Rick, a forty-five-year-old white computer engineer in Maineville, Ohio, realized he was really good at fixing things as a young child. But he never liked getting dirty, so his dream job was to fix things without getting dirty. Computers were just the ticket. After five years in the navy, Rick finally finished getting his two-year associate’s degree, and, determined to set a good example for his children, completed his bachelor’s degree right before turning forty. As a computer engineer, he has earned between $85,000 and $101,000 a year and considers himself middle-class. He’s also been laid off twice, at two different companies, both times when his job was offshored to India. The last time, he actually had to train his replacement in order to receive his severance. His entire department was being transferred to India, and the company flew the new workers to the United States to be trained by the very people whose jobs they were taking.
Rick’s layoff came after the company was bought out by a big, publicly traded corporation. The original company was privately held and described by Rick as a “tight-knit group, and more of a family culture.” But now the culture was much more siloed and corporate. And, more important, the company was now “beholden to shareholders.” In addition to Rick’s department being offshored, a total of 120 staff members were laid off and their jobs outsourced. The layoffs came after the company missed its third-quarter earnings goal and needed to initiate a “course correction.” And there went the jobs.
Rick is incredulous about his situation. “This is cold-blooded at a level I’ve never seen before,” he said. “How is this even legal? How can you fire a hundred and twenty people and then ship in folks from another country to take their jobs? Even if it is legal, it shouldn’t be. It’s just wrong.” In Rick’s mind, there’s a very clear reason that this happened: “We have no union. There’s nothing we can do to fight this.”
Rick’s story is becoming much more common now among professions once considered safe from the lure of cheaper labor. But no more. Companies are now sending many so-called skilled positions offshore, including once high-paying jobs in the financial and tech sectors. The transfer to cheaper sources of once safe occupations is just one of the ways in which work has become less secure for many people in the middle class. Recent college graduates are increasingly working in jobs that don’t require a degree, at least until a career path opens up somewhere else. Journalists of all kinds are likely to be freelancers, forced to be constantly pitching new work to new outlets to earn a living. Faculty members are increasingly hired as adjuncts, paid by the course in what amounts to roughly the minimum wage. The spoils are preserved for corporate executives and managers, who now face intense pressures from the financial class to lower costs and boost profits. All of these trends lead, in some fashion or another, back to the outsized and extractive role Wall Street now plays in our economy. If you snoop around and look at corporate boards, financial statements, and shareholder proxies, chances are that the people doing the squeezing are at the very top of the food chain—private equity firms and hedge funds.
The middle class is no longer safe, as the trappings of secure life fall further out of reach: housing, child care, college, retirement, and even a decent vacation. Getting ahead is harder today. College-educated workers are feeling the pinch, and the pain, of a neoliberal economic system that is systemically rotten to the core. Much has been written about the strain facing the middle class, and I’ve even contributed to that growing chorus of experts, pundits, and politicians concerned about the disappearing middle class. I’ve tried in my writing to emphasize that it’s the entry points into the middle class that have evaporated, focusing on the reality that it is harder now either to work or to educate your way into the middle class. When I wrote my first book, Strapped, which focused on what was happening to young people trying to get ahead in an era of inequality and finance-driven capitalism, I purposefully told the stories of young people who hadn’t finished college. But the media interviews for my book almost exclusively focused on the problems confronting young professionals. There are real issues there, but when you compare those issues—doubling or tripling up in an apartment in a hip neighborhood to afford rent, say—to those of a thirty-something working as a cashier with unstable hours, struggling to find and pay for child care, it’s the mom in a crumbling neighborhood who needs much more of our political attention and public concern. And it’s her challenges that are faced by many more Americans than the issues confronting an upwardly mobile urban professional.
Unless we can coalesce around the need for a much higher quality of life for the new working class, then anyone who is not truly affluent and upper-class will remain living on a precipice of economic anxiety and insecurity. Why? Because the philosophy that allows employers to schedule their hourly workers week to week, with little advance notice, is the same philosophy that allows employers to expect their salaried workers to be “on” 24/7, responding to emails and taking conference calls that disrupt family and leisure time. The policies that stripped away our factories are the same policies that are now yanking professional jobs out of the country. The political hostility toward people who are down on their luck and need help buying food is delivered by the same politicians who drastically cut higher-education funding. The three biggest threats to the middle class are the same culprits behind the degradation of the working class: Wall Street, “trickle-down” economics, and antigovernment activism. These forces hit the working class first and hardest, but they inflict plenty of damage on the middle class too.
