THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504010175
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 227 lines
Both political parties say they're anxious to do something for the middle class - rather than to it, for a change. Tax cuts are the most frequently mentioned panacea, but cuts big enough to make much difference may not be in the cards. There are no easy answers, but the problem is real enough. The middle class is in trouble.
For at least 20 years, the middle class has been under increasing stress, and lately it has begun to fragment. According to research at the University of Michigan by Greg Duncan, some members of the middle class have been moving up to greater prosperity and security. But, according to Duncan, in the '80s and early '90s ``there was more movement down and out of the lower middle class.'' A lot of families, despite their best efforts, became downwardly mobile.
This is alarming because the middle class has always been the great bulwark against extremism, a source of social and political stability. It is the solid center needed in any society trying to maintain democratic capitalism.
The middle class is often defined as the bulge in the bell curve of income distribution. The 60 percent in the middle now earns between $17,000 and $64,000 a year. They hold jobs, raise kids, pay the bulk of the country's taxes and depend on a paycheck (or two) to do it. Their dream of the good life has been synonymous with the American Dream - a few bucks in the bank, a home of their own, consumer goods and a decent education leading to a better future for the kids.
All of that now seems imperiled. By 1989, a family with median income couldn't afford a median-priced home. Even with two wage-earners, many families find it tough to get ahead, or stay even. A high school diploma is no longer a ticket to high wages, and increasingly unaffordable college degrees are no guarantee of entree to the white-collar world. Affordable health care is an increasing concern.
Anger at the political system runs high. It is seen as having offered no help, but having imposed burdens - including high taxes to pay welfare recipients not to work. More than an election or two could be at stake if the middle class continues to fray around the edges. THE ANXIOUS CLASS
In proposing tax relief, help with job retraining and affordable higher education, Labor Secretary Robert Reich said the middle class had become the ``anxious class'' - worried not just about the future but the present.
Actually, the middle class has always been characterized by anxiety, because getting in isn't easy and staying in is even harder. The middle class is precarious territory. Even in the 1950s, when the middle class was expanding, sociologist C. Wright Mills said the characteristic affliction of the middle class was status panic.
Paul Fussell, in his acerbic book ``Class,'' characterizes members of the middle class as timid, conventional, passive, terrified of losing their jobs and oddly rootless. ``The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income.''
In her book about an embattled middle class, ``Fear of Falling,'' commentator Barbara Ehrenreich identifies one source of the anxiety. The middle class - unlike the monied elite - has no capital other than knowledge and skill. ``And unlike real capital, these cannot be hoarded against hard times, preserved beyond the lifetime of the individual or, of course, bequeathed.''
That means each individual must struggle to gain entry to the middle class. The children of a middle manager have no assurance of a similar place in suburbia unless they earn it by acquiring their own skills and knowledge. For that reason, the middle class places a tremendous premium on education and effort.
``If this is an elite,'' Ehrenreich says, ``then it is an insecure and deeply anxious one. It is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. But in the middle class there is another anxiety; a fear of inner weakness, of growing softness, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will.'' THE HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
Much of American history has been a struggle to create and maintain a middle-class nation. At the beginning, Ben Franklin praised America for its ``happy, general mediocrity,'' economically speaking. Jean de Crevecouer, an early-American booster writing in 1782, said America ``is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. . . The rich and poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.''
But keeping it that way has been a constant worry. Alexis de Tocqueville thought the industrial revolution could create a new class structure. He said ``the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world.'' He warned that ``friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.''
All through the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were conflicts between capital and labor, the farmers and the banks, Wall Street and Main Street. We tend to forget the recurring squeezes of the middle class because we have been living in a unique era - one that George Will has argued was a historical aberration now coming to an end. What we regard as decline may only be things returning to normal.
After World War II, we bestrode the world like a colossus. Left virtually without competitors, the strongest intact capitalist economy in the world and a military superpower, the United States entered a 30-year period of unprecedented prosperity. The middle class grew astonishingly as a new managerial class was created, high industrial wages permitted working-class men and women to enter the middle class for the first time and the GI Bill sent a broader cross-section of the country to college.
It was the era of affluence, of consumer culture and of the suburbs. ``People may come out of the new suburbs' middle class,'' said William Whyte in ``The Organization Man.'' ``A great many who enter, however, are not.. . . This expansion of the lower limits of the middle class is happening in towns and cities as well, but it is so pronounced in the new suburbs that it almost seems as if they were made for that function.''
It was wonderful while it lasted, but the rest of the world caught up, repaired the damage of World War II and emulated us. Competition increased, and our standard of living began to decline, little by little. Since the 1970s, staying middle-class has been harder and harder. Rather than entering it in droves, Americans have begun to exit it.
Blue-collar workers were the first to feel the squeeze. According to Ehrenreich, they began to disappear ``from the middle range of comfort'' not only because of job loss but because of wage loss. And the white-collar world was not immune to erosion either. Of course, many white-collar workers aren't really well-paid members of the managerial class but glorified clericals who shuffle data, the blue-collar work of the information age.
