The Making of the American 99%, the Collapse of the Middle
Class, and the Fall of the "Liberal Elite"

by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich

TomDispatch - A project of the Nation Institute
December 15, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175480/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich_and_john_ehrenreich%2C_the_fall_of_the_%22liberal_elite%22

	"Class happens when some men, as a result of common
	experiences (inherited or shared), feel and
	articulate the identity of their interests as
	between themselves, and as against other men whose
	interests are different from (and usually opposed
	to) theirs."

	-- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
	Class

The "other men" (and of course women) in the current
American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the
wealth distribution -- the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and
CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have
been around for a long time in one form or another, but they
only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group,
informally called the "super-rich," in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to
them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions,
$25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But
as long as the middle class could still muster the credit
for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it
seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash
of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to
whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our
political system stood revealed as a band of feckless,
greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group
capable of (as Thompson says) articulating "the identity of
their interests." It contained, and still contains, most
"ordinary" rich people, along with middle-class
professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners,
as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses,
manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the
affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most
visibly by race and ethnicity -- a division that has
actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos
of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to
foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately
lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed.  On
the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had
been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to
have come out of the 99% before Occupy emerged were the Tea
Party movement and, on the other side of the political
spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective
bargaining in Wisconsin.

But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the
99% had not begun to discover some common interests, or at
least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves.
For decades, the most stridently promoted division within
the 99% was the one between what the right calls the
"liberal elite" -- composed of academics, journalists, media
figures, etc. -- and pretty much everyone else.

As Harper's Magazine columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly
explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism
by targeting that "liberal elite," which supposedly favors
reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels
of taxes, supports "redistributive" social policies and
programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle class,
creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the
environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and
promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay
marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative
intellectuals, looked down on "ordinary" middle- and
working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and
politically incorrect. The "elite" was the enemy, while the
super-rich were just like everyone else, only more "focused"
and perhaps a bit better connected.

Of course, the "liberal elite" never made any sociological
sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt
Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated
middle managers and highly trained engineers may favor latte
over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And
how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite,
while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?

A Greased Chute, Not a Safety Net

"Liberal elite" was always a political category masquerading
as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite
some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the
great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a
member of the actual elite, the 1% who are, for the most
part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes,
gated communities, and walled estates.

The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in
their daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers, and
professors. These groups (along with middle managers and
other white-collar corporate employees) occupy a much lower
position in the class hierarchy.  They made up what we
described in a 1976 essay as the "professional managerial
class." As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our
experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s,
there have been real, longstanding resentments between the
working-class and middle-class professionals. These
resentments, which the populist right cleverly deflected
toward "liberals," contributed significantly to that
previous era of rebellion's failure to build a lasting
progressive movement.

As it happened, the idea of the "liberal elite" could not
survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For
one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the
actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to
them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying,
were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be
overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be
condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.

There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in
the right-wing populist strategy: even by 2000, and
certainly by 2010, the class of people who might qualify as
part of the "liberal elite" was in increasingly bad repair.
Public-sector budget cuts and corporate-inspired
reorganizations were decimating the ranks of decently paid
academics, who were being replaced by adjunct professors
working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were
shrinking their newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms
had started outsourcing their more routine tasks to India.
Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap foreign radiologists.
Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in the arts and
public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy
movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of
dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a
hour, or no job at all.

These trends were in place even before the financial crash
hit, but it took the crash and its grim economic aftermath
to awaken the 99% to a widespread awareness of shared
danger. In 2008, "Joe the Plumber's" intention to earn a
quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of
plausibility. A couple of years into the recession, however,
sudden downward mobility had become the mainstream American
experience, and even some of the most reliably neoliberal
media pundits were beginning to announce that something had
gone awry with the American dream.

Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices
dropped off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and
professionals were staggered to find that their age made
them repulsive to potential employers. Medical debts plunged
middle-class households into bankruptcy. The old
conservative dictum -- that it was unwise to criticize (or
tax) the rich because you might yourself be one of them
someday -- gave way to a new realization that the class you
were most likely to migrate into wasn't the rich, but the
poor.

