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Every time one of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates launches into a jeremiad about wanting to provide more help for the middle class, I almost puke. As a person living on disability, I am tired of hearing the Democratic Party pander to the so-called “middle class.”
Hilary Clinton takes a page from her husband and lists “Strengthening the Middle Class” as the first priority under the issues section of her web page:
America’s middle class is under siege and ready for a change. People are working harder and longer for less and less.
John Edwards–he of the “Two Americas”–uses the euphemism “regular families” in his list of issues. To Edwards’ credit his explication of this states:
Every day, 37 million Americans wake up in poverty. Personally committed to the cause of poverty, Edwards has outlined an ambitious agenda to eliminate poverty within a generation.
Barack Obama does not play this rhetorical game, at least on his web site. Alone among the so-called “Big Three” he lists “Fighting Poverty” as one of his issues.
There are 37 million poor Americans. Most poor Americans are in the workforce, yet still cannot afford to make ends meet. And too many poor Americans are single mothers who are raising children.
However, when Obama released his tax cut, he stressed it was for the “middle class.”
Bill Richardson is even more circumspect, listing “Jobs and the Economy” among his issues, maybe that is why he is trailing the others. Like everyone else he has a “plan”:
I have a plan to meet these challenges by encouraging innovation and expanding economic opportunity.
Joe Biden’s list of issues is–like his rhetoric, too windy. It is so long no sane person could remember them all. Among this grab bag of ideas is “Jobs” which he heads with the following quote which is in italics so we won’t miss it:
Every day we see more evidence this economy is not working for middle-class Americans. If we honor work, we have to reward it.
Dennis Kucinich, who likes to bill himself as the maverick of the bunch is certainly not a maverick on this issue. Hilary Clinton’s advisors could have written his section which is titled “Survival of the Middle Class.”
Chris Dodd uses another euphemism, “working people.” He states:
As President, Chris Dodd will bring the values and aspirations of working people into the White House.
The candidates’ use of middle class only follows the custom of its party. For example, Senate Democratic caucus Vice Chair Chuck Schumer’s recent book is titled Winning Back the Middle Class: One Family at a Time. The title for Chapter Two, in case we should miss it, reads “It’s the Middle Class Stupid.” After last November’s victory, the party website wrote it had a “middle class mandate.” Another entry headlined: “Bush tax bill leaves middle class behind.” The Party website still has a copy of the 2004 Platform (why they would still have easy access to a document that took them down to defeat is strange). One section is titled “Standing Up for the Great American Middle Class.”
This is an abbreviated (thank God) version of the infamous “Plan for America,” a campaign document as thick as my local phone book, which contained the following tortuous phrase:
I believe the measure of a strong economy is a growing middle class, where every American has the opportunity to success.
As I wrote in Strange Death, diagram the sentence the way those little old ladies who taught me high school English would, standing at the blackboard with chalk in hand. The phrase after the comma would have to modify “middle class.” Like fingernails running down a blackboard, the implications of that comma–those not in the middle class have little opportunity for success–would certainly raise eyebrows. Martin Luther King would be outraged.
It is about time that we faced reality: for the Democrats “middle class” has become a code word as surely as “states’ rights” was half a century ago. Ever since the Republican Counterrevolution began its war on the New Deal and “big government” and its minions on the Raucous Right began beating the drums of hatred with attacks on government programs and welfare, the Democratic Party has acquiesced to their strategy and practiced the very “class warfare” the GOP delights in hanging around the Democrats’ ever-diminishing spines.
This has been happening for quite some time. In 1995 Scott Tucker wrote in The Humanist:
If a Democratic politician were to speak openly about the ruling class and the working class in this country, a thousand right-thinking pundits of both parties would denounce this indulgence in retrograde Bolshevism. Class is unmentionable in official discourse, with one overwhelmingly obvious exception: the middle class. The definition of this “middle” is something of a muddle, which is very convenient for bipartisan speech making. Not everyone aspires to the luxury of the rich, but who would not wish to rise above the misery of the poor? The perfect moral and economic balance is therefore found among middle class professionals and business people. All else is extremism.
There is also another, more noxious use of the term middle class, for like it or not the term “middle class” has carried with it a certain racial tinge since the Southern Strategy days of the late 1960s. In their 1994 book Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Academic Libraries: Multicultural Issues, observed:
Middle class becomes a code word for white, no matter the educational and occupational family status of the white individual. [p. 27]
In The Dignity of Working Men,
Just as black workers take white and middle class to be synonyms, white workers often equate being poor with being black.
While the growth of the black middle class, increasing images of middle class blacks and sensitivity to racism have reduced the use of middle class as a code word, it occasionally still stumbles out into the light. Media Matters caught New York Times columnist David Brooks using the code word:
In other words, under Brooks’ reasoning, “the middle class” is synonymous with white people earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year.
