The “struggling middle class”
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This graph from an otherwise good piece from Ben Rhodes about what the Democrats should do features an absolutely ubiquitous bit of political framing that I find extremely annoying and unhelpful:
The hard truth is that the Democratic Party, in its current form, cannot lead the opposition that is required. Faced with a relentless onslaught from Mr. Trump, the party has lost touch with an electorate that sees it as emblematic of what they hate about politics, a polarized culture, overseas commitments and an economy where being middle class doesn’t feel like enough to get by.
If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard about the financial struggles of the middle class I could buy a Cybertruck.
Here’s a stat that ought to drive home how ahistorical this kind of completely inescapable political rhetoric actually is: When John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society in 1958 — a study of the challenges faced by the richest society in human history to that point, i.e., the United States in the late 1950s — the 95th percentile of family income in this country, that is, an unquestionably upper class income by any reasonable definition, was the same as the median family income in America in 2023.
This country is immensely wealthier than it was in the economic “golden age” of the 1950s, looked back on so fondly by many a fascist MAGA. This isn’t just reflected in the (completely indefensible) explosion of billionaires, deci-billionaires, and centi-billionaires in our midst. It’s reflected in the fact that a perfectly middle class family — one at the 50th percentile of income — has an income that in the 1950s would have been the equivalent, comparatively, of having a family income of $350,000 in 2023.
Yes the “middle class” faces plenty of economic challenges, especially in regard to the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, but middle class families, broadly defined, are still much better off in regard to all three of those social goods than they were during the Golden Age of MAGA nostalgic lore. Rates of homeownership are higher now than then, while fully half old people in the USA as recently as 1965 had no medical insurance of any kind. (The figure is now effectively 100% because of Medicare, which of course Elon Musk’s army of incels is trying to get rid of). The percentage of adults with a four-year college degree or more has gone from 8% in 1960 to 38% in 2022.
The really disgraceful thing in this unimaginably rich country is the economic condition of the truly poor: of the bottom 10%, and especially the bottom 5%, of households, in a nation with a pitifully inadequate social safety net. And the precarity of middle class economic status, in a country that tolerates something approaching third world levels of poverty among millions of its citizens, is also a valid concern for people well above the economic bottom.
But the fact that “the middle class doesn’t feel like it has enough to get by” is a product, above all, of right wing propaganda, which at this point is functionally fascist propaganda. Repeating that propaganda is a bad idea.