So if we want to save the middle class, we’ve got to start from the bottom up.
That means that the new working class, which will be primarily Latino and black in less than a generation if current trends hold, must be at the center of our public debate. And that means a major recalibration of how we view each other and whether we can finally agree that we are all in this together—native-born Americans and immigrants, blacks and whites and Latinos, poor, working-class, and middle-class. As I detailed in Chapter 5, the New Deal consensus fractured when black Americans and women finally got the legal right to the good stuff white men had hoarded for so long. So what will it take for Americans to stand shoulder to shoulder, when for so long race and class have divided us?
Three significant barriers stand in the way of this new, racially diverse working class regaining moral, economic, and political power and bringing the primarily white, college-educated middle class along with it. The first is the gaping social distance between Americans, which has certainly hardened by both race and class. Today’s working class lives in a completely different orbit from the middle and upper classes, with whom they often interact only in commercial transactions. Yet our policymakers, journalists, and thought leaders are overwhelmingly culled from the more privileged parts of America, a bias that distorts the narrative about working life today in profound ways.
The second barrier is the very American tradition of pathologizing struggle and strife, which was once aimed mostly at the poor and the black underclass but has been extended to the entire working class, undercutting support for much-needed pubic policies that could help both the working class and the middle class. And finally, for the new working class, the most fundamental challenge remains the racial divisions that exist in the United States and, more important, our long aversion to either acknowledging or addressing them.
As part of my job at Demos, I talk to journalists and producers fairly frequently. Without fail, when I talk about the fact that most Americans, even most twenty- and thirty-somethings, don’t have bachelor’s degrees, this “news” is greeted by surprise on the other end of the phone. Keep in mind that a full two-thirds of people in this country do not have bachelor’s degrees, even among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds, whereas 92 percent of journalists today—print, television, digital, and radio—have bachelor’s degrees, up from 58 percent in 1971.1 Fewer than 10 percent of journalists are people of color, an increase for sure since 1971 (5 percent), but not even close to reflecting the percentage in the population of people of color, who account for more than one-third of our country. As media outlets, particularly in digital and cable, have proliferated, journalism is no longer about “reaching the widest possible audience.” Only 12 percent of journalists think this is an extremely important goal, down from 39 percent in 1971. Niche online sites tend to draw younger and better-educated readers. The Internet revolution in journalism now brings competition into the news, with each reporter or producer striving to hit the “most read” or “most clicked” on their site each day. Given who combs these news sites—think BuzzFeed, Salon, and The Huffington Post—if you were a journalist aspiring to the top ranks (or even a decent living), which story would you be more inclined to pitch, “College graduates increasingly priced out of most popular cities” or “Homelessness among the working class surges in top cities”?
In addition to speaking with journalists as part of my job, I spend a fair amount of time talking to congressional staff, whose social distance from the working class reflects an even greater gap. In 2011 the National Journal published the demographics of 300 top-level congressional staffers and found that 93 percent are white, 68 percent are male, and 97 percent have graduate or law degrees.2 About half these staffers attended private colleges for their undergraduate degree, including 10 percent who went to an Ivy League school. For an institution charged with considering the interests of all people in the United States, this is pretty astounding. And it should be noted that the elitism, maleness, and whiteness of top staffers were similar for Republican and Democratic offices. Congress itself is a tad more diverse. The 114th Congress, seated in January 2015, is the most racially diverse in history, with 83 percent white members and 17 percent black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, or Native American.3 Keep in mind, however, that today 38 percent of the population is not white.
Of course, just because an individual has completed a bachelor’s or an advanced degree doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is not from a working-class or poor background. I’m a case in point. But I’m also a major outlier. Today, people between twenty and forty years old with bachelor’s degrees are likely to have grown up in households where at least one parent also had a bachelor’s degree. While more people than ever before are enrolling in college, the folks who actually manage to complete college are much more likely to have grown up in college-educated households than those who drop out. For example, one survey found that 55 percent of children from two-degree families reported obtaining a college or postgraduate degree, compared with just 23 percent of the children from no-degree families.4 And those who hold advanced degrees, whether graduate or law degrees, are even more likely to come from well-educated households. What this means is that America’s power brokers—our newsmakers and governing class—are unlikely to have a family background similar to that of the majority of Americans.
