11/29/2016 ThestrangecaseofAmericasdisappearingmiddleclass|PaulMason|Opinion|TheGuardian

The strange case of Americas disappearing

middle class
Paul Mason
Middle America is being squeezed from both ends, by the rich and the poor. This new insecurity is fertile
territory for the likes of Donald Trump

Monday 14 December 2015 17.15GMT

T he shot was of two women in party dresses taking a sele next to the Greek riot police. In the
summer of 2015 it was an unremarkable sight middle-class supporters of the euro rallying
to save Greece from the threat of Grexit. But when I described the scene, in a voiceover
aimed at an American audience, a query came back from the US: this does not sound right; they
look too posh to be middle class.

Middle class, in the US, means what working class means in Britain. Except that, while nobody
even in Corbyns Labour party goes around saying they represent working-class values, all
politicians in America claim to represent the values of this middle class.

But the middle class is shrinking. A report from the Pew Research Center last week found that, for
the rst time since the 1970s, families dened as middle income are actually in a minority in
the US squeezed from both ends by an enlarged poverty-stricken group below them, and an
enriched group above them.

The graphs showing the shrinkage read like a textbook example of the future that French
economist Thomas Piketty predicts for the world. In 1971, there were 80 million households in
the US dened as middle income compared with a combined 52 million in the groups above and
below. Now, there are 120 million middle-class families, but 121 million rich and poor A
demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, says Pew.

There has also been a big shift in who gets the wealth generated by America: Fully 49% of US
aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29% in 1970. The share
accruing to middle-income households was 43% in 2014, down substantially from 62% in 1970.

Middle America is, of course, supposed to be the bedrock of US democracy. The young family
with kids, its income gradually rising as the years go by, is the foundation of political stability and
consensus and, although its quintessential era was the Keynesian years from 1945 to 1973, the
dream, myth or other storytelling metaphor has survived. Until now.

The bare fact is that the majority of Americans, according to Pew, are either rich or poor. And this
is beginning to have political impact. It would be facile to link the emergence of Donald Trumps
know-nothing, racist rhetoric to a mere demographic tipping point. But the insecurities he is
playing on are real.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/14/thestrangecaseofamericasdisappearingmiddleclass 1/3
11/29/2016 ThestrangecaseofAmericasdisappearingmiddleclass|PaulMason|Opinion|TheGuardian

In part, the new demographics of the US are a success story: black people and older people have
both, according to Pew, moved up the income scale. The clearest move downwards is among
those who did not receive or complete a college education. That means the quintessential success
story of the US is no longer the young, white, suburban family of the Bewitched and Doris Day
legends. And the manual worker, the farmer and the self-taught salesman all essential
archetypes no longer t so easily into the success narrative.

Neoliberal economics favour the already rich and those rich in assets. This means, in an economy
bulked out on the steroids of quantitative easing, older people. Meanwhile, for the young
whether of the precariat or those lucky enough to get into the stable workforce of corporate
America the debt accumulated while gaining the essential passport to middle-income status a
degree serves as a lifetime drag on asset wealth.

This demographic tipping point creates, in short, more problems for Americas mainstream
political narrative than it creates for the shrunken middle classes. Consensus is fragmenting.
Social media thrusts footage of repeated police shootings of black or other minority Americans
into our timelines. It thrusts the senseless mass shooter into the limelight. Now, it makes anti-
Muslim hatred go viral.

Trumps aim is not just to amplify these insecurities, but to create a politics of spectacle and
senselessness around them. Businesspeople in the US are quietly despairing not just about the
overtness of the racism, but also about the underlying irrationality of the discourse.

If fewer people get to work in technocratic jobs, where logic, prudence and care have to be
followed every hour of every day, then, sooner or later, the acid of unreason begins to corrode
democracy. Thats the fear: that values of science, logic and humanity get left behind as the
fragmenting conservative right outshout each other.

Its worth exploring the root cause of such fragility, though, because it is not obvious why the
proportional decline of the middle class should trigger, causally, an implosion of reason as
spectacular as the one being played out in the Republican primary battle. When you dig into the
demography of the US middle class, a plausible answer emerges: it is more ethnically diverse than
ever, there are fewer marriages than ever, it is better educated than ever.

Any conservatism or any form of liberalism that assumes as its default a middle class that is
white, religious and uneducated is going to be misaligned with reality. But this new, diverse, more
modern US middle class needs representation like never before. The average income of the upper
tier, says Pew, is seven times that of the middle tier. In 1983, it was merely double.

As the primary season begins, beyond all the self-parody and craziness, the most serious
questions for these 120 million households will be: who actually understands us, and who can
oer us a plausible way beyond stagnating real incomes and multigenerational insecurity.

Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. @paulmasonnews

More comment

Topics
US income inequality Economic policy US economic growth and recession Economics
Donald Trump More
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/14/thestrangecaseofamericasdisappearingmiddleclass 2/3
11/29/2016 ThestrangecaseofAmericasdisappearingmiddleclass|PaulMason|Opinion|TheGuardian

Save for later Article saved

Reuse this content

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/14/thestrangecaseofamericasdisappearingmiddleclass 3/3