The Working-Class Majority
Andrew Levison
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.
"Bleak and depressing as that prospect is, many Democrats, liberals and progressives have come to accept it. They have decided they must either compromise their ideals or ignore the workingman and seek a coalition of women, youth, the alienated. They sidestep the blue-collar issues and look elsewhere for a constituency.
These opinions are widely held. The central thesis of this book is that all of them are basically and profoundly wrong. The hope for a progressive majority in America need not be forgotten, the basic progressive principles and ideals do not have to be jettisoned, and more widely disparate groups with few common interests need not be proposed as solutions to the current political dilemma.
All such approaches are tactics born of desperation rather than a serious understanding of the real problems, legitimate discontents, and, in significant measure, decent democratic instincts of American workers. They are conclusions reached on the basis of a common wisdom about workers and working-class life that is simply without foundation.
Consider the basic social and economic conditions of blue-collar workers. Although the euphoric image of the “affluent worker” of the ’50s has been modified in recent years, to the less ecstatic “middle American,’ it is generally accepted that the classic discontents of blue-collar life have become a thing of the past and workers are now “lower middle class,” unofficial junior partners in affluent America. No thousand-dollar stereos perhaps or Christmas trips to Aruba, but still, in the popular conception they are increasingly identical to their middle-class neighbors in suburban America. As we shall see, for all the talk of overpaid craftsmen and narrowing income gaps, the truth is far different. The majority of America’s blue-collar workers live not only far below affluence, but below the modest government standards for a fully comfortable “middle American” life. The gap between the working class and the middle class, between those who work basically with their hands and those who work with their minds, 1s enormous, and like the notion of similar life-styles, is belied by the reality of a deep economic, social, and geographical segregation between workers and the middle class that approaches the distinction between black and white. On the job and in the community workers often face not only the most harsh and pressing problems, but often clear injustice as well. While genuine improvements over the years are undeniable, so is the persistence of a real and basic inequality. Even the venerable cliché of America as a white-collar society turns out, on examination, to be a simply deceptive misstatement of the facts. For the rest of this century, the majority of Americans will be essentially manual, rather than professional or managerial, workers.
The popular notions about workers’ political attitudes are equally flawed. Although often caricatured as far worse racists and militarists than the middle class, careful evidence fails to back up the claim. Strong currents of racism and militarism are certainly present in working-class America, but a vision of all workers as hate-filled “hard hats” assaulting students is no more valid today than the shamelessly romanticized image of Tom Joad was in the ’30s, when Henry Fonda acted the part in _The Grapes of Wrath_. The results of elections and other real-life behavior in fact suggest that, in certain vital respects, blue-collar workers are still a largely liberal, not conservative, force in American politics."