Middle Class

Too many people are claiming the government isn’t helping middle class people like them, when I have no idea what they mean by the term "middle class."

In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.

When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.

By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.

However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.

Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.

By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.

Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.

Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.

I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.

Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.

I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.

She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."

No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.

They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.

More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.

They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.

The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.

It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.

When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.

But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.

They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.

They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.

Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.

Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.