Why Americans All Believe They Are 'Middle Class'

[n2doc]

by ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO


Last week, President Obama went on the road promoting an economic agenda for the middle class. As expected, John Boehner and other Republicans fired back by charging Obama with “squeezing the middle class.” It’s not even an election year, yet “middle class” is hotly contested linguistic real estate. But nobody seems to know what this term means.

“Middle class” remains our favored self-designation, although the percentage of Americans who select it fell from 53 percent in 2008 to 49 most recently, according to Pew Research. As a friend’s high-school teacher loved to say, “The great thing about America is that everyone can be middle class.” Good thing she wasn’t teaching math.



Given this popularity, it is no mystery why “in the interest of the middle class” now beats “for the children” as political cliché. The puzzle is why so many who do not fit the category (as median family income reported as just above $50,000 defines it) believe they do. Why does the description “middle-class nation” continue to feel appropriate, desirable, or both?

Researching how people’s unconscious assumptions affect their perception of economic issues, I explored the linguistic dynamics behind the term “middle class,” especially in comparison to other economic groupings. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of more than 450 million words from speeches, media, fiction, and academic texts, among the most common words (excluding conjunctions and prepositions among others) co-occurring with “middle class” we find “emerging,” “burgeoning,” “burdened,” and “squeezed.” These tell us what happens to this grouping. Absent are quantitative terms or descriptors for what life is like within this category. In fact, in common usage, we rarely hear about actual people named within it; middle class may as well describe a grouping of potted plants or pop cans. There’s little here tied to income or lifestyle.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/what-we-really-mean-when-we-say-middle-class/278240/

[LuvNewcastle]

1. People don't mention the working class much anymore.

Republicans don't like to call them the working class. It leads to questions about what the other people are doing.

[Gormy Cuss]

10. Working class are the new lower middle class

or so it seems from that distribution. I guess that lower middle class sounds more upwardly mobile.

[socialist_n_TN]

12. Working class was never a particular economic designation....

Working class has a lot of sociological connotations that middle class doesn't. And most pols don't use working class anymore because of the Marxist tinge to the term.

[Gormy Cuss]

14. I agree with you on the Marxist tinge aspect.

Last edited Sat Aug 3, 2013, 03:50 PM - Edit history (1)

AFAIK "working class" encompassed a broad swath of economic situations but had as its unifying factor viewing one's self as worker rather than manager. When unions were stronger in this country many working class people were also middle income (or "middle class" in the vernacular.)

Middle class was always the desired status, even as this author points out Americans historically have resisted "class" labeling, because class is not strictly tied to income but rather to status.

[Populist_Prole]

15. Bingo! Your post is spot-on.

The only ones left are well-paid bullshit artists in sinecures ( the self styled "creative class" ) and the 1 percent. Everyone else is working class; this includes doctors, lawyers and the like. You work for a living: You're working class.

[Uncle Joe]

2. I do believe the designation needs to fall on more than just income.

In some areas of the nation 40,000 a year might put you squarely in the "middle class" while in more high cost of living areas, 60,000 might not be enough.

Thanks for the thread, n2doc.

[starroute]

3. A lot of it is cultural identification

You look at old photos from the 1920s and 30s and you can identify different classes by their dress. The working class often wears dungarees, or sturdy pants and work shirts. The middle class wears suits and ties. The upper class might wear particularly well-tailored suits, expensive resort wear, or even tophats and tails for special events. The differences for women are equally apparent.

But during World War II, there was a great leveling -- at least in terms of style. Wartime austerity was followed by a postwar consumer society where off-the-rack clothes were far better tailored and the clothes of the wealthy were far more casual.

Much the same was true of entertainment. Once everybody was watching the same movies and TV shows and listening to the same recordings, upper class access to live theater and symphony orchestras didn't count for much. It wasn't where the action was.

I'd date the decisive changes to around 1960. That was when the idea that almost everybody could be middle class really took hold. And, not coincidentally, it was also when working class solidarity began to decline and the unions started losing their influence.

[Bunnahabhain]

4. I agree with much of what you say here.

It is certainly cultural now more than income based.

[1-Old-Man]

5. I always had to skimp but had enough to live, never made $100K in my life, is that the middle.

When someone tells me that $200 grand a year is still middle class I want to gag.

[BlueCheese]

6. The big problem is there's no standard definition of middle class.

There's a poverty line, and the terms top 1% and top 5% have mathematically clear definitions. But there's no official federal definition of middle class, so everyone argues about what it means.

I don't understand the snark in the article about the statement "the great thing about America is that everyone can be middle class." Clearly, not every single last person can be in the middle, but there's nothing inherently silly about a huge majority of people being decently well-off.

Somebody once told me that as long as she felt like she had to work for a living, she was middle class. Maybe upper-middle class, but she didn't feel rich until she could quit her job and not worry about money. It seemed like a reasonable enough definition to me.

[leftstreet]

7. DURec

Interesting article

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. It's a political method of looking like you're saying something when you're really not.

"I'm a fighter for the middle class" is gibberish. It's pablum. It means exactly jack shit.

"I'm a fighter for middle income familes" is specific and tangible. The political downside is that it begs legitimate and reasonable questions about what this means to families who make less than $38,515 or more than $62,433.

[monmouth3]

9. "Genteel Poverty" is a term used a lot in my senior neighborhood..n/t

[NickB79]

11. Fuck that. I grew up in poverty

Literal poverty. Family of five trying to make it on the farm on less than $20K a year in the 1980's. WIC, free school lunches, food stamps, state-subsidized health insurance, driving rusty beater cars and trucks, etc. We would have starved if we didn't grow our own vegetables, chickens, cattle, pigs, hunt, fish, harvest wild fruits, can, and freeze food, etc.

I might make more money today than my parents did, but in my mind I'm still poor and always will be. And for that, I'm eternally grateful, because I've seen what happened to friends of mine who grew up thinking they were solidly middle class. When they went out into the world on their own, they bought the big houses and fancy cars expected of them, racked up the credit card debt, and crashed and burned in SPECTACULAR fashion.

[Brigid]

13. Maybe they're suffering from what I call "Steinbeck Syndrome."

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." -- John Steinbeck