Part II

The Formation of a New Lower Class

 

 

IF PART 1 succeeded in realizing my intent, you now have a sense of the degree to which a new upper class has formed that is composed of people who are more and more removed from the lives of everybody else. It is in that context that we start to explore what’s been happening to everybody else, focusing on the working class.

Far from the life of the SuperZips is working-class America. For most of its history, working-class America was America, for practical purposes. In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level white-collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms. Even when our time horizon opens in 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs.1 Within that mass of the working population, there were racial and ethnic distinctions, but not many others. Skilled craftsmen considered themselves to be a cut above manual laborers, and clerks in offices considered themselves to be a cut above people who had to work with their hands (even if being a clerk didn’t pay any more than being a carpenter), but they all considered themselves to be working stiffs.

Michael Harrington’s The Other America created a stir when it was published in 1962 partly because Harrington said America’s poor constituted a class separate from the working class—a daring proposition. At that time, the poor were not seen as a class, either by other Americans or in their own eyes. The poor were working-class people who didn’t make much money. They were expected to participate in the institutions of American life just as everybody else did. When white Americans thought about the lower class, a lot of them thought in terms of race—that’s one of the bad realities of 1960. Insofar as they thought of a lower class among whites, they had in mind people at the fringes of American life—the broken-down denizens of the Bowery and Skid Row, or the people known as white trash. In the years after 1960, America developed something new: a white lower class that did not consist of a fringe, but of a substantial part of what was formerly the working-class population. Part 2 describes the trajectory of its formation.

The new lower class grew under the radar for a long time. In the 1960s and 1970s, two groups of Americans at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum notoriously defied the traditional American expectations of respectable behavior. One consisted of white youths who came of age in the 1960s, mostly from middle-class and upper-middle-class families, who formed the counterculture that blossomed in Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s, gathered strength nationally during the years of the Vietnam War, and died away during the 1970s. The other was black and urban, a small minority of the black population that became so socially disorganized that by the early 1980s it had acquired the label of underclass.

The counterculture got most of the nation’s attention during the 1970s and the underclass got most of the attention during the 1980s. But during those decades—quietly, gradually, without creating obvious social problems for America as a whole—the population of white Americans who defied traditional American expectations grew in size. By the 1990s and 2000s, the new lower class was a shaping force in the life of working-class America.

The separation of the new lower class from the norms of traditional America would be interesting but not alarming if it represented nothing more than alternative ways of living that work equally as well as the old ways of living. The nation is not going to the dogs because people wear jeans to church, smoke marijuana, or pierce a wider variety of body parts than their parents did. But the separation of the classes described in part 2 does not consist of these kinds of differences. Rather, it comprises differences that affect the ability of people to live satisfying lives, the ability of communities to function as communities, and the ability of America to survive as America.