Introduction

If America bottomed out politically in May 1970, it did so again in August 2011, and that time it took me with it. I couldn’t see that political light was only a month down the tunnel. All summer long, on Salon and on television, I had to cover the grim hostage crisis known as the debt-ceiling battle, as Republican extremists—purporting to ride a wave of white middle- and working-class anger—threatened to destroy the world’s economy unless President Obama slashed federal spending. When the besieged president finally gave in, a ratings agency downgraded U.S. credit anyway, because the fight exposed the country’s broken politics. The president was still learning the hard way that placating extremists only leads to more extremism. Still, I tried to keep my deep pessimism—about Barack Obama’s presidency, about our country, about our politics—to myself. As a journalist and a lifelong Democrat, I’m an optimist; I’ve had to be. This, too, would pass. How long could people badly hurt by the recession continue to support policies that would make things worse? Not forever, right?

I hit my political bottom, oddly, on HBO’s anything-goes politics show Real Time with Bill Maher. I was having fun until Maher asked me whether Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice for liberals in the 2008 Democratic primary, given the president’s struggles. My brain short-circuited; I went mute. I don’t think anyone noticed; the brilliant and hilarious astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson stepped in to save me, answering a resounding Yes. “I think she would have been,” he told Maher, contending that Clinton would be “a more effective negotiator in the halls of Congress.” It turned out to be great television and great politics: the African American scientist backed the white lady Democrat when the white lady pundit would not.

Yet I was left puzzling over how I wound up speechless on a talk show. It wasn’t “buyers’ remorse” over Obama, as Maher framed it. I’d supported Clinton in the bitter 2008 primaries, but I knew the country’s mess was too spectacular to clean up by trading one Democrat for another. Besides, I’d proudly backed Obama in the general election, defending him in the pages of Salon and on TV, too. On Election Day, almost 70 million Americans voted with me, as the African American Democrat won the largest share of the popular vote of any nonincumbent president or vice president since General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. It was what had happened since then—the stunning, racially tinged anti-Obama backlash that thwarted desperately needed economic reform, restored Republicans to Congress, and forced beleaguered Democrats to accept GOP definitions of what was politically possible—that had me tongue-tied, with no ready answers.

I had to admit that Democratic infighting over the president’s troubles had thrown me back to that fractious 2008 primary, when identity politics paralyzed the party for a while, to the exclusion of what should have been urgent questions about class and inequality. In some precincts of the left, if you backed Clinton, you weren’t just wrong; you were racist. If you backed Obama, you faced the charge of sexism, of cruelly ignoring a track record of political success just because it wore pumps and pastel pants suits. Some Obama supporters dismissed Clinton’s white working-class support as a Hard Hat Riot at the ballot box, bashing the dream of a black president. The late Geraldine Ferraro embarrassed herself by attributing Obama’s success to his race (and maleness) and blaming Clinton’s woes on her gender. It was a great relief for me, personally and politically, when the nation moved on from primary-season infighting, and we elected our first black president.

Yet as his presidency hit hard times, I discovered a vexing Obama paradox: Electing our first black president provoked a genuine and appalling racial backlash—but not all of Obama’s troubles could be blamed on a resurgence of racism. And parsing out what was real prejudice and what was valid political disagreement wasn’t always easy. Obama certainly made political mistakes, and the sputtering economy magnified their importance and frustrated even some ardent supporters. The backlash was giving me whiplash: one day I’d be on TV blasting the racist fringe of the Tea Party, whose most extreme supporters depicted our dignified president as an African witch doctor, a watermelon-eating simpleton, a character from Planet of the Apes, and, on its “birther” extreme, as a Kenyan Muslim who was ineligible to be president. But the next day I’d critique the president’s cautious, conciliating moves as the economy worsened and Republicans doubled down on their opposition to him—only to find myself called a racist, or more gently, someone who couldn’t acknowledge the leadership of our first black president.

In the New York Times, author Ishmael Reed compared Obama’s white critics to spoiled children. “Unlike white progressives,” Reed intoned, “blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout.” Nine months later, in the Nation, scholar Melissa Harris-Perry asked whether Obama’s white liberal critics were exhibiting “an insidious form of racism” because they held him to a higher standard, she believed, than they did President Bill Clinton.

