America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters. - Review - book review

America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers Basic Books. 215 pages. $27.00.

Although the idea of class has typically been the skunk in e garden party of American politics, growth in income inequality and persistent Republican catering to the rich--such as the attempt to repeal the estate tax--have recently given notions of class more prominence and legitimacy. Nevertheless, there is still little acknowledgment that in America the majority of people are part of a working class, or that political parties ought to take their needs seriously.

In their well-argued, important new book, America's Forgotten Majority, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Joel Rogers, a professor of law, politics, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focus on how neglect of the white working class in particular has led to the decline of the Democrats and caused a national political stalemate. Forget the college-educated, Volvo-driving, suburban soccer moms or the wired Internet workers as the key to the political future, they argue. The real swing voter is more likely to be a woman who drives an old Chevy Malibu and goes bowling, assuming she can find the time after a hard day as an office worker, airline clerk, or nurse's aide.

By contrast, Michael Zweig, a professor of economics at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, is little interested in such electoral issues. In The Working Class Majority, Zweig is more concerned with how class matters pervasively, even if secretly, in American life. His calculations about who falls into what class are intriguing, and he makes illuminating arguments about why separating "the poor" from other workers is politically perilous. He also explains why the individualistic ideology of "family values" does not reflect working class experience and needs. But his approach to class is often so schematic and ahistorical that it doesn't deal adequately with ambiguities of class experience. Life differences within the working class, as well as consumerism, the mass media, and illusions of social mobility help explain why Americans often do not interpret their experience through the lens of social class and then act accordingly.

Both books clearly acknowledge that the old mental image of the working class as made up of blue-collar white guys headed to the factory while their wives and children remain at home is grossly misleading. Women make up nearly half the work force today. Service and office jobs have expanded, and factory work has greatly declined.

Both also agree on the rough dimensions of this changing but persistent working class: Zweig carefully calculates that 62 percent of the work force is "working class," which he defines not on the basis of income or occupation but on the power and authority at work--which working class people don't have.

By contrast, in describing changes over several decades in the American economy--economic slowdown, growing inequality, and a "great divide" in educational attainments--Teixeira and Rogers conclude that the three-fourths of Americans without a four-year college degree have lost ground economically. The white working class--their "Forgotten Majority"--makes up about 55 percent of all voters.

Both books are talking about roughly the same group, but Zweig's refreshing emphasis on power brings to the fore the most important social relationship in explaining how society ticks. Teixeira and Rogers, on the other hand, use education to define class because it's the best variable available for analyzing voter surveys.

Teixeira and Rogers make a compelling case that the real swing voters in recent decades are white workers, who have struggled and often fallen behind economically for a quarter century. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, the authors argue, have adequately responded to their needs. As a result, these voters are disaffected and up for grabs. White workers are also such a big bloc that they are essential to the success of either party.

Teixeira and Rogers justify separating white workers from minority workers, who have suffered even more from the same economic trends, because minorities remain loyal to the Democrats and the idea of activist government. But the political behavior of the Forgotten Majority, they argue, has been shaped by "a disjuncture between economic experience and values," such as beliefs about fair reward for effort or the centrality of hard work and individual achievement.

Starting in the late 1960s, Democrats lost ground among these white working class voters, some of whom became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s or Perot supporters in the early 1990s. In the last four decades, the Forgotten Majority vote for a Democratic President dropped by 14 percent (20 percent among men) but stayed about the same among college-educated whites. This decline wasn't a result of suburbanization, a shift to white collar jobs, or a more conservative ideology. Rather, it stemmed from frustration with government's failure to address their economic anxieties, Teixeira and Rogers argue. White workers still had high expectations of government but were disappointed with the results. In reaction, they became "pragmatic conservatives."