The Threatened Middle Class

Another theme in your work is a focus, amidst all the morass of politics and the failure of the ideologies to move beyond their first position, a focus on what the lower-middle class and the middle class are going through. These were the key voters in the politics of the 1980s and the 1990s. The need to address their problems, especially what they were feeling because of the impact of the global economy, and what they saw as the erosion of moral values -- that was a key part of your argument. Talk a little about that.

It's a simple fact that they were the key to most of the political transformations that happened in that period. They were the Reagan Democrats, they were the people who came back to Clinton in 1992; some of them went to Perot in that period. If you were interested in where American politics was going, they were one of the most important groups to pay attention to. So there's that level. And then there is the level of social justice and what makes a democracy work. We did a pretty good job as a country from the period after World War II until about the mid-1970s in creating an economy that lifted everyone up simultaneously. When Kennedy said, "A rising tide lifts all boats," it was actually true. The poor gained about as much income as the wealthy and the middle class in that period.

Then, for [various] reasons, some of them having nothing to do with politics, that went haywire after the oil shock. You began to develop this widening gap. It goes back to our founders talking about needing a mass property-owning base, a middle class base, to have an effective democracy. I think that is still true. If you allow large inequalities to grow, you have both injustice and dangers to democracy. And so that's where a lot of that came from.

The simple fact is that a lot of those folks were folks I knew. My column is in my hometown paper, and I always have in the back in my head, "What would somebody back in my hometown think of this? How would this affect the folks I grew up with?" Fall River was a working-class town with an upper-middle class, where there was a sense of linkage between people. There weren't gated communities, so you could be close. My dad was a dentist, so I was hardly a working-class kid, but a lot of my friends were working-class kids, and we didn't realize it. It took me a long time to realize that these divisions actually meant something outside the context of my hometown. You were aware somebody had more money and somebody had less money, but there was more of a linkage than you see now in a lot of places. I don't know how you recreate Fall River. That connection is easier in a small town than it is in a large metropolitan area.

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