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The Rise of the Have-Nots
The American middle class has toppled into a world of temporary
employment, jobs without benefits, and retirement without
security.
By Harold Meyerson
10/30/07 "American
Prospect" -- -- Last week over lunch, a
friend in his 30s prodded me to explain how my generation, the
boomers, had botched so many things. While not exactly conceding
that we had, I said that the one thing none of us had
anticipated was that America would cease to be a land of broadly
shared prosperity. To be born, as I was, in mid-century was to
have come of age in a nation in which the level of prosperity
continued to rise and the circle of prosperity continued to
widen. This was the great given of our youth. If the boomers
embraced such causes as civil and social rights and
environmentalism, it was partly because the existence and
distribution of prosperity seemed to be settled questions.
Nor were we alone in making this mistake. Our parents may have
gone through the Depression and could never fully believe, as
boomers did, that the good times were here to stay. They
remembered busts as well as booms. But the idea that the economy
could revert to its pre-New Deal configuration (in which the
rich claimed all the wealth the nation created while everyone
else just got by), the notion that the middle class might shrink
even as the economy grew: Who, among all our generations and
political persuasions, expected that?
Yet that's precisely what happened. Median family income over
the past quarter-century has stagnated. The economic rewards
from increased productivity, which went to working-class as well
as wealthy Americans from the 1940s to the '70s, now go
exclusively to the rich. The manufacturing jobs that anchored
our prosperity were offshored, automated or deunionized;
lower-paying service-sector jobs took their place.
It's no great achievement for a people to recognize that their
nation's economy has tanked, but recognizing that their nation's
class structure has slowly but fundamentally altered is a more
challenging task. It's harder still for a people who are
conditioned, as Americans are, not to see their nation in terms
of class.
Which is why a poll released this month by the Pew Research
Center reveals a transformation of Americans' sense of their
country and themselves that is startling. Pew asked Americans if
their country was divided between haves and have-nots. In 1988,
when Gallup asked that question, 26 percent of respondents said
yes, while 71 percent said no. In 2001, when Pew asked it, 44
percent said yes and 53 percent said no. But when Pew asked it
again this summer, the number of Americans who agreed that we
live in a nation divided into haves and have-nots had risen to
48 percent -- exactly the same as the number of Americans who
disagreed.
Americans' assessment of their own place in the economy has
altered, too. In 1988, fully 59 percent identified themselves as
haves and just 17 percent as have-nots. By 2001, the haves had
dwindled to 52 percent and the have-nots had risen to 32
percent. This summer, just 45 percent of Americans called
themselves haves, while 34 percent called themselves have-nots.
These are epochal shifts, of epochal significance. The American
middle class has toppled into a world of temporary employment,
jobs without benefits, retirement without security. Harder times
have come to left and right alike: The percentage of Republicans
who call themselves haves has declined by 13 points since 1988;
the percentage of Democratic haves has declined by 12 points.
This equality of declining opportunity, however, isn't matched
by an equality of perception. The percentage of Democrats who
say America is divided between haves and have-nots has risen by
31 points since 1988; the percentage of Republicans, by just 14
points. Indeed, though that 13-point decline in Republicans who
call themselves haves has occurred entirely since they were
asked that question in 2001, the percentage of Republicans who
say we live in a have/have-not nation has actually shrunk by one
point since 2001. (It had increased 15 points from 1988 to
2001.) Apparently, so great is Republicans' loyalty to the Bush
presidency that they're willing to overlook their own
experience. And, in many cases, to attribute the nation's
transformation solely to immigration, rather than to the rise of
a stateless laissez-faire capitalism over which the American
people wield less and less power. Which helps explain why
Republican presidential candidates bluster about a fence on the
border and have nothing to say about providing health coverage
or restoring some power to American workers.
But the big story here isn't Republican denial. It's the
shattering of Americans' sense of a common identity in a time
when the economy no longer promotes the general welfare. The
world the New Deal built has been destroyed, and we are, as we
were before the New Deal, two nations.
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