The Sinking Middle Class

A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

By David R. Roediger

2020

First Published

3.57

Average Rating

264

Number of Pages

8H03M

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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

Avg Rating

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Author

David R. Roediger

Author · 13 books

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.