As progressives engage in their latest round of provincial-American sneers (we’re back to the anti-Texan trope, with Perry’s entry into the presidential race), it is important to recognize that the endgame of the statist movement, as I’ve been at pains to explain, is not, as the left would have you believe, a leveling of the class system; rather, what they are after is a new class system, one divided along the lines of the ruling class (including the attendant parasitic inside the Beltway satellite industries, be they media or lobbyist or analyst or private sector crony businesses, etc.) and their bureaucratic apparatchiks, and those who are to be ruled over. Meaning, the rest of us.
After all, we can’t have certain types moving up in class just because he or she gets lucky and, say, invents a better way to keep nachos fresh, or thinks up a new way to keep a mullet looking sharp.
Fred Siegel, City Journal (via WSJ):
It was in mid-1960s New York—under the leadership of a Barack Obama precursor, Hollywood-handsome John Lindsay—that the country’s first top-bottom political coalition emerged. In 1965, Gotham had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country. But the city’s political elites used eminent domain to push manufacturing aside in favor of business services; they also expanded social programs to help African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. The service sector proved rough going for the less educated, and the social programs failed. New York City responded by inflating its unionized public-sector workforce to incorporate minority workers.
Higher taxes to pay for bigger government joined higher crime to produce a massive exodus of manufacturing and middle-class jobs. Over the last 45 years, New York has led the country in outmigration. A recent study by E. J. McMahon and Robert Scardamalia of the Empire Center for New York State Policy notes that since 1960, New York has lost 7.3 million residents to the rest of the country. For the last 20 years, “New York’s net population loss due to domestic migration has been the highest of any state as a percentage of population.”
New York City, meanwhile, solidified its standing as the most unequal city in America. Twenty-five percent of New York was middle-class in 1970, according to a Brookings Institution study. By 2008, that figure had dropped to 16 percent, and the numbers have only plunged further since the financial crisis, with virtually all the new jobs in the city’s hourglass economy coming at either the high end or the low. Only high-end businesses can succeed in a local economy that has the nation’s highest taxes and highest cost of living—and even those businesses, in many cases, weathered the downturn only by living off the Fed’s policy of subsidizing banks. Despite the federal largesse, more of the city’s new jobs are in the low-wage hospitality and food-services industries than in the financial sector. The middle has lost its political voice in a city dominated by the politically wired wealthy and the public-sector unions that service the poor.
New York is the picture of what the Tea Party fears for the country at large. In the 1970s, liberal mandarins seized the high ground of American institutions in the name of managing social, racial, gender, and environmental justice on behalf of the disadvantaged. Their job, as they saw it, was to protect minorities from the depredations of middle-class mores. In the wake of the Aquarian age, the U.S. developed the first mass upper-middle class in the history of the world. These well-to-do, often politically connected professionals—including the increasingly intertwined wealthy of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—espoused what might be called gentry liberalism, a creed according to which the middle classes had to be punished for their racism, sexism, and excess consumption.
And they have been punished—with job losses. These losses are the inevitable result of the costs of an ever-expanding, European-style public sector; environmental restrictions on manufacturing, mining, and forestry, which push high-paying jobs offshore; and illegal immigration, which reduces overall wage levels. At the same time, the decline in the quality of K–12 schools has undermined what was once a ladder of economic ascent. After completing high school today, students are likely to require a raft of remedial courses in college. Then, after college, many middle-class students graduate not with an education but with a credential—and a bag of enormous college loans that paid for the intermittent attention of a highly paid, tenured faculty.
The private-sector middle class’s plight has been exacerbated by international competition and technological innovation, which have undermined job security, including for unionized manufacturing workers, who had enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity for about a quarter-century. Median household incomes have grown only marginally since the early 1970s, despite the mass movement of women into the workplace. Many dual-earner families have been caught in the two-income tax trap: on the one hand, they pay for services once performed by the homemaker; on the other, notes economist Todd Zywicki, they’re pushed into a higher tax bracket when the wife’s salary is added to the husband’s.
Adding to the woes of the middle and lower classes is that their families are far less stable than they were a generation ago. The decline of marriage has been driven not only by changing mores but also by a decline in male employment. In 1970, only one of 14 working-age men was out of the workforce. Today, notes Nina Easton, one in five is either “collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents.” Whites who don’t attend college have out-of-wedlock birthrates approaching those that triggered Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concerns about the black family in 1965. Today, four in ten American babies are born out of wedlock.
During the current downturn, the black and Hispanic middle class has been particularly hard hit. From 2005 to 2009, according to a recent Pew survey, inflation-adjusted wealth fell by 66 percent among Hispanic households and by 53 percent among black households, compared with 16 percent among white households. These families worry with good reason that in the face of continuing high unemployment, they may fall out of the middle class. For the Obama administration and the public-sector unions, the solution to this slide is to force the nearly one in four employers that have contracts with the federal government to pay above-market wages. Here again, New York has been a pacesetter. Recently, public-sector unions and their allies tried to force a developer rebuilding a decayed Bronx armory to follow their wage and hiring guidelines; the deal collapsed, leaving one of the poorest sections of Gotham in the lurch.
