j666:
What is “working class”? The definition I grew up with - high school education and decent, steady blue collar employment - doesn’t even exist anymore.
If we are talking about people with high school education and no inherited wealth, are they really equivalent to the working class of 50 years ago? Even trades people tend to have some post high school education now, professional certifications or associates in business.
Well, as I posted in this thread :
I suppose that applies to a lot of them, but it’s not definitional. Many working-class people have high job skills and some go to college (community, at least). There are various definitions of the"working class" – but not so widely various that it is difficult to say who is and isn’t in it.
One can perhaps meaningfully subdivide the working class. From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:
Top out-of-sight
Middle
Destitute
One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it’s not riches alone that define these classes. . . . “Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor,” says George Orwell, “but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.” When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, “The guy has no class,” he was not talking about money.
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. . . Proceeding downward [from the middle class], we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn’t exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What’s the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head “the masses,” and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage – to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to “saving” and “planning” maintained it in a position – often precarious, to be sure – above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.
The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. The high proles are the skilled workers, craftsmen, like printers. The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you’re proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you’re probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.
Also – Fussell seems to overlook this – the working class can also be subdivided racially/ethnically. Among other things Marx got wrong, a social class is not merely a set of people of the same economic status or economic function. It is also a sociological entity. People of the same class do not just work at the same kinds of jobs or earn the same level of income, they live in the same kinds of neighborhoods, go to the same schools, socialize with each other, marry each other, and absorb a similar outlook growing up. The white and black working classes are really two different social classes, and will remain so until socialization and neighborhood and intermarriage between them is a great deal more common than it is now. It’s not that either is above the other (except that the whites probably provide most of the high-proles as Fussell defines them); they’re like two halves of the same layer of the cake. Or thirds, or whatever, because the Latino working class is separate from both, etc.
Fussell’s analysis, as noted, dates from 1983, but I don’t think the picture has changed significantly since then, the way it did change significantly between the 1940s and then.
j666:
It looks like death for white americans stopped decreasing around 1998 or '99. That makes no sense, sociologically. That was a good time, for every one but the Clintons; the economy was stable and growing, the social order was pretty traditional, the wars were far away … what existential crisis could have started then?
Good question. No easy answers. My guess is, that was when it really, really became clear to white workers that the America they were going to die in was a very different country, not only economically but culturally and socially and demographically, from the America they had grown up in. Which might have accounted for W, also. I recall reading a book in the past year, can’t recall title or author, which covers the 1970s white backlash represented by Louise Day Hicks, etc. One chapter covers a fight over school textbooks in West Virginia, and one local said to some city-slicking do-gooder that the problem was “You are trying to put commas in place of our periods.” That, on a national scale.