Were progressives being unfair to the first black president? Was I? Or were we all falling victim to the same kind of dead-end infighting that had split the forces of social justice since the sixties and the seventies? Could it possibly be that the Republicans had again dug the Democrats a political grave, then watched in amusement as they eagerly pushed their own allies into it? I began to believe that the long American decline that began in the 1970s could be traced back to just these kinds of battles among people who ought to be partners. Suddenly, at the nadir of that dismal summer of 2011, I was doubting myself, pulling my punches, biting my tongue.

After a lifetime on the fractious American left, I felt stranded on the sidelines without a side: a civil rights integrationist stuck in a world of narrow boxes; a working-class Irish Catholic San Franciscan jousting with Beltway and Ivy League elites; an American who loves my country fighting charges that I’m un-American from an increasingly vicious right. One party, my own, had lost its spine; the other lost its mind. I knew that change lay in a broader definition of common ground, and I saw hope in the rising realization that “We are the 99 percent.”

Yet if we are the 99 percent, why do we so often fail to get a majority of the country to listen to us?

• • •

I had the broad outlines of an answer, as others had put much of the evidence together before me. I’d seen it over and over. Democrats do best when they can unite around a vision of economic improvement for everybody; they get derailed when Republicans toss culture war grenades or play on race. Then Democrats attack one another, and the party’s agenda gets framed in a way that makes a lot of people—particularly white middle- and working-class men—protective of their shrinking resources and diminishing status. Democrats lose the public opinion battle, and their chance to make things better; the GOP comes in, protecting the interests of the top 1 percent, and makes everything worse for the rest of us. With the bark of a demagogue into a microphone, whether it’s Father Charles Coughlin in my grand-parents’ day or Rush Limbaugh in mine, the class war is turned into a culture war, burning ever hotter, all heat, no light.

And yet, first in the Obama coalition and then in the Occupy Wall Street eruption, I saw a national yearning to create a new social compact based on more broadly shared opportunity and prosperity. A hallmark of American exceptionalism—that each generation does better than the next, that social class isn’t a barrier to climbing here—had ceased to be true: Most countries in “Old Europe,” where opportunity was supposedly strangled by a sclerotic class system and a big welfare state, now offered their citizens a greater chance to climb economically than the United States did. The top 1 percent of Americans, who received 9 percent of the income in the mid-’70s, got a quarter of it in 2007; they own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Economic inequality is worse than it’s been since the eve of the Great Depression. Finally, though, more Americans seemed to realize that the 1 percent were able to grab all of the economic rewards of the past thirty years at least partly because the 99 percent were fighting among themselves.

The 2012 Republican presidential primary helped raise the issue even higher. Mitt Romney, the presumptive nominee, looked like the poster child for the top 1 percent, a cross between Richie Rich and Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. When Romney released 2010 tax returns showing that while he made $21 million off investments, he only paid a 13.9 percent tax rate—a lower rate than middle-class workers—he offered the nation a crash course in our plutocratic tax policy. Unfortunately, some of the politicians who’d worked hardest to protect Romney’s low investment tax rate were Democrats, a complication that hinders the party’s attempt to channel the interests of the 99 percent.

Even some of the white working class, the group Ronald Reagan had turned into Reagan Democrats by railing against “welfare queens” everyone knew were black, seemed to be waking up. Right-wing author Charles Murray, who in the 1980s blamed government for encouraging sloth and single parenthood in the black community, published a best seller that said the same thing about the white “lower class”: they were suffering from declining wages and higher unemployment not because of a changed economy, but because they had come to prefer slacking and shacking up to hard work and marriage.

Suddenly, when today’s Republicans attacked moochers, slackers, and welfare queens, they included some working-class whites—cops and nurses, firefighters and teachers, the public employees who formed the backbone of what grew into the American middle class. When Sandra Fluke, a young white law student, defended President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies provide contraception cost-free, Rush Limbaugh attacked her in obscene, misogynistic terms; more genteel right-wingers called her a “welfare queen” for demanding taxpayer-funded contraception. As people took to the streets from Madison, Wisconsin, to Wall Street to Davis, California, a new spirit of political courage and curiosity spread.