There’s a major difference, though, between New York and the country as a whole. The New York option—move somewhere else—doesn’t apply to private-sector middle-class workers fighting adverse conditions that exist throughout America. So they’ve exercised the classic democratic right of political action, organizing themselves to compete in elections. The Tea Party is the national voice of the private-sector middle class—despite the demonizations heaped upon it by public-policy elites whose own judgment and competence leave much to be desired.
Middle-class decline should be front and center in 2012, which is shaping up as a firestorm of an election. It’s likely to be a bitter contest, in which the polarized class interests of those who identify with the growth of government and those who are being undermined by its expansion face off without the buffer of mutual goodwill. Liberals, unless they change their tune, will blame Tea Party “terrorists” for the tragedy of a fading middle class. They will continue to delude themselves into thinking, as Al Gore said in 2000, that their rivals represent “the powerful” and that they themselves act on behalf of “the people,” even though President Obama’s policies have poured money into Wall Street and the politically connected “green” businesses that form the upper half of his top-bottom electoral coalition. The question is whether the country will buy this line and, more broadly, whether it will follow the New York model. Should it do so, those future historians will no doubt look at the election of 2012 as the contest in which the middle class staggered past the point of no return.
Me, I plan on telling Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin to fuck right off in 2012. And Jeb Bush isn’t going to say a damn thing that can stop me.
But then, I’m a bit of an outlaw.
You?
(h/t TerryH)
NYC in the 1960’s? It reads like California in the 2000s. Pete Wilson may have been the last gasp of decent leadership in the Cali GOP, and even he was rather RINOey.
Middle class seems a meaningless term to me. It defines a group of people by income who have little else in common. I view the breakdown like this:
The wealthy- those who acquire wealth
The merchant class- those who create wealth
The workers- those who work for the other two
Simplistic, I am on a mobile and cramped for time.
it’s probably just misplaced
or hiding
Me, I plan on telling Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin to fuck right off in 2012.
Why wait until 2012? You’ve got a functioning Twitter account right now.
I mean, look at these Baldwin gems.
did someone look under the couch
“Pete Wilson may have been the last gasp of decent leadership in the Cali GOP, and even he was rather RINOey.”
Saying that name in my presence is like walking up behind Moe Howard and shouting, “Niagara Falls!”
Wilson wasn’t “RINOey,” he was a dedicated Establican.
To me…
The merchant class, aka the bourgeois,aka “the rich”, are what we now call the upper middle class and consist mostly of small business persons and degree-ed professionals.
The workers would mostly be in the lower middle class.
The wealthy are the upper class and would be defined not so much by income as by their means of earning it which is through invested funds.
The lower class would be those whose earnings are all spent to meet the basic necessities of life and so have a hand to mouth existence.
One thing both middle classes have in common is the dream of moving up. The wealthy wish to hold onto what they have and fear its loss. The lower class dream to of moving up but can also be roused to envy and resentment of those better off by demagogues.
The fusion of interests of the wealthy and the lower class is made by those who wish to move up by gaining power as opposed to earning money though power will get you money too.
The wealthy fear being dethroned by the upper middle moving up and shaking up the foundations of wealth. The Democrats have come to power by making deals with both the wealthy and the lower class. They will, for a price, provide security for the wealthy and buy off the lower class with money taken mostly from the upper middle but also from the lower middle too.
This bargain started in the 30s as a way to keep the lower class from embracing the lure of the then new socialist movements, communism and fascism that were flourishing during the great worldwide depression.
That bargain worked but the temptation to constantly expand the programs to hook more people and for people to hook themselves into what appears to be a costless freebie has led to them to the edge of the cliff we face today.
The demagogues now have the problem that they have run out of money they can steal or borrow and the tiger they are on is still hungry.
Saying that name in my presence is like walking up behind Moe Howard and shouting, “Niagara Falls!”
Wilson wasn’t “RINOey,” he was a dedicated Establican.
Relative to *whom*, Mr. McGehee? Schwarzenfailure? Meggy Whitman, as vapid as Meggy McCain and even less attractive? Some other dilettante with money who can’t bring him/herself to say the words “illegal alien”???
This *is* Cali, you know….
“We’re the Hekowi.”
— F Troop
Let me say that City Journal is a national treasure. The hard copies are works of art; I intend on keeping mine for archive purposes, so that we can look back and see what people thought back before it all went patas arriba.
That is really giving Roosevelt and the Great Depression revisionists like Doris Kearns Goodwin the benefit of the doubt. I think demagogues are demagogues and Roosevelt was a master. I don’t believe for a minute he cared about encroaching socialism or saving the great American experiment. I truly believe he used the Zeitgeist to do what democrats always do, cement their power base.
