One of the most glorious things I witnessed in my lifetime was the way working class consciousness largely evaporated in this country after World War II. A Beatles song neatly summed up the reason: “A working class hero is no way to be.” Indeed, it had only seemed a good way to be in years when people in this very large and diverse group of Americans didn’t have a clear shot at joining the better heeled middle class. When that chance came along, “Don’t call me working class, pal, I’m middle class” became the working man’s and working woman’s joyous mantra and primary mode of social identification.
A number of things made this transformation possible. The power of unions. A government influenced by wealth, yes, but not totally servile in its influence. And perhaps most important, though rarely recognized as such, a tax structure that wasn’t focused on enhancing the questing beast of economists — GDP growth — but rather one aimed at the far more humane goal of seeing that wealth was distributed in ways that while appropriately rewarding the deserving also ensured that most others got a hefty taste.
Now, on a daily basis, I watch the glory fade away. I watch the American middle class shriveling, and dividing into two easily recognizable pieces: the part that still is hanging on to its middle class perks but increasingly fearful of losing them; and the part that has already lost some of them and rapidly on the way to becoming outright poor. In a great many respects, the former part can be identified with the Tea Party.
At first glance Tea Party thinking may resemble a combination of old fashion Know Nothingism and high colonic libertarianism. Dig a little deeper, though, and you see a large segment of the rump American middle class scared and furious that their own standard of living might somehow be taxed away or otherwise diminished by efforts of the government to help those already fallen from middle class ranks or those who never made it into that desirable status in the first place.
Many, perhaps most Tea Party people at one time would have been natural joiners in soak-the-rich leftist populism if such populism were still a force to be reckoned with in American life. It isn’t, of course.
The liberal left’s utter inability or unwillingness to demonize the twaddle that passes for conservatism in this country today, to allow the sins of pols who called themselves “conservative” to be forgotten while the very word “liberal” has become political anathema, has become a near impossible barrier to overcome in bringing a disaffected middle more to the left. And of course the one-time liberal left’s political instrument to bring about more equitably shared wealth, the Democratic Party, now wallows in Clintonomics, which is Rubinomics, which comes down to pandering to Wall Street for campaign contribution crumbs while steeped in the demented hope that the phony economic miracle of the 1990s can somehow be repeated.
So a frightened rump American middle class has turned to conservative populism instead of the silenced liberal variety. These people understand that neither Democrats nor Republicans will nick the rich to aid the middle, so the only way to save what some of the middle still has is to see is isn’t shared with those who have already fallen away.
I’ve lived long enough to see a lot better. But I don’t recall a time when I’ve witnessed a less adept and less courageous group of Democrats desperate to keep hold of the helm, and an even nastier group of Republicans fighting for a shot at the tiller.
A third party that will soak-the rich and spread-the-wealth anyone?
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