WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today we’re stalking the middle class – from Marx to Middletown (Muncie, IN) to Macomb County, Michigan – to reveal what it’s hiding.
Our conversation with historian David Roediger took place about a month ago on October 14th and in between then and now fell November 3rd, Election Day in the U.S., and we have a new President-Elect – Joe Biden. I asked Roediger for a quick thought on the election. He said this via email:
The rejoicing in the US–and it is worth noting in the world–at the rejection of Donald Trump by US voters is palpable, even as the proportions of his defeat were far less than polling and reason predicted. Data on voter behavior remains inadequate but it appears that high school educated white voters, dubiously labelled the “white working class” and blamed for Trump’s 2016 victory, shifted significantly away from Trump especially among males, falling from 48 to 42%. On the other hand, the election, and not only its 70 million-plus Trump votes, shows once again how the political grammar of “saving the middle class” and “paying attention to the white working class” constricts our political choices, even as impressive organizing occurs. 150 million voters, whether Trump backers or supporters of “Middle Class Joe” Biden, voted for candidates explicitly opposed to Medicare for All, for example, despite the popularity of that basic demand.
Another historian, Mike Davis, said recently in a Mother Jones interview something which might boil down to the phrase, “we are the 60%.”
In the elections, over the past hundred years where Democratic presidential candidates have had the largest margin of victory, still, the Republicans are able to count on 37 to 41 percent of the vote. Alf Landon in 1936, at 37 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater got almost 39 percent of the vote. Trump’s popularity ratings are still about 40 percent. But you need to ask yourself—why this constant percentage in American political history? What does it say, particularly about the upper middle class, the local country club elites? Today the hedge funds and private equity people are a very large base in this country for conservative politics. This was true in the 1930s. It was true to some extent in the ’60s with the Goldwater–massive white resistance brigade. And it’s true today. So when we talk about bringing people together, we shouldn’t be talking about it in some vague populist sense, believing that there is this great basis of unity. It’s the 60 percent that we’re talking about and creating a class unity that is based on full recognition of structural racism and systemic discrimination.
At the end of Roediger’s new book, The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History, he writes that in 2016 “among whites, Trump won not one particular income category but all income categories. The voting patterns of white workers were far more like those of whites in other class positions than like those of other groups of workers.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his book about the mythic middle class centers on the politics, specifically the electoral politics, of whiteness.
In the book’s “Afterword” he notes a truly forgotten aspect of the white working class – that polling done by the AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the United States with approximately 12 and half million members) shows nearly 40% of white non-college-educated electorate as Democrat or leaning Democrat with 80% or more of those approving of Black Lives Matter and not wanting a border wall.
There is a space of unity in these numbers and these numbers beg the question – Is “the middle class” a chimera manufactured to promote class confusion, prompting white resistance brigades to go on marching while we all walk upon Du Bois’s color line?
GUEST
David Roediger is the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas and probably best-known for his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness. The Sinking Middle Class is published by OR Books.
RELATED
Why Does Everyone in America Think They’re Middle Class? by David Roediger
Why We Campaign to ‘Save the Middle Class’ and Shouldn’t by David Roediger
A Scholar of American Doom Doesn’t See How Capitalism Can Fix This Crisis – Interview with Mike Davis
MUSIC by The Bottle Rockets
“Get on the Bus” (Lean Forward)
“Rural Route” (The Bottle Rockets)
“Align Yourself” (Zoysia)
“Sunday Sports” (The Brooklyn Side)
“Maybe Tomorrow” (Bit Logic)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