OT: Steyn’s The Imperial Presidency is seven flavors of awesome, more than his usual six.
Curmudgeon, Wilson’s immediate predecessor was George Deukmejian, who repaired California’s business climate after eight years of Jerry Brown and then disappeared into retirement.
Wilson, on the other hand, embarked on the governorship as a stepping stone to the presidency and fucked managed to squander the opportunity presented by a brief GOP takeover of the Legislature.
Before Wilson, California still could elect a decent conservative.
Yup. Outlaw.
#11,
I just figure that compared to the rise of the various “Labor” parties and the fair success of the Communist party in European politics of the period, none of these took hold in the US as the Democrats actions squeezed them so far out of the mainstream by taking their lower class base away through programs which were similar to what the far left was agitating for but controlled by the Democrats (FDR) for their own power needs. FDR triangulated the far left IMHO.
That’s a great piece, in a really bad way. The truth sucks.
Definitely outlaw.
Principles, not pragmatism.
The Truth always sucks Pablo. that’s probably true by definition.
Curmudgeon, Wilson’s immediate predecessor was George Deukmejian, who repaired California’s business climate after eight years of Jerry Brown and then disappeared into retirement.
Wilson, on the other hand, embarked on the governorship as a stepping stone to the presidency and fucked managed to squander the opportunity presented by a brief GOP takeover of the Legislature.
Before Wilson, California still could elect a decent conservative.
I remember Deukmejian well, and I remember Wilsonian debacles like “the snack tax”.
That said, it *wasn’t* Wilson who set the GOP on a Hispandering course. That dishonor goes first to Jack Kemp, then to Karl Rove.
This bargain started in the 30s
It’s the same bargain that Churchill (Randolph, not Winston) urged the Tories to make in order to stick it to the Liberals; the same bargain that Bismark made to keep the Prussian Junkers on top of Prussia, and Prussia on top of the rest of the German speaking world; the same bargain that the oligarchical Senatorial order made with the Head Count to keep control of the Roman state.
“thinks up a new way to keep a mullet looking sharp”
So you’re telling me this guy has no shot at the big bucks?
Man you are a real Kiljoy these days Goldstein;)
Fixed!
I’m tempted to start always talking like this just so our friends on the left can see how annoying they are.
Some of them might, anyway.
Despite being part of the “law” (well, the ultimate enforcement mechanism, anyway) I think I will choosee “Outlaw”.
“choosee”? Cripes, I sound like Joe Biden in China…
The outlaw Choosee wails!
Dyeing ain’t much of a living…
The corduroy colorist?
Didn’t John Lindsay give Florence Henderson the crabs?
Opposing illegal immigration may have been the only thing Wilson ever did that anyone would ever see as “conservative” — and in that I suspect he intended only to undermine the conservative wing of the party going into the 1994 election cycle by denying them a hot-button “conservative” issue to use against him.
Wilson had started off his first term by negotiating a huge tax hike — for some time it stood as the largest state tax hike in the history of the world — over the objections of legislators from his own party. That left him vulnerable to a primary challenge and he, not knowing how to “do” conservatism intelligently, screwed it up.
He managed to get re-elected, mainly on the same tide that put Republicans in charge of Congress, but left the GOP in ruins.
…left the california GOP in ruins.
Opposing illegal immigration may have been the only thing Wilson ever did that anyone would ever see as “conservative” — and in that I suspect he intended only to undermine the conservative wing of the party going into the 1994 election cycle by denying them a hot-button “conservative” issue to use against him.
I honestly don’t recall any serious primary opposition against him? Again, like I said, Wilson was a RINOey putz. Still, he *didn’t* leave the California GOP in ruins. That dubious dishonor goes to Ah-nold, who had an overwhelming victory in 2006, but refused to use it to help out *any* of his fellow Republicans.
Outlaw, heck yeah.
Friday morning links…
The prospects for Irene in the northeast change by the hour. Last night, she was downgraded but now it’s just confusing. However, if she does hit New England hard, don’t be surprised if Maggie’s is down for a while. Counselor Cheers Up Someone’s Fir…
Schwarzenegger was a result, not a cause. In my opinion.
[…] “Who Lost the Middle Class?” As progressives engage in their latest round of provincial-American sneers (we’re back to the anti-Texan trope, with Perry’s entry into the presidential race), it is important to recognize that the endgame of the statist movement, as I’ve been at pains to explain, is not, as the left would have you believe, a leveling of the class system; rather, what they are after is a new class system, one divided along the lines of the ruling class (including the attendant parasitic inside the Beltway satellite industries, be they media or lobbyist or analyst or private sector crony businesses, etc.) and their bureaucratic apparatchiks, and those who are to be ruled over. Meaning, the rest of us. […]