Let me interject here that I do not believe any of the Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party are intentionally using middle class this way, but given that the percentage of people of color living in poverty is still a national embarrassment, there is little question focusing on the middle class has a negative impact on people of color. The National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan website has the following table:
At the heart of the Democrats’ class warfare lies a deeply disturbing rhetorical and philosophical turnabout. I was listening to Harry Truman’s 1948 stemwinder yet again the other day–which I find myself doing more and more to remind me that once there really were Democrats who weren’t afraid to say what they believed in without triangulating the results of dozens of focus groups.
A few choice phrases from that speech show how much the Democratic Party has changed.
In January 1946 I repeated what I thought the Government should do, and I have repeated it time and again since that time-and I haven’t changed a bit. I am still the Democrat you nominated in Chicago on the Democratic platform of 1944, and I am still for Roosevelt’s New Deal.
I have told the people that there is just one big issue in this campaign and that’s the people against the special interests.
The Republicans stand for special interests, and they always have.
The Democratic Party, which I now head, stands for the people–and always has stood for the people.
Note that there are no qualifiers by the word “people.” Truman simply says the Democrats are for the people, meaning ALL Americans. In using this phrase he was repeating a core belief of the Democratic Party that goes back at least to William Jennings Bryan.
Here is an excerpt from Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech:
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.
Then there is Woodrow Wilson. In his First Inaugural he states:
We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.
Finally there is Franklin Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” speech:
These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Notice in all three of these speeches there is no qualification of the people or the masses, as Bryan termed them. Roosevelt even goes further in terming his “forgotten man” as the one “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Compare these speeches to the ones from the current candidates’ web sites and you have dramatic proof of how far the Democratic Party has strayed from the tradition that made it the majority party for much of the last century.
The Republicans, of course, have accused the current Democrats of “class warfare,” something they have been doing dating back to Bryan, but this time they are right. We still have “forgotten” Americans “at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” and by purposely avoiding any reference to them, the Democrats are engaging in exactly the class warfare the Republicans accuse them of.
Besides this moral argument against the Democrats’ class warfare there is an important pragmatic argument. More and more Americans are staying away from the polls–and various surveys show they are FDR’s “forgotten” Americans. In an article written last May, Steven Hill, Director of the Political Reform Program of the New America Foundation, analyzed the situation in California and found:
For the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties and say that California needs another major political party.
Hill goes on to ask, “Why has this happened?”
A separate study by the policy institute suggests one illuminating explanation: There is a widening breach between most of the 35 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote.
Frequent voters tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are unregistered) tend to be younger than 45, are renters, and relatively few have household incomes over $60,000 or hold college degrees.
What Hill found in California seems to be occurring across the country. The 2004 American Political Science Association Report American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality noted:
Nearly nine out of 10 individuals in families with incomes over $75,000 reported voting in presidential elections while only half of those in families with incomes under $15,000 reported voting.
The most damning part of the report details how the Democrats class warfare has impacted nonvoters:
Both of the major political parties intensify the skewed participation in U.S. politics by targeting many of their resources on recruiting those who are already the most privileged and involved.
The major parties have become less likely to personally contact large numbers of less privileged and less active citizens — even though research tells us that personal contact is important in encouraging citizens to vote.
Those Americans who would be most likely to raise issues about basic opportunities and needs — from escaping poverty to securing jobs, education, health care, and housing — tend to be the least likely to participate in politics.
A fascinating paper by MIT’s Alan I. Abramowitz unintentionally reveals the results of ignoring the nonvoters. According to Abramowitz there are distinct ideological differences between voters and nonvoters:
The American public appears to be increasingly divided into two groups: the politically engaged, who view politics in ideological terms, and the politically disengaged, who do not.
Interestingly, the data Abramowitz uses focus on eleven questions from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Most of those eleven question do not involve what politicians term “bread and butter” issues but instead include the usual ideological single issue hot-buttons: two questions on abortion, two questions on Iraq, questions on immigration, stem cell research, and affirmative action. The only real “bread and butter” question is on the minimum wage, which as expected has a low correlation with all the other issues.
Abramowitz’s paper confirms the APSA report in demonstrating that the issues that occupy the major parties mean little to nonvoters, who being low income have more pressing issues on their minds than stem cell research. Where the Democrats’ middle class warfare is killing the party is that by ignoring these nonvoters, they have shut out a substantial constituency that voted for Bryan, Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.
Today no party speaks for the America of Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman. As a result the Democratic Party no longer knows how to speak to all Americans. Like an opera singer who has lost the ability to hit the high notes, their range has diminished so they can only hit the middle ones. Nowhere was that better demonstrated than in the NewsHour interview Chuck Schumer gave in defense of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Schumer literally did not know how to properly defend this program for low income Americans, nor, more important, did he have any idea how to rally them to support overriding the veto of George Bush. He seemed unable to summon up the proper indignation or to explain the importance of the program. Harry Truman would have known exactly what to say and so would Bryan and FDR.
Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party finds itself on the losing end of so many elections? If the Democrats continue building the political equivalent of a gated community, they may just find themselves locked in to a position that locks them out of power.
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