Republicans tried to demonize the protests, to scare Middle America, all to make us forget that, like it or not, social change requires agitation—or in Frederick Douglass’s words, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The New Deal wasn’t handed to us; it took decades of fighting, including strikes and civil disobedience, to get government’s and business’s attention. The civil rights movement likewise involved strife and turmoil and jail time for its leaders. I was thrilled to see the new activism. Maybe we were finally realizing we’re all in this together.

Maybe.

But the old ways take time to be unlearned. Though the Occupy movement transformed the political debate, emblazoning the issue of income inequality high on the national agenda, many of its local satellites fell back into ’60s style infighting—over property destruction and violence, relations with police, and race and gender. Too many Democrats judged the new activism only on the grounds of whether it was good or bad for President Obama and the party’s congressional leadership. Republicans did what Republicans do: they revived the culture wars, crusading, rather unbelievably, against contraception; questioning the work ethic of poor people (even suggesting that poor kids work as school janitors); labeling Spanish a “ghetto language.”

Yet, in a daring new flourish, some Republicans joined Charles Murray in attacking the morality of the white working class, which apparently, according to Republicans, had begun to share the lamentable attitudes toward work and family once associated with “welfare queens,” a variety of political scapegoat that used to only come in black. What is the matter with white people, indeed?

Sometimes I found myself hopeful: Maybe the white working class would realize that the GOP was talking about them now, while hoping they’d only notice the nasty things they said about the other guys. At other times, we seemed condemned to relive those battles of the ’60s and ’70s, battles that weren’t dead; in Faulkner’s words, they weren’t even past.

And occasionally, I confess, I found myself thinking, Maybe the problem is me. Maybe I’m stuck on what happened forty years ago. Maybe I’m the one with a faulty understanding of left and right, black and white, the cleavages of race and class, why this country comes together, and why, more often, it comes apart. Over the past four years I’ve spent a lot of time searching my personal history, my family history, and American history to understand how I got here. I particularly wanted to understand the divisive clash between race and class, a destructive wedge often manufactured, or at least encouraged, by politicians, and one that I once believed I had a rare capacity to identify and deflect. Now I felt like the wedge was coming right at me.

I had to start by examining the lessons I learned in my family, most of them handed down to me by my father, an Irish Catholic liberal dreamer. The son of poor Irish immigrants, born in the Bronx, New York, on the eve of the Great Depression, he was the person who taught me that you could trace the decline of the Democratic Party and of the movement for economic inclusion and fairness to the brutal tensions that surfaced in the strange Hard Hat Riot that split his family but that nobody my age even knew about.

• • •

My father set me on an eccentric political path early, back before kindergarten, with a fractured Irish fairytale. Against the galvanizing moral backdrop of the civil rights movement, which my parents supported fervently, my father confided that dark-haired Irish such as he and I—my mother was a pretty redhead, my little brother had blond curls—were called “black Irish,” and it wasn’t just because of our chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Some people thought the black Irish were offspring of Spaniards and Moors mixing with fair-skinned Celts many centuries ago, he told me. Who knew but if many generations back, we might have black ancestry, too?

It was a perfect fable for 1963, and it worked. A driven little Catholic girl—I wanted to be a nun, then a missionary, then a saint—I shared my parents’ belief that the civil rights movement was the moral issue of our time, good versus evil, played out literally in black and white. In my father’s version of history, black people were just the latest group of Americans to struggle for rights and freedom. Our people, the Irish, had also faced cruel prejudice and endured their own share of suffering. For my parents and all of our Irish Catholic relatives, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 proved that we’d left steerage, although status anxiety persisted throughout my childhood, as we fought not to seem “shanty Irish” on Long Island. President Kennedy, my dad explained, was working hard to bring black people into the Promised Land of full citizenship in America, where we had only recently arrived. (Yes, as I learned very early, he exaggerated Kennedy’s civil rights exertions a bit.)

