The middle class has taken a big hit. Is it going to mobilize?
Today, with their incomes flat or falling, these Americans scramble to maintain a semblance of what their parents enjoyed. They are moving from being dominant to being dominated. From acting to acted upon. Trained to be educators, lawyers, librarians, and accountants, they do work they can’t stand to support families they rarely see. Petrified of being pushed aside by robots, they rankle to see financial titans and tech gurus flaunting their obscene wealth at every turn.
Headlines gush of a humming economy, but it doesn’t feel like a party to them—and they’ve seen enough to know who will be holding the bag when the next bubble bursts.
The “Middle Precariats,” as Quart terms them, are suffering death by a thousand degradations. Their new reality: You will not do as well as your parents. Life is a struggle to keep up. Even if you achieve something, you will live in fear of losing it. America is not your land: it belongs to the ultra-rich.
Much of Quart’s book highlights the mirror image of the downwardly mobile middle class Trump voters from economically strained regions like the Midwest who helped throw a monkey wrench into politics-as-usual. In her tour of American frustration, she talks to urbanites who lean liberal and didn’t expect to find themselves drowning in debt and disappointment. Like the falling-behind Trump voters, these people sense their status ripped away, their hopes dashed.
And there signs that they are starting to revolt. If they do, they could make their own mark on the country’s political landscape...
Historically, the more affluent end of the middle class tends to identify with and support the wealthy. After all, they might join their ranks one day. But when this dream dies, the formerly secure may decide to throw their lot in with the rest of the Precariats. That’s when you have the chance for a real mass movement for change...
If the growing ranks of Precariats can work together, maybe it won’t take a natural catastrophe or a war or violent social upheaval to change America’s unsustainable course of gross inequality. Because eventually, something has to give.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/07/middle-precariat-downwardly-mobile-middle-class.html
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