America's Forgotten Majority: Why The White Working Class Still Matters

The mere mention of a white working class causes many pundits to cringe. Liberals, because the notion of a "white" anything smacks of political incorrectness; conservatives, because mention of any kind of working class puts the fear of Marx in their soul. For decades this key demographic group has been either ignored in polite conversation or caricatured in popular culture. Either way their collective existence has remained submerged, like an iceberg. Yet, as Teixiera and Rogers point out, this grouping composes 55% of the American electorate, or more than enough votes to guarantee governance to any party that can win their allegiance.This slim volume is elegantly structured, very plainly written, effectively argued, and numerically buttressed, (being neither a statistician nor a political scientist, I'm unable to critically analyze the numbers & so, take them at face value). The authors' aim is to show that this key grouping is identifiable (by income and educational levels), grossly underserved by government ( falling income levels since 1973, without compensatory programs that are perceived as favoring minorities), and without fixed partisan loyalties. ( though working class men have lately trended toward conservative appeals).This last is significant, because the authors seek to show how the loyalty of this class can be won in today's politico-economic mix by advancing the right kind of programmatic appeals, ones that importantly seek to unify along class lines rather than divide along racial lines. In the process the authors must also attack some of the myths that currently surround this grouping, such as their endemic racism or the alleged disappearance of their very existence. No lasting governance can be won by any party, the authors provocatively contend, without significant support from this forgotten majority that has been so used, abused and ignored by the elite powers that be. In sum, there is in the book abundant grist for Republicans, Democrats, and third-partyites to chew on and is well worth the price.

when books like this roll around. "America's Forgotten Majority" is clearly written for the Democratic Party, even though the authors claimed to be apolitical in the book's preface ("the content of politics is not our chief concern"). The central thesis is that the biggest chunk of the American electorate (55%) consists of the white working class. The authors define working class not just in old, heavy-industry terms (the USA is a post-industrial society and relatively few of us earn our living in industry) but also in low-level white collar, technical and secretarial fields. These are exactly the fields that have had the roughest times economically since 1973. The members of this forgotten majority are better educated in the past (they tend to have a high school diploma or even a two-year college degree) but they tend to vote like the working class.The press, and by inference the Democratic Party, however, has become infatuated with the upper-middle-class, college-educated "soccer mom." College graduates are the people whose standard of living accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. College graduates may or may not constitute a reliable "swing" faction but they are only about one-fifth of the electorate, say the authors.It is clear that the authors want the Democratic Party to try to court the much larger (though fickle) "forgotten majority" of white working class voters. This is a good book to read right now but it will probably be obsolete after the 2000 presidential election. By the way, in the whole book I counted only 21 paragraphs having to do with the Republican Party.