It turns out that large percentages of the public seem to expect the government to be doing something about health care, poverty, and the preservation of natural resources. The authors then use this data as the basis for the opposition they set up between pragmatic and ideological conservatism. People do not form a political ideology, or even political conclusions, through an abstract and deductive process, but through an accumulation of pragmatic judgments made in response to specific situations. In this case, it may be suggested that Americans' experience with government inefficiency and bureaucratic expansionism will not be so easily forgotten as the authors hope. The surveys they cite reveal little about what kind of government involvement the public imagines.
Class is a term that carries a certain theoretical weight.
A social class is conventionally understood to comprise people with certain shared experiences, values, and understandings of the world. They should have a sense of being part of a class, and of their class as having distinctive interests. A strong case can be made that America's working class once fit that mold, if less so than in Europe. Teixeira and Rogers acknowledge that the economic structure of the United States has fundamentally changed over the past 30 years. Blue collar work has continued to decline. . . .