The most unique aspect of my father’s political worldview, though, was that his civil rights passion coexisted with a deep commitment to the rights of working-class people: cops and firefighters, steamfitters and utility workers, men like his father, brothers, and brothers-in-law; women like my grandmother and her sisters, all of whom had to work back when women supposedly didn’t. Sadly, we lived in a time and a place where those two sets of values were dangerously colliding, when those who cared passionately about the lasting injustice of racism had trouble relating to the fears and struggles of the increasingly alienated and often manipulated white working class, and vice versa. Historian Rick Perlstein labeled that era “Nixonland,” a time when divided Americans began to believe not merely that the other side was wrong, but that they couldn’t share the same country, a besieged state of mind encouraged by our thirty-seventh president. I grew up in Nixonland, with family on both sides of the divide. It forged my political identity—and led to my midlife political identity crisis.

The Obama campaign wasn’t the first time I realized I didn’t live in my father’s dream world. On the left as I grew up, identity politics had far more energy than did economic populism, on almost every front. The troubles of the white working class got blamed on the white working class itself, which did in fact let racism and fear drive its political decisions too often. For a while, my father’s comparing the sufferings of Irish Catholic immigrants to the black experience seemed naïve, maybe even racist, a way to dodge the much greater injustice, and perhaps the guilt, of slavery. Besides, colleagues on the left insisted that the Irish weren’t freedom fighters; they were reactionaries. I can’t count the times people recommended to me the shrill “whiteness studies” tome How the Irish Became White (the Spark Notes version: by kicking black people every chance they got). New lefty scholars declared my people the uniquely racist enforcers of white supremacy.

I watched one area of common ground emerge on the left: more and more observers seemed to believe that so-called people of color—a bewildering expression linking folks as disparate as African American investment bankers, Cuban teachers, Laotian refugees, Caribbean entrepreneurs, Salvadoran doctors, Chinese cops, and fourth-generation Mexican real estate moguls—shared more interests with one another than with any white Americans. That magical thinking became the operating assumption of many of my left-wing allies. I saw it in the Obama movement, when his backers dismissed Clinton’s white working-class supporters as racist and insisted their candidate could win without them. I disagreed. “What’s the matter with white people?” I found myself asking—in a different way—as in, “Aren’t we part of your multiracial future, too?”

The loneliness of my position hit me hard one day as I debated the emerging Tea Party with Pat Buchanan, a fellow Irish Catholic and one of Nixon’s henchmen, on Hardball. When I noted the prominence of birthers within the Tea Party, the wily Buchanan quickly dragged me into Nixonland. “Do you know why you lose these people?” he asked, his voice rising. “Because you show contempt for them! You call them birthers. You call them names. All they want, Joan, is respect. And you liberals never give it to them. No wonder they go over to the Republican Party!”

Ouch. I partly agreed with Buchanan. Lefty scorn for the working class helped push it right; I knew from experience that my team threw around the term racist too easily. No matter what kinds of coalitions the Democrats can assemble to win an election, it will be harder for them to restore America’s economic potential without the support of the white middle and working class.

Not a minute later, however, Buchanan approvingly compared the Tea Party to the supporters of George Wallace—the segregationist Alabama governor who drew blue-collar whites in two presidential runs with an anti-integration appeal—whom Buchanan helped win over for Nixon in 1972. So he could link the Tea Party to that earlier white backlash, but I couldn’t suggest there was a racial tinge to their Obama-hate?

The other irony was Buchanan labeling me an elitist who had “contempt” for the common people, when in fact I came from those people, and he did not. The son of a prosperous accountant, Buchanan went to Georgetown and Columbia University. My father was raised by poor Irish immigrants, who sent him away to a Christian Brothers boarding school at age thirteen; I went to the great land-grant college the University of Wisconsin. But I’m the elitist snob and he’s the man of the people? I pushed back. “Pat, that’s unfair,” I told him. “I’m a working-class Irish Catholic. I don’t like the demonization of the president.” I wasn’t going to let Buchanan pit me against my people, any of them: black people or the Irish. Buchanan and his allies had widened these divides for way too long.