The social distance of America’s cultural elites, its news- and policymakers, from the zeitgeist of American experience has contributed to the invisibility of the new working class. When the Great Recession hit, national news outlets focused on the falls from grace of the previously middle-class. Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR) is a media watchdog group that extensively studied how the mainstream media covered the Great Recession. Its analysis illustrates how social distance can greatly distort the way Americans collectively view what’s happening around us. Take for example, the Washington Post. In the first two years of the Great Recession, the Post did not run a single article about how the foreclosure crisis primarily hit the black and Latino working class.5 The paper did, however, deem it newsworthy—even front-page newsworthy—to cover how foreclosures were hitting condo owners in Silver Springs, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., and how buyers of million-dollar homes were now facing foreclosure.6 Stephen Pimpare, author of A People’s History of Poverty in America, explains the class bias in our media by saying, “So much of large-audience journalism is produced by people who are not working-class and tend not to know working-class, let alone poor people. The subtext now is that this is something we need to pay attention to, because ‘good, decent people’ are being affected.”
The Washington Post really takes the cake, though, for bending over backward to cover the fall-from-riches stories of the Great Recession. Keep in mind that this newspaper has a special role in agenda-setting: it is the paper of record for political elites. It is the reading du jour for anyone who works on Capitol Hill or who seeks to influence what happens in its corridors. What it reports and who it writes about matter. A lot. In August 2009, when the national unemployment rate was 9.7 percent, the Post ran a story with the headline “Squeaking by on $300,000.”7 A more than 3,600-word story. The main subject of the story was Laura Steins, a vice president at MasterCard who was divorced, with three children and a live-in nanny. The story chronicles the tough times to hit the leafy suburbs just outside Manhattan, where the titans of the Street were now supposedly feeling real pain. I’ll admit it: I was fuming by the end of this article. At the level of humanity provided to Steins, at the expanse of words dedicated to her experience, and at the actual sympathy the reporter conveyed, writing, “Whatever fantasies the underclass may have of the good life—of small dogs in purses and Dolce and Gabbana—are not on display here. The rugs are worn. Milk is spilled. A Marmaduke of a beast named Tyson hovers at the table ready to snuffle up pork tenderloin from the plate of a distracted child.” This scene unfolded in a four-thousand-square-foot home on three acres, with a swimming pool. And a nanny who does the food shopping, cooks all the meals, does the laundry, and apparently also fixes leaky pipes.
During the Great Recession, coverage by the mainstream media could give one the impression that the downturn was doing the most damage to the big banks and middle-aged professional workers. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the content of news stories about the economy in the early months of President Obama’s first term, from February 1 to August 1, 2009. All told, the center examined 9,950 stories from television, radio, cable, newspapers, and the Internet.8 “Citizens may have been the biggest victims of the downturn, but they have not been the primary actors in the media depictions of it,” wrote the report’s authors. So what did the media cover? Nearly 40 percent of the stories were about the challenge of reviving the banking industry, the battle over the stimulus package, and the struggles facing the domestic auto industry. Even though the fate of the auto industry would directly affect millions of workers, the stories concentrated on ideological questions about whether the government should bail out the industry. According to Pew, stories related to labor issues or worker layoffs registered but faintly in the coverage.
Coverage of the Great Recession was also driven almost entirely by government officials and business leaders and the press itself. The White House and federal agencies alone initiated nearly a third (32 percent) of economic stories studied, while business triggered another 21 percent. About a quarter of the stories (23 percent) were initiated by the press and did not rely on an external news trigger. Ordinary citizens and union workers combined to act as the catalyst for only 2 percent of the stories about the economy. For the average person in the United States, the two most relevant issues were the decline in housing values and rising foreclosures and the enormous increase in unemployment, but these issues each garnered just 6 percent of all the news stories generated during the deepest part of the recession.
Given that the epicenter of the financial industry is in New York and our nation’s capital is in Washington, D.C., it’s not surprising that so many of the stories covered would emanate from these two cities. But the proportion of all stories with datelines from either New York or D.C. even surprised the study’s researchers, who refer to it as “overwhelming.” Just over three-quarters of economic stories during this time were reported from these two cities alone. The struggles in the rest of the country barely seemed to exist. The one encouraging observation from the analysis was that nightly network news got it right, covering the impact on ordinary people more thoroughly and regularly than any other type of media, devoting 12 percent of economic stories to the impact on people.
In essence, not even an economic calamity—one that resulted in millions of lost jobs and foreclosed homes—could catapult the plight of the working class to headline news. Most newspapers had long ago cut their labor reporters, with only a handful left to carry the weight. Stephen Greenhouse of the New York Times stood out as the best in the business. But when he left the paper, the labor beat just got absorbed by other reporters. There’s no dedicated reporter now at the Times covering issues facing run-of-the-mill workers, with the exception of Rachel Swarns’s excellent weekly column, “The Working Life,” in the metro section of the paper.
