num_pages: 264
description: Joe Bidens current emphasis on the American middle-class is typical of centrist Democrat strategy. It is used as a cudgel to defend the party against more radical demands that could win over working-class voters and non-voters. For Republicans it provides a foil for disingenuous appeals to the white working class. Donald Trumps 2016 victory made full use of such rhetoric.Yet as David Roediger makes clear in a pointed and persuasive polemic this obsession with the middle-class is relatively new in US politics. It began with the attempt to win back so-called Reagan Democrats by Bill Clinton and his legendary pollster Stanley Greenberg. It was accompanied by a pandering to racism and a shying away from meaningful wealth redistribution that continues to this day.Drawing on rich traditions of radical social thought Roediger disavows the thinly sourced idea that the United States was for much of its history a middle-class nation and the still more indefensible position that it is one now. The increasing immiseration of large swathes of middle-income America only accelerated by the current pandemic nails a fallacy that is a major obstacle to progressive change.No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination. Nikhil Singh
language: English
title: The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History
publisher: OR Books