• • •

When I began researching this book, I knew I wanted to write about the sixties and the seventies, with a particular focus on why Americans have let our nation decline in almost every measurable way since then—and sometimes even cheered on those who engineered that decline. I wanted to tell it the way I saw it growing up, watching many of my working-class Irish relatives forsake the Democrats, a party they saw as forsaking them. Yet my family’s story, and that of the Democratic Party, turned out to be more complicated. I thought I could look back to an earlier time of unity and surface lessons for the present, but there was no such time. So I had to go farther back in history than I’d anticipated.

First, I had to explore the black-Irish conflict that my father so ingeniously resolved for me with his fairytale of fusion. In fact, the African American–Irish Catholic divide is one of the fundamental fractures at the core of the Democratic Party and American politics today, and understanding it can illuminate the way the politics of race can so often clash with the politics of class. This is the gap I’ve been trying to bridge throughout my political and personal life, to make my father’s fairytale real, with little success. I once blamed the conflict solely on wealthy capitalists and their politician-servants such as Nixon and Buchanan, pitting two groups at the bottom against each other. In this book, however, I explore the role played by my side—the forces of social justice, the liberal reformers and do-gooders—as well.

I also had to look more closely at my extended family, how they climbed out of poverty into the working and then middle class. From what did they benefit, and what were the costs? We were lucky, all of us, and yet the climb involved fracture and loss. Growing up in Nixonland, I had a father who stayed the course of civil rights liberalism, and a mother who had the same values but who reacted to the chaos of the era with fear and who drifted back to the law-and-order security of the past. I saw the New York of liberal Republican John Lindsay become the city of conservative Democrat Ed Koch, all before I turned twenty, as bitter battles over race, education, unions, cops, and crime shattered the city that had been a laboratory of the New Deal.

Then I had to unpack my own baggage, accumulated by my coming to adulthood in the Reagan era, watching the society in which my family had risen be dismantled, with the support of many of my relatives and others like them. I’d been raised to change the world, but the great movements of the sixties had either self-destructed or morphed dutifully into do-goodism, which I quickly joined. I found meaning in a new generation of antipoverty work, but I learned that my black-and-white civil rights paradigm didn’t quite fit the multiracial California in which I was raising my Irish-Jewish daughter.

Finally, I had to go back to the most painful political experience in my recent life: the 2008 election and its aftermath, when clashes over race and class once again marred what should have been a renewal of the Democratic Party. When I first came out of the “closet,” so to speak, as a working-class Irish Catholic (and as a white person, too, I suppose), it was to challenge the Pat Buchanans of the world. Then I realized I was also challenging a multiracial world of liberal political elites in which “white working class” is either a political anachronism or worse, code for a wide swatch of voters viewed as unreachable, too stupid or racist to know they should be voting for Democratic politicians (who often ignore or condescend to them). And yet despite our crucial and admirable focus on eradicating racism, only a slightly smaller proportion of African Americans live in poverty than when Dr. King tried to launch a Poor People’s Campaign. It’s not that our necessary effort to fight racism and discrimination led to that outcome, but it certainly didn’t prevent it. We took our eye off the prize of economic inclusion, for everyone; we left the poor, disproportionately African American though still a majority white, to fend for themselves.

When I began this book, I thought the fracture at the heart of the American experiment was disturbing, but paradoxically, I came to find it liberating. Even some liberals believe that we used to be one big happy European-immigrant family, one white nation, indivisible, and that it was only when we began to try to reckon with racial difference and injustice that things fell apart. That isn’t true: we’ve always struggled to live up to our country’s founding ideals, particularly the notion of e pluribus unum. We scapegoated many generations of white immigrants, as well as the white poor. We have never lived up to our grand promises—but there’s still time.

I don’t say any of that to deny that racial discrimination has been more persistent and debilitating, especially to African Americans, than the prejudice faced by any white immigrant group, including Irish Catholics. Still, when we insist that our current struggle can’t be placed on a continuum with America’s long history of exclusion and injustice, and then a reckoning to right those wrongs; when we suggest that there’s something uniquely troublesome about building a strong, united, multiracial America, maybe even impossible—Pat Buchanan wins. That’s what he thinks.

That’s not what I think. That’s not what most of us believe—not even white people. As the right wing gives up on America because it’s changed beyond their recognition, we’re the ones who can make the American Dream real, for everyone this time.