The new working class was able to lift the cloak of invisibility only by hitting the streets under the banner Fight for $15. As workers went on strike in hundreds of cities around the country and successfully won significant increases in the minimum wage in several major cities and states, the newsrooms finally had a story to tell and the new working class gained some visibility. Great investigative journalism by Jodi Kantor of the Times, for example, raised awareness about the havoc wreaked by erratic scheduling practices.9 The morning after her piece profiling a Starbucks employee went online, Starbucks announced that it would make changes to its scheduling practices to provide more stability for its baristas.10 The mobilization of the new working class, from retail to fast food to home care workers, has thankfully gotten the media to at least pay attention to the multiple indignities confronting the nation’s lowest-paid workers: lack of paid sick days, wage theft, unstable schedules, and an incredibly low minimum wage. But it came only when a significant share of the Sleeping Giant dared to demand better treatment. The middle class and upper class bear no similar burden. Laura Steins most certainly didn’t have to march to have her story of barely making it on $300,000 told.
Most college-educated workers can take a new position and pretty much not worry whether the new job includes paid sick days, offers health insurance, or provides a retirement plan. Most professionals even get paid vacation days, all without having to march in the streets and fight intractable politicians to win these benefits. Similarly, professionals don’t have to wage a protest to get the media to focus on one of the biggest work-life issues confronting them, such as the 24/7 time demands facilitated by smartphones or the new expectation of working during vacation. That’s the privilege of visibility. To have your life experiences acknowledged and reflected in the cultural zeitgeist is taken for granted by career professionals, providing a cocooned perception that these are the most pressing and ubiquitous problems facing workers in America.
Increasingly, Americans live in isolated similar-class, similar-race bubbles.11 The working class and middle class aren’t just separated by whether they have a degree on parchment paper declaring that they completed college. They’re separated at almost every level of social and civic life. Our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches, our doctors’ offices, our restaurants, our day care, and our bars are all now more likely to be filled with people just like us. And unlike in earlier generations, when class lines were more porous, today people largely marry within their own social and economic class and have children who do likewise. These class and racial cocoons are problematic, because they mean that the cultural makers, news shapers, and political agenda-setters are increasingly isolated, as well as protected, from the hardscrabble reality of the working class. Without any friends, neighbors, or relatives who punch a clock, they have fewer opportunities for authentic relationships with someone outside their social class.
Today most middle- and upper-class Americans’ knowledge about working-class life comes through commercial transactions. In his widely circulated American Scholar article “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” William Deresiewicz recalls the day he realized “there might be a few holes in my education.” He had called a plumber to fix some leaky pipes, and when the man was standing there in his kitchen, he recalls, “I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness.”
As the more affluent among us become further cocooned in their neighborhoods, their colleges, and their workplaces, neither real life nor pop culture provides much of a window into the lives of working-class people. It’s been decades since there was a hit television show about a working-class family, one that actually didn’t shy away from story lines about layoffs, overdue bills, and just trying to make ends meet. Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997, is typically held up as the last network show with working-class story lines and lead characters. In the 1970s, when the social distance between Americans was much closer, many of the hit shows revolved around working-class families, schools, and friendships: One Day at a Time; Welcome Back, Kotter; Laverne & Shirley; Good Times; Alice; All in the Family; and What’s Happening, to name a few of the better-known shows. Why the vacuum today? One explanation could be that back in the 1970s, the writers and producers were probably much more likely to have families—either immediate or extended—who were working-class and could write authentic characters and story lines. Today, in contrast, a generation of screenwriters and producers bring us the very well-heeled in Modern Family, the bourgeoisie in Parenthood, and the urbane in 30 Rock. The working class can easily get a glimpse of the affluent life by turning on the television—visibility that isn’t reciprocated.
