THE GLOBAL WAR AGAINST THE MIDDLE CLASS: Joel Kotkin: Yeomanry’s Global Decline.
For much of the last part of the 20th Century, the world’s middle class was ascendant, expanding and, in most countries, firmly in control of national politics and culture. Yet in more recent decades, this process has been slowly reversed, in the United States as well as in Europe and, increasingly, East Asia.
This erosion of the middle class has many roots. Globalization has savaged many middle-class jobs, whether in factories or increasingly services, transferring employment to China, India, and other developing countries. In many countries, immigration, much of it from poor countries, has posed a threat to wage rates, particularly for lower skilled workers and increasingly professionals as well.
In the United States, long seen as the great land of opportunity, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Across the thirty-six countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP, and the middle class has become smaller. Much of the global middle class is heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs, and «looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters,» suggests the OECD.
Traditionally, those classes hurt most by what pundits may praise as «transformative change» would turn to the political class that identifies with their interests. But in many countries where parties once strongly tied to middle- and working-class interests – the Australian and British Labour Parties, the German Social Democrats, or the American Democrats – are no longer working class in nature but dominated by an alliance among the ultra-rich, particularly in tech, well-paid professionals, government workers and those most dependent on government aid. . . . China’s autocratic state increasingly looms as the future role model in which the yeomanry is allowed to exist but wields little influence. Certainly, after the events of the past year, Europe and much of the developing world seems anxious to fall into Beijing’s economic and even political orbit.
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
The oligarchy isn’t an accident. They never are.