I’ve been reading Anne Applebaum’s essays for years, and she’s invariably sharp and insightful. She typically writes on foreign affairs, but some essays are for a foreign audience, describing aspects of American politics and culture. In a recent essay for the Telegraph, she succinctly describes America’s middle class, and the problems it faces. Applebaum writes of
….the American upper-middle class, a group which is now sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class, with different politics, different ambitions and different levels of optimism. Thirty years ago, this wasn’t the case. A worker in a Detroit car factory earned about the same as, say, a small-town dentist, and although they might have different taste in films or furniture, their purchasing power wasn’t radically different. Their children would have been able to play together without feeling as if they came from different planets. Now they couldn’t.
Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating.
I would argue that the growing divisions within the American middle class are far more important than the gap between the very richest and everybody else. They are important because to be “middle class,” in America, has such positive connotations, and because most Americans think they belong in it. The middle class is the “heartland,” the middle class is the “backbone of the country”. In 1970, Time magazine described middle America as people who “sing the national anthem at football games – and mean it”….
This is profoundly true – it’s the anxiety of slipping away from the upper-middle class, and not the rich, that animates recent protests (from Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party). (There’s also the anxiety of some in the upper-middle class of falling from that comfortable group, as some surely have and will, never to return.)
To see the upper-middle class as ‘sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class,’ is the key insight. They are different, and are becoming only more so.
See Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?