When I was growing up, I had friends whose parents were college-educated professionals and I had friends whose fathers worked at the same steel factory as mine. I lived on a block with accountants, advertising executives, teachers, factory workers, and nurses. In college, of my two closest friends, one was from a college-educated household and one wasn’t. When I waited on tables during college breaks and after graduating, I was friends with single moms who were raising their children on tips like the ones I was saving up to move to New York City to start a career. Once I got into the professional career pipeline, however, my friendships and networks, once a mishmash of classes, cocooned into homogeneity. My husband’s parents and his extended family are college-educated. The close friendships I’ve formed over the past twenty years are with people from well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class families. Most of my colleagues in the world of think tanks and progressive advocacy also hail from well-educated homes. As we raise our daughter in a mostly white and upper-middle-class enclave, her friendships mirror my cocoon. My own family keeps me grounded, and has given me a very up-close and personal look at the working class on a downward escalator over the past several decades. It’s a touchstone far too few of our power brokers have today, creating a blind spot that profoundly skews our cultural and political landscape.
The cocoon bias operates by making the working class invisible, but perhaps worse than invisibility is the hostility that far too many privileged people so easily indulge toward people who are struggling. There’s a noxious tradition of elites, whether public intellectuals or pundits, pathologizing people who toil for marginal wages, live in old, decaying neighborhoods, and all too frequently hit the official line designated as poverty.
Blaming people who struggle to get ahead for their predicament is something of an American tradition, one that stretches from the beginning of our nation to our current political debate. It’s important to remember that of all advanced nations, the United States has the highest percentage of workers earning low pay, defined as earning less than two-thirds of the median wage. In America that describes one out of four workers.12 As I discuss in Chapter 2, four out of ten households using food stamps have at least one adult working; the rest are children, the elderly, and disabled adults. Half of all front-line food workers and home care workers rely on food stamps to supplement their meager wages. As the Great Recession stripped millions of their livelihoods, the number of households using food stamps soared. As it should have: That’s the whole point of a safety net. But according to many Republicans in Congress, the use of food stamps demonstrates some sort of moral failing.13 The same philosophical strain also condemned unemployment benefits as a deterrent to finding a job, even when job-seekers outnumbered available jobs by a margin of four to one. Conservatives claim that people just aren’t trying hard enough, and that any benefits we provide as a society to ameliorate hardship provide a disincentive for people to work or get a better job. It’s fairly routine for Republicans to claim that any type of means-tested benefit is a one-way ticket to dependency and laziness. Conservative media channels like Fox News and its marquee talent, Bill O’Reilly, seem to take special pleasure in indicting the morals of people in hardship. Here’s just a sample of O’Reilly’s harangues against those whose struggle mightily to make it in America:
In 2004, he ranted, “You gotta look people in the eye and tell ’em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.”14
In 2012, O’Reilly listed what he called the “true causes of poverty” as “poor education, addiction, irresponsible behavior, and laziness.”15
In 2014, during the week that marked the fiftieth anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty, O’Reilly again said that “true poverty” “is being driven by personal behavior,” which included, according to him, “addictive behavior, laziness, apathy.”16
Why does what Bill O’Reilly thinks and communicates to his audience matter? Because his is the most viewed cable news show, regularly drawing in between 2 and 3 million viewers each night. And those viewers are hit over the head with a message that people who struggle to make ends meet are bottom-feeders, “takers” in Romney lingo, who lack the work ethic and will to pull themselves up. (Just as a refresher, Mitt Romney, running as the Republican candidate for president in 2012, threw 47 percent of Americans under the bus by describing them as people “who believe that they are victims…who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” Well, call me crazy, but I do believe that in a country as wealthy as ours, people are entitled to health care, housing, and food.) And just to set the record straight, 80 percent of people who are counted as poor are children, the elderly, the disabled, students, or the involuntarily unemployed.17
Fox News may be the go-to channel for pathologizing individuals who work hard but can’t get ahead, but the tendency to portray struggle as the result of personal failings extends far beyond the conservative media channel. Indeed, it is an analysis that enraptures many public intellectuals and academics. The inability of millions of people to get ahead—usually defined as meeting the norms and lifestyles of the white middle class—has far too often been blamed on an erosion of individual morals. This assignment of blame to the individual, as opposed to structures of exclusion created by the state, has a very long tradition in America, too long to cover here. So, with that in mind, let’s start with the most famous—or infamous, depending on your viewpoint—example of pathologizing struggle in the last half century: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” commonly known as the Moynihan Report.18
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who went on to become a U.S. senator, was an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor in 1965, when he issued his epic analysis, which assigned the breakdown of family structure as the chief obstacle to prosperity facing Negroes (the term used in the report). Keep in mind, this report was released on the heels of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, yet Moynihan focused on the breakdown of patriarchial families as the culprit holding African Americans back. In the introduction to the report, he made the case pithily and without reservation, commenting on the current economic status of African Americans: “A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post-war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.” Moynihan did rightly attribute the root causes of the problems confronting African American families to economic and structural factors: the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racist attitudes of many white Americans. Yet the collective takeaway from the report was that the urban black working class was culturally dysfunctional because of a pattern of matriarchy and single-parent households, and because these strong black women were raising children who were less educated and more delinquent than their white counterparts. It was pseudo-social science validating the common stereotypes about black people. In fact, one chapter in the report is actually entitled “The Tangle of Pathology.” Moynihan ended his report without providing solutions, other than to say that it would take a coordinated and multipronged set of strategies to address the fundamental problem facing black communities: a breakdown in family structure.
Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world. The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right. In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families. After that, how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business.
Fifty years after the publication of his report, Moynihan’s analysis is still the subject of much controversy and public debate. To be fair, the report was written as an internal memorandum, but it swiftly got leaked to the press. Had Moynihan written the report for public consumption, it’s likely he would have used less incendiary language. And apparently his motivation was a good one: He hoped to get the government to start a substantial public jobs program, using the “crisis” in black families as the rationale.19 But for reasons we can’t know, he did not explicitly call for any such plan, and in fact simply left the reader with the impression that all efforts to help achieve true equality were doomed unless black families got their act together. That meant forming two-parent families where the man was in charge. Whether fairly or not, Moynihan’s report is viewed by many as blaming the victim, and it’s hard not to get that impression from a straight reading. The report validated the strongly held belief of conservative readers that poverty is caused by a pathological culture, and government programs like welfare and food stamps do nothing but add another pathology to the tangle: dependency. Because Moynihan was a liberal and a Democrat, his report mainstreamed the idea that cultural breakdown causes poverty.
Our social, cultural, and economic norms have long been set by the white upper-middle class, with any failure to conform to those norms seen as deviant. In 2014, Charles Murray, well known for his infamous book The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks were genetically intellectually inferior to whites, broadened Moynihan’s analysis to the white working class. In Coming Apart, Murray bemoans a white working class that has seemingly lost the hunger to work and is now engaging in all manner of activities similar to those of the “black underclass”: illegitimacy, crime, and drug use. Political scientist Robert Putnam also explored the disparities in familial upbringing between college-educated and non-college-educated households in his most recent book, Our Kids. While Putnam’s book lacks the judgmental bromides of Murray’s, it nonetheless paints a picture of a working class that is mired in drug abuse, teen pregnancy, abusive marriages, and absent parents. David Brooks, the moralizing columnist at the New York Times, devoted one of his columns to the lessons we must take from Putnam’s book. Writing in his typical condescending manner, he asserted, “It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.”20
The notion that poverty, which is a frequent way station for many in the working class, is the result of bad character traits—whether it’s unwed mothers, drug addiction, or criminal behavior—is a solidly held belief in America, particularly, as we’ve just seen, among the elites and especially when the conversation is about people of color. We remain deeply suspicious of individuals who need any type of public assistance, harboring doubts about whether they’ve really done all they could do to get a better job. Maybe they just want to sit around and get high instead of going to work. And so why not force people applying for public benefits to take a drug test? Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a former 2016 presidential candidate, has proposed testing people who apply for food stamps and unemployment benefits for drug use, joining twelve other states that have attached drug testing to at least some part of their public benefits programs.21 Some people who are reading this book may agree, finding themselves nodding their heads and thinking, “Sure, I don’t want my tax dollars going to drug addicts scamming the system.” But here’s the thing. We don’t require drug testing for public benefits that accrue to more affluent people, like the mortgage interest tax deduction. We don’t drug-test the real estate developers before handing over large tax abatements. We don’t drug-test middle-class parents who claim the child-care tax credit. And it defies the imagination that anyone would ever propose such a policy. Why? Because there’s an implicit assumption that all these individuals, by virtue of their middle-class or higher status, adhere to social norms and therefore have earned the right to such benefits. They obviously took hold of their bootstraps and climbed the ladder of opportunity and are now unassailably entitled to the good life.
