The income now necessary to maintain what was a considered a middle-class existence in the 1950s-‘70s puts said existence beyond the reach of any below the bottom reaches of the one percent. Job and retirement security, unions, all get eviscerated. High-risk 401 (k) s replace defined-benefit pensions. The pay gap between CEO and rank-and-file is now the highest in the entire world. Former members of the middle class now are plunged into chronic economic insecurity and seemingly irrevocable decline. And those who constitute what was the middle class and are now at the lower rungs of the one percent are themselves beset with constant financial anxiety.
I can only ask: where have your heads been these last forty years?
It’s been a combination of complacency, passivity, denial, somehow-learned helplessness that has kept the once-middle class from being able to take in, let alone do something about the way that the United States was being contorted into a two-class nation.
It’s extraordinary that, after the 1960s, what comprises today’s erstwhile middle-class, (both top and lower ends), seems to have in fact forgotten that they were living in a participatory democracy. Their political withdrawal is astonishing.
I remember talking in the fall of 2002 to a long-term family friend: a retired school teacher, married to a lawyer, economically comfortable, liberal—but somehow lulled into a state of total political inertia.
She predicted quite rightly—this was even a few weeks before the Democrats caved to GW Bush’s demand for unilateral war-making powers—that the Republicans would exploit the threat of terrorism for electoral advantage. But “there is nothing I can do about it.”
We have learned the hard way that democracy is not a spectator sport—voting every two years is not enough.