A growing, thriving middle class has long been understood as the key to political stability. That’s been true throughout history, just as it is today. You look around the world and where you see a middle class population under stress, you see signs of political unrest.
Perhaps the most important way to understand the political environment in the U.S. today is in terms of what’s happening to the American middle class. While there is no commonly understood definition of the middle class in the U.S., by any definition, the middle class is falling behind. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of total (aggregate) U.S. income of the bottom 60 percent of households in the U.S. declined by more than 15 percent between the years 1967 and 2008. The next 20 percent saw their share of income decline less than 4 percent between 1967 and 2008, and the top 20 percent increased their share of income by almost 15 percent. The top 5 percent saw their share of income grow by 25 percent.
The increasing disparity between the incomes of rich and middle class households, an erosion of health and pension benefits for the overwhelming majority of Americans, as well as chronic unemployment and under-employment, helped set the stage for the election of 2008. Middle class families found themselves increasingly unable to keep up, let alone get ahead. With the first signs of the financial crisis appearing in the weeks and months before the 2008 election, the electorate responded to the Obama message of hope and change. Since the 2008 election, things have of course become much worse and more dire. Dramatic increases in the numbers of home foreclosures and bankruptcies, unsettling and historic levels of unemployment and under-employment, declining home prices, the tightening of consumer credit, and a growing sense of economic insecurity have sent the middle class into a deep funk. The rise of the Tea Party movement is not surprising in this context.
The question is whether either of our political parties will be putting before the electorate real and reassuring solutions to the growing unease of middle class Americans. The failure to do so may well give rise to even further erosion of confidence in our political leaders and government in general.