The idea that anyone, no matter the circumstances in which they are born, can move up the class ladder is a bedrock principle in America. It was part of our founding ideology, conceived in direct contradiction to the rigid class hierarchy of Mother England. But there’s a competing value to the individualistic ethos that if we work hard enough, the world can be our oyster. And that’s egalitarianism, a very American belief in equal opportunity and the right to a level playing field. Of course there is a tension inherent in the core American values of individualism and egalitarianism. The extension of the logic that individual effort is responsible for each person’s success is that the failure to get ahead is rooted in a lack of individual effort rather than in structural constraints. Hello, drug tests. However, Americans also place great importance on equal opportunity, recognizing that giving everyone an equal chance to succeed is fundamental to the American dream. An extension of this logic is that individual failures are indicative of broader inequalities and differences in opportunity. Decades of opinion research confirm that Americans change their minds about whether individuals are to blame or circumstances are, and the way these issues are covered by the media can influence how people view the failure to become middle-class.22
As we learned in Chapter 3, affluent Americans tend to exhibit little sympathy for the struggling masses, with two-thirds of our most financially secure citizens believing that poor people today “have it easy” because they can get benefits without having to do anything in return. They clearly missed the giant “ending welfare as we know it” reform law that was passed in 1996, which now keeps enrollment rates in public assistance very low, even during the Great Recession, when millions of working-class people lost their jobs.
So what about those drug tests for public benefits? Are they finding high rates of drug use among welfare applicants? In all but one state, the rate of drug use among applicants was found to be lower than 1 percent—much lower than the illegal-drug-use rate among all Americans, which is 9 percent.23
As we have seen, people of color will soon make up the majority of the new working class, a fact that creates an additional burden in reclaiming the economic and political power of the old blue-collar white working class. This working class starts from a place of larger institutional and structural disadvantage—lower pay, fewer benefits, decimated unions, and a very strong neoliberal orthodoxy that eschews government regulation and investment. But perhaps the greatest obstacle is the persistence of racial anxiety and animosity, along with a renewed xenophobia coinciding with the rise of Latino immigrants, both legal and undocumented.
Americans can be some of the most generous people in the world, measured by the percentage who give money, help a stranger, and volunteer in the community. When there’s a natural disaster in the world, Americans in great numbers give quickly. By some measures we’re the most giving country in the world.24 I live in New York City, a place many associate with brusqueness and detachment. But that’s just the reality of living in a city packed with 8 million people. When it really counts, New Yorkers can barn-raise with the best of them. Yet our nation’s public spirit—the collective support we provide to everyone in the country—is decidedly miserly. If we are ever going to improve the quality of life for broad swaths of Americans by reinvesting in our common good—our state universities, child care, a humane safety net—we will need to address the legacy of our violent racial history.
If you had asked me eight years ago which identity had a more profound effect on someone’s life in America, race or class, I likely would have said class. But after living through the reactionary and, yes, racial backlash to the first African American president, and after months of research for this book, I realize that the legacy of our racial hierarchy remains central to explaining the halting of American progress and the degradation of life for the working class. For readers who have been with me up until this point, I understand that this admission, and the analysis that follows, will have to cut through an instinctive and very strong shield that is erected immediately when someone mentions race. Want to clear a room at a party? Just start a conversation about race. White people tend to get defensive, offer vague regret about the state of affairs, or dismiss the claim that what is happening has anything to do with race. “I didn’t have anything to do with slavery or Jim Crow.” “Why can’t they just let it go and move on?” “Sure, black lives matter—all lives matter.”
Unlike in eras past, today’s racism is covert, for the most part. Long gone are the days of “whites only” drinking fountains and casual and frequent use of derogatory language to refer to blacks and Latinos. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains in his book Racism Without Racists, today’s racism is structurally based and less about individual prejudice. But white Americans remain stuck in an outdated definition of racism. Bonilla-Silva writes, “One reason why, in general terms, whites and people of color cannot agree on racial matters is because they conceive terms such as ‘racism’ very differently. Whereas for most whites racism is prejudice, for most people of color, racism is systemic or institutionalized.”25
Today’s Sleeping Giant is disproportionately people of color. Many whites have escaped the working class through generations of seemingly color-blind policies and practices that provided overwhelming opportunities to white men and eventually to white women. Consider the G.I. Bill. While color-blind in its approach, it was administered locally and by states, with congressional oversight. As a result, black men were excluded from the benefits of this seemingly color-blind, universal program because of segregated colleges, redlining that disqualified them for federal mortgage benefits, and an overall racist bias against them.26 All told, the United States spent more on higher education benefits for veterans than we did on the Marshall Plan.27 Historian Ira Katznelson refers to the G.I. Bill as an affirmative-action program for white men. As the civil rights era produced landmark legislation outlawing discrimination, our government took similar steps to advance higher education to all Americans with the Higher Education Act of 1965, which established federal grants and loans to ensure that no one would be barred from going to college owing to cost. Almost immediately the percentage of students from low-income families going to college doubled.28 And then, just as happened with the opening of employment and housing opportunities for people of color, states across the country began to systematically disinvest in higher education. States like California and New York, which had long made college free to in-state residents, pulled back on these programs once black students and Latinos gained access. In fact, whites in California revolted strongly against the expansion of public goods—more precisely, the racial and ethnic composition of those who had access to these public goods—in 1978, by severely curtailing revenue to pay for these goods through Proposition 13, which froze property taxes at current home values and required a two-thirds majority vote in each chamber of the legislature for any new tax increases. As the Latino population increased significantly in Colorado, its white residents fought back by passing a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) in 1992, which similarly constrained the legislature from raising tax revenues to meet public needs. Under TABOR, state and local governments cannot raise tax rates without voter approval, and if revenues grow faster than the rate of inflation, those revenues must be returned to the taxpayers.