But downsizing has also swept through the ranks of management. Numberless jobs once thought secure have vanished. Ehrenreich quotes economists who express the same worry as Tocqueville 150 years ago, ``that the middle class - defined simply as those with middling amounts of money - would disappear altogether, leaving America torn, like many third-world societies, between an affluent minority and an army of the desperately poor.''
Political analyst Kevin Phillips, in 1993's ``Boiling Point,'' believed it was already happening. ``Across broad swaths of charcoal-grill and lawnmower America.. . . Suburbia, now home for the first time to a majority of the national population, was exactly where the American Dream was increasingly at risk.''
According to Phillips, the economic losers already include several million highly paid unionized blue-collar production workers in manufacturing, withering farm areas, dying small towns, single young women and the children in their custody, middle managers and defense workers: ``all falling out of the middle class.'' WHO'S TO BLAME?
No wonder the middle class is angry and politically volatile. The result may well be a round of class warfare. White-collar workers may feel the squeeze, but will get no sympathy from even more pressured blue-collar workers. Ehrenreich reminds us that ``to the working class, the professional middle class is an elite. Money is only part of its perceived advantage. The other difference, which middle-class people have traditionally not liked to acknowledge, arises from the division of labor between the two classes.''
Though the two groups may have common interests in the present situation, they may find it impossible to forge a common cause. Racial and gender resentments may also increase. In America, white men who find it hard to earn a living have often blamed blacks, Hispanics and immigrants for their plight. It is happening again today with the demonizing of affirmative action and welfare recipients, and the passage in California of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187.
And now a new scapegoat class has been added: women. Like other newcomers to the work force, they are now being blamed for hardships actually caused by structural changes in the economy. In ``America Now,'' anthropologist Marvin Harris made the common-sense observation that ``woman's liberation did not create the working woman; rather the working woman - especially the working housewife - created women's liberation.''
Harris reminds us the ``married woman's initial motivation was to provide a supplement to the breadwinner-husband's income.'' Many entered the work force not out of choice but necessity. Ironically, the hardships and discrimination women often found when they entered the work force helped politicize them.
``By the early 1960s,'' Harris says, ``the baby-boom parents were finding it increasingly difficult to achieve or hold on to middle-class standards of consumption for themselves and their children and the wife's job had begun to play a crucial role in family finances.'' WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
The threat of falling out of the middle class will not be accepted passively. William Whyte warned a generation ago that ``suburbia does not condone shabby gentility. The amenities that a severe cutback in expenditures would put in jeopardy are not marginal. . . People in such situations say that in almost every case the prime fear is the fear of `going back.' ''
The opportunities for political mischief were not lost on Whyte. He said, ``if their fears were exploited, their discontent could become ugly indeed. If our economy has an Achilles' heel, this might be it.'' That is, the squeeze could lead to an explosion.
Indeed, maybe it already has. George Bush was summarily dismissed from office for not coming to the rescue of the middle class during a punishing recession. Bill Clinton has presided over an economic expansion, but many in the middle class are still getting squeezed. They rejected him and his party at the midterm to install Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. Their honeymoon could be as brief if they don't make good on their promise to put the middle class first. Populists like Ross Perot and more dangerous demagogues are waiting in the wings.
The Republican prescription is to pass tax cuts, to reduce federal spending and to make life harder for criminals, welfare recipients and immigrants, all of whom stressed-out middle-class and working-class people don't mind punishing. But it remains to be seen if the Republicans can enact their proposals. Even if they do, will the middle class be better off?
The ``Contract With America'' really doesn't address the economic discontents that are haunting middle America. Kevin Phillips thinks the Republicans are in danger of catering to an elite, not the middle. If they do, history may be about to repeat itself. Phillips reminds us that ``by emphasizing tax cuts, deregulation, disinflation, finance and the growth of financial assets, all three of America's capitalist heydays have been geared to the investment and capital-forming top 1 percent of the population, benefiting the great economic middle much less.''
Finally, a huge issue that has been ignored for 30 years remains unaddressed by both parties today. Harris describes it as the contradiction ``between making people more productive and putting them out of work. Because of this structural contradiction, a policy of slashing taxes, shrinking the government bureaucracy, reducing welfare and deregulating the private sector cannot long endure. Pursuit of this policy may prevent a runaway inflation but it will add millions of middle-class white-collar workers - especially women - to the ranks of the jobless, and thereby further erode the standards of consumption of a substantial portion of the American people.''
A great deal is at stake: not just individual lives, but political stability. Democracy thrives in a middle-class nation and is threatened when class divisions open up. If more breadwinners fall out of the middle class, who will pay the taxes needed to defend the country, provide a secure old age for retirees and maintain the infrastructure that makes the country productive?
Furthermore, successful capitalism requires consumers to maintain what Harris calls ``standards of consumption.'' If we are reduced to a managerial elite that ships jobs overseas and a mass of working men and women who are underemployed and underpaid, who will buy the products that the overseas factories produce?
But the biggest reason to be concerned about the fate of the middle class is the most obvious. We are it. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN EARLE/Staff
by CNB