“Middle America” also once implied the existence of a broad group of people who had similar values and a similar lifestyle. If you had a small suburban home, a car, a child at a state university, an annual holiday on a Michigan lake, you were part of it. But, at some point in the past 20 years, a family living at that level lost the sense that it was doing “well”, and probably struggled even to stay there. Now it seems you need a McMansion, children at private universities, two cars, a ski trip in the winter and a summer vacation in Europe in order to feel as if you are doing minimally “well”. You also need a decent retirement fund, since what the state pays is so risible, as well as an employer who can give you a generous health-care plan, since health care is so expensive.
I’m not going to argue about the economics of this shift in definition of “middle”, or the morality (of course, no one with a small suburban home and a car is “poor” by global standards). The point is that people’s perceptions have changed. Many who used to feel secure in “middle America” now feel, rightly or wrongly, left behind, and they don’t think they will ever catch up. Meanwhile, many of those who used to feel proud of coming from “middle America” now feel, like my friend, that they have little in common with their “heartland”. If this turns out to be a permanent change, the implications for American politics, even for Western politics, will be profound. For the past 50 years, Western democracy has flourished alongside the assumption of upward mobility: everyone could participate in the political system; everyone had a chance at improving his status; and everyone could hope, at least, that his children would live better than his parents had, in Britain, France and Germany as well as America. But if Americans are no longer “all in the same boat”, if some of them are now destined to live better than others, then will they continue to feel like political equals? If Britons, Frenchmen and Germans no longer have much in common with their countrymen, will they still want to take part in the same national debates? We don’t know yet – we’ve never lived without a “middle middle class” before – and we are about to find out.