These tax revolts were highly racialized: prompted by a perception among white residents that “others” were getting all the benefits and bankrupting the state in the process. Let’s remember, as discussed in Chapter 3, that part of the southern strategy all along included eventually curtailing tax revenue as a way to “starve the beast” of government, by painting a vivid picture of people of color drinking from the public trough. But these revolts didn’t just harm people of color, they harmed the middle class and the working class of all races and ethnic backgrounds.
The politics of austerity is also fundamentally motivated, even subconsciously, by the desire to end access to important benefits like college grants, food stamps, and child-care subsidies, all programs disproportionately needed by working-class Americans of all races and ethnicities. Congressman Paul Ryan’s conception of the safety net as a hammock that lulls people into complacency is dog-whistle racism in its highest form. Without mentioning race, Ryan cleverly racializes the need to cut government spending by drawing attention to the abuse of means-tested programs, which most white Americans immediately understand (wrongly) to be used primarily by people of color.
In addition to cutting off access to vitally needed safety-net programs, austerity results in major losses of public-sector jobs. Historically the public sector has had more stringent equal opportunity and civil rights protections than the private sector, providing a haven of employment for people of color in an otherwise segregated private marketplace. As a result, black Americans and women are overrepresented in public-sector jobs, which also provide closer pay parity with white men than private-sector jobs.29 The Great Recession prompted major cuts to both state and federal spending, resulting in half a million fewer public-sector jobs than before the recession.30 The racial undercurrent is also present in the attacks on the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions. In Wisconsin and Michigan, Republican governors exempted the police and firefighter unions from these attacks and restrictions—and their members are overwhelmingly white and male.31
As detailed in the last chapter, the reach of America’s racial history is long. Indeed, it is very much still our present reality. In comparing the generous social spending of Western European countries to the miserly spending in the United States, two economists found that the racially diverse composition in the United States explains half of the gap in social spending.32 The other half was due in large part to the presence of more left-wing political parties in Europe. At the state level, in states where the population of blacks is higher, welfare payments are less generous. Similarly, whites are more supportive of redistribution if they live close to poor whites but less supportive if they live close to poor blacks.33
Outright and blatant prejudice is no longer the operating principle of white supremacy in America. Today racism often seems to exist without the smoking gun of someone spewing racial epithets. But racist thinking and racist institutions and structures abound. While officially color-blind, our institutions and structures continue to deliver racially biased results. Consider that even though blacks, whites, and Latinos use drugs at similar rates, black Americans, and to a lesser extent Latinos, are much more likely to be arrested and sent to jail for drug violations. Consider that Latino and black homeowners were much more likely to be sold subprime mortgages during the housing bubble, even if they qualified for prime mortgages, than were white homeowners. Consider that today blacks and Latinos experience discrimination in approximately half their efforts to rent or buy housing. Consider that white women leaving welfare were more likely to be hired than black women, and were paid more to boot.34
As long as white Americans continue to insist that we are living in a postracial society, we will never truly overcome our racial past. As long as access to public goods is viewed as taking from whites to give to all the “others” in our society, we will fail to achieve greatness and continue the long slide of lower educational attainment, dilapidated infrastructure, and bargain-basement jobs that increasingly make the United States a laggard rather than a leader among advanced nations. Our present and future will continue to be constrained by insufficient public goods, a threadbare safety net, a complete lack of family-friendly policies like child care and paid family leave—all of which have shattered working-class and middle-class security and increased the population of struggling Americans.
There is hope. Working-class Americans are beginning to fight back. The Sleeping Giant is stirring. Whether we listen or act remains to be seen.