And here was another thing many in the middle class were
discovering: the downward plunge into poverty could occur
with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic
99% first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or
Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to
economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare
state to stop a family or an individual in free-fall.
Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a
year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by
Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they
reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but
abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has
traditionally been linked to employment.

In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety
of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated
60% of American firms now check applicants' credit ratings,
and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread
enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even
bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly
difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-
imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation
of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal
record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net,
America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution
with alarming speed.

Making Sense of the 99%

The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately
1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the
99%'s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people
-- we may never know the exact numbers -- from all walks of
life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as
the poorest of the poor have always lived: without
electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they
managed to create self-governing communities.

General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented
mix of recent college graduates, young professionals,
elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of
the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part,
constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse
protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment
in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a
purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to
will itself into existence.

Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the
Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase?
All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist
within that 99%, including distrust between members of the
former "liberal elite" and those less privileged. It would
be surprising if they didn't. The life experience of a young
lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a
blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for
biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum
circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic
to at least the 90%. "Middle class" prejudice against the
homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of
the poor, retains much of its grip.

Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy
encampments -- for example, over the role of the chronically
homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles
-- but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about
health and safety threats, there was no "Altamont moment":
no major fires and hardly any violence.  In fact, the
encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences:
people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street
survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of
political science discussing horizontal versus vertical
decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress
uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.

Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most
decisively when people are prepared to nourish and build it.
If the "99%" is to become more than a stylish meme, if it's
to become a force to change the world, eventually we will
undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial
divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so
patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next
big action -- the next march, or building occupation, or
foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.

[Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch regular, is the author of
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a
10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).

John Ehrenreich is professor of psychology at the State
University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He wrote
The Humanitarian Companion: A Guide for International Aid,
Development, and Human Rights Workers.]

This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in
print at the Nation magazine.

Copyright 2011 Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich

====

Comment from Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of
TomDispatch:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175480/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich_and_john_ehrenreich%2C_the_fall_of_the_%22liberal_elite%22

You might almost think the news was good.  The Europeans, so
headlines tell us, have at least a "partial solution" to the
Euro-zone crisis (until, of course, the next round of panic
is upon us); the stock market has sort of rebounded (until
the next precipitous plunge); the unemployment rate "dropped
sharply" to 8.6% in November, the lowest it's been in more
than two years (thanks in part to the strangest category
around -- the 315,000 people who grew too discouraged last
month to look for work and so were no longer considered
unemployed but out of the labor force); and talk of a
double-dip recession seems on holiday.  So why pay attention
to the modest-sized Associated Press story you were likely
to find, if at all, deep inside your newspaper (as on page
21 of last Friday's Washington Post)? It was headlined
"Household wealth down in 3rd quarter," with the telling
subhead, "Corporate cash continues to grow, Fed report
says."

Still, if you wanted to sum up the growing gap between the
1% and the 99%, you couldn't ask for better.  In fact,
household wealth wasn't just "down" 4%, it was the "biggest
loss of wealth" for Americans "in more than two years," and
those corporate cash stockpiles didn't simply continue to
grow, they reached "record levels" at $2.1 trillion.  Since
American wealth is deeply linked to homeownership, the fact
that "most economists expect home prices to keep falling"
wasn't exactly good news, nor when it came to pensions and
retirement was the July-to-September 12% drop in "the
average balance in 401(k) plans managed by Fidelity
Investments, the largest workplace savings plan provider."
In sum, the average American household managed to lose
$21,000 dollars in those three months, a total loss in
household wealth of $2.4 trillion.

You might think that would make front pages nationwide, but
we're evidently too busy dealing with complex subjects like
whether the $10,000 bet offered by Mitt Romney, the $202
million man, during Saturday's Republican debate meant he
was "out of touch" with normal Americans.  In the meantime,
TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
unerringly home in on a fast-changing American reality first
brought to national attention by Occupy Wall Street: that,
as the middle class goes down the chute, we're left in a
world in which 99% "R" Us.  This is a joint
TomDispatch/Nation article and will appear in print in the
latest issue of that magazine. Tom

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