly wonderful novelty and one immediately requiring replacement by a new wonder... the "news item" is overwhelmingly the sound bite of alleged political news, and that "anodyne" must now be in boldface....
I'm reminded of a scene from Boston Legal where the toyfulness of news, and the media in general, is unpacked in the courtroom.
So news, as anodyne, becomes part of the political packaging, part of the show, to be taken, ultimately, as being no more serious than the campaign promises. A surreal onslaught, every four years, on the delicate balance between our ears called consciousness, an ecosystem every bit as precious as rainforest. There are laugh tracks, practiced ponderments, tearful moments of William Hurt layer peelings of imagined empathy. But we persist in believing the news, even when they refuse to tell us what we need to know. Roediger writes,
Many of us desire those electoral news items, desperately wanting to be seen as the first to know them, and count that as being engaged in politics ... even radicals follow the example of TV pundits in relying on the most quickly available voting data to construct simplistic definitions of class that have little to do with social relations.
Even radicals, and Roediger's not being snarky or ironical. Sh*t happens.
Michael Dukakis getting bushwhacked by Bernard Shaw, the latter asking him what he'd do if his wife, Kitty, was raped by Willie "Furlough" Horton, becomes laugh-track-roast material fit for Comedy Central. One recalls this moment of "live" TV (future generations only get this moment and none of the debate, where Dukakis excelled), and Roediger briefly references the moment, a moment racially charged, a black man asking what a white man of power would do to a black man if -- an impossible question to answer, and we clapped with gleeful little schadenfreude hands as one of the few promising pol's careers went down the 'terlit' (as Archie Bunker would say) and his wife returned to heavy drinking. Maybe that was the silver lining to the moment: Kitty was spared four years of journos clinking her ice cubes (real or imagined).
This cheapening and potentially toxic blend of shallow politics and Madison Avenue massaging was, says Roediger, turned into an art form by consultant and pollster Stanley Greenberg working the Clinton campaign in 1992. Greenberg helped turn Macomb County into a Middle-Class Melting-Pot America by the careful gathering of data points and manipulation of their results. Writes Roediger,
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