Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

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David Roediger

Sinking Middle Class

A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

David Roediger

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English

Haymarket Books
21 June 2022

Social theory

The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled.

Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand.

Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.

By: David Roediger
Imprint: Haymarket Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 215mm, Width: 139mm,
ISBN: 9781642597059
ISBN 10: 1642597058
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 21 June 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race, and Marxism.

Reviews for Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

As the nation burns and the future appears uncertain, David Roediger delivers another incisive, timely, clear-eyed analysis of class and race in America. His point is clear: another world won't be built by pollsters or slick election strategies aimed at saving the middle class. We have to grow a movement. --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination A consistently pathbreaking historian. --Monthly Review No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination. --Nikhil Singh Brilliant and insightful... Explores the ways in which appeals to save the middle class in electoral politics harm the very constituencies they purport to help. --George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place