CULTURE CLUB: The Happy Life of the Middle Class

Democrats are missing the masses

Chuck Twardy

So, it's a splendid, late-spring Sunday morning, and I've taken my coffee and Times to the side patio I built with Home Depot pavers, settled into a metal-mesh patio ensemble I bought at Target, overlooking my stab at a desert garden. I watch a hummingbird poke at the salmon-pink blossoms a yucca plant has thrust into the foreground. A finch settles into the mesquite tree at the end of the garden and sets up a plaintive twitter: Ahem? I fill the feeder in the pine tree behind me.


Then I notice insects working the yellow blossoms of the mesquite and I inch in for a closer look. Bees! No, not bees, I almost say aloud, my mind scrambling to recover the report I'd seen recently on a local newscast, about "Africanized" bees swarming Valley neighborhoods.


Killer bees! To the hills! Sauve qui peut!


No, they're just bees, doing what they do, like the hummingbird. But what about those kids I hear clamoring on the parking lot across the street? Could they be one of those roving packs off ... of ... "youths?" No. They're just shooting hoops in the church lot, in their Sunday best, to boot.


Try as I might, I just can't find a crisis to scar my pleasant moment of middle-class serenity.


One of my instructors in college was a learned man, but not to the academy bred. In class one day, discussion got around to an author's social status, and the instructor observed that his fellow faculty members—the whole cultural establishment, really—disdained the middle class. But he was at pains to discern what he and his colleagues might be, other than middle-class. They made respectable but not lavish wages; they drove Bonnevilles and Celicas to and from inner-ring suburban homes with mown lawns.


Of course, it was the presumed pieties of the bourgeoisie that troubled those middle-class doctorates—the home-fire enthusiasms, the uninflected sentiment, the embrace of the mundane. This is a prejudice that runs through art, literature and intellectual life, from The Merchant of Venice to Babbitt to American Beauty, the contempt for the managers and traders among us. But in mid-aughts reality, certainly no less than it was in the mid-1970s, the constitution of the middle class is complicated. It comprises college professors and columnists as well as trade reps, carpenters and real-estate agents. It retains a broad swath of U.S. demography, although by some measures it is shrinking, shedding its lower echelons over time. Just how comfortably you enjoy your patio moments depends on whether you consider this A) the natural product of postindustrial economy; or B) evidence of a sinister plot to assemble a medieval society in an information-age economy.


In the Times' business pages recently, David Leonhardt proposes a similar optimism-index test and finds an institutionalized pessimism on one side of the divide: "...[B]y most broad measures—wages, average life span, crime, education levels, home ownership and racial and gender equality, to name a few —life in this country has clearly improved over the last generation. And most Americans think about their lives in these terms. In polls, even low-income people generally say they are better off than their parents were, probably because most are."


Leonhardt puts this in political terms, suggesting that Democrats need to learn a lesson: Most Americans, that motley middle class, like their lives. They like their Sunday mornings, in church or on the patio. They like Little League games and school recitals and picking up a latté after dropping off the kids at baseball or ballet practice. And many of them worry, not just about bees and gangs, but about the future of their country, and class.


Incomes rose more for the previous generation, Leonhardt concedes, and he cites the 1990s as the time when this one saw its fortunes rise. He says nothing of this precarious moment, when war, housing-price deflation and massive debt threaten apparent prosperity. But his voice joins a chorus warning about reflexive recrimination. In The New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg details how centrist Democrats contend with the perception in Middle America that the party at best tolerates it. With a real chance to regain at least one house of Congress, the party finds itself led by its ideological fringe and facing the possibility its strategists will once again wring defeat from victory. Its candidates seem to have no idea, beyond certifying their churchly bona fides, how to win back "Reagan Democrats," although many in that group no longer lead lives that could be called middle-class.


Threats of investigations might energize the base—and heaven knows many of us in the middle-class savor the prospect —but they will not win elections. The best hope for that might lie in acknowledging that it's okay to be middle-class, that it is the business of this country, what we're supposed to do, and that Sunday mornings on the patio are worth saving.



Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.

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