America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.

America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers Basic Books. 215 pages. $27.00.

Although the idea of class has typically been the skunk in e garden party of American politics, growth in income inequality and persistent Republican catering to the rich--such as the attempt to repeal the estate tax--have recently given notions of class more prominence and legitimacy. Nevertheless, there is still little acknowledgment that in America the majority of people are part of a working class, or that political parties ought to take their needs seriously.

In their well-argued, important new book, America's Forgotten Majority, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Joel Rogers, a professor of law, politics, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focus on how neglect of the white working class in particular has led to the decline of the Democrats and caused a national political stalemate. Forget the college-educated, Volvo-driving, suburban soccer moms or the wired Internet workers as the key to the political future, they argue. The real swing voter is more likely to be a woman who drives an old Chevy Malibu and goes bowling, assuming she can find the time after a hard day as an office worker, airline clerk, or nurse's aide.

By contrast, Michael Zweig, a professor of economics at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, is little interested in such electoral issues. In The Working Class Majority, Zweig is more concerned with how class matters pervasively, even if secretly, in American life. His calculations about who falls into what class are intriguing, and he makes illuminating arguments about why separating "the poor" from other workers is politically perilous. He also explains why the individualistic ideology of "family values" does not reflect working class experience and needs. But his approach to class is often so schematic and ahistorical that it doesn't deal adequately with ambiguities of class experience. Life differences within the working class, as well as consumerism, the mass media, and illusions of social mobility help explain why Americans often do not interpret their experience through the lens of social class and then act accordingly.

Both books clearly acknowledge that the old mental image of the working class as made up of blue-collar white guys headed to the factory while their wives and children remain at home is grossly misleading. Women make up nearly half the work force today. Service and office jobs have expanded, and factory work has greatly declined.

Both also agree on the rough dimensions of this changing but persistent working class: Zweig carefully calculates that 62 percent of the work force is "working class," which he defines not on the basis of income or occupation but on the power and authority at work--which working class people don't have.

By contrast, in describing changes over several decades in the American economy--economic slowdown, growing inequality, and a "great divide" in educational attainments--Teixeira and Rogers conclude that the three-fourths of Americans without a four-year college degree have lost ground economically. The white working class--their "Forgotten Majority"--makes up about 55 percent of all voters.

Both books are talking about roughly the same group, but Zweig's refreshing emphasis on power brings to the fore the most important social relationship in explaining how society ticks. Teixeira and Rogers, on the other hand, use education to define class because it's the best variable available for analyzing voter surveys.

Teixeira and Rogers make a compelling case that the real swing voters in recent decades are white workers, who have struggled and often fallen behind economically for a quarter century. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, the authors argue, have adequately responded to their needs. As a result, these voters are disaffected and up for grabs. White workers are also such a big bloc that they are essential to the success of either party.

Teixeira and Rogers justify separating white workers from minority workers, who have suffered even more from the same economic trends, because minorities remain loyal to the Democrats and the idea of activist government. But the political behavior of the Forgotten Majority, they argue, has been shaped by "a disjuncture between economic experience and values," such as beliefs about fair reward for effort or the centrality of hard work and individual achievement.

Starting in the late 1960s, Democrats lost ground among these white working class voters, some of whom became Reagan Democrats in the 1980s or Perot supporters in the early 1990s. In the last four decades, the Forgotten Majority vote for a Democratic President dropped by 14 percent (20 percent among men) but stayed about the same among college-educated whites. This decline wasn't a result of suburbanization, a shift to white collar jobs, or a more conservative ideology. Rather, it stemmed from frustration with government's failure to address their economic anxieties, Teixeira and Rogers argue. White workers still had high expectations of government but were disappointed with the results. In reaction, they became "pragmatic conservatives."

Racism, the authors say, did not fuel this shift, since surveys show that Americans have become markedly more liberal in their thinking about race.

This analysis is partly convincing, especially for the past decade. But the white working class shift from the Democrats started before the advent of the economic slowdown and rising inequality. And perceptions about race certainly seem to have skewed white working class reactions against government policies. For example, the misperception of welfare as a program for blacks, even though it helped more white workers, was crucial politically in the "pragmatic conservative" shift. Also, in the 1970s and later, when white workers were getting squeezed, why didn't more of them demand a revitalization of government in ways that would help them?

It's partially correct to argue that the Democrats didn't really present progressive, populist alternatives that would appeal to white working class voters, but the authors' treatment of this conservative turn seems incomplete. After all, even as government offered them less and less, blacks and minorities remained hopeful about activist government. Where was their disjuncture of values and experience leading to a conservative reaction? White working class union voters, including men, were affected by the same trends as nonunion white workers but remained more supportive of both Democrats and strong government. What was the difference here? In all likelihood, it was simply the experience of being organized into a union that generated more understanding of class and power in American life.

While Teixeira and Rogers grant that some New Democrat ideas--such as demonstrating that the party could be tough on crime--may have helped inoculate Democrats against Republican attacks, they argue persuasively that this "marketing" approach to politics neglected to address the fundamental issue of Forgotten Majority voters and failed as a political strategy.

In 1992, Clinton did more poorly than Dukakis among Forgotten Majority voters, and in 1994--when Clinton's economic populism had been jettisoned, NAFTA had been passed, and a flawed strategy on health care had collapsed--Forgotten Majority voters abandoned the Democrats in droves. They were not, however, voting for Gingrich's rightwing ideology. What saved the Democrats in subsequent elections was the perception by Forgotten Majority voters that they were defenders of Social Security, Medicare, education, and the environment--the "Old Democrat" programs.

But the Democrats did not seize power in Congress in reaction to Gingrich's overreaching, and they failed because they had locked themselves into a fiscal conservative straitjacket, Teixeira and Rogers soundly argue. The Democrats' strategy of supposedly putting any budgetary surplus in a "lockbox" for Social Security has kept them from taking advantage of a long period of modest economic growth and huge projected budget surpluses to provide the kind of programs that could win over the Forgotten Majority.

If Democrats want to capture those votes they have to address the "new insecurity" with ambitious programs for health care, job and retirement security, education, management of globalization, and resolution of work and family pressures, such as universal preschool and expanded hours for public schools, the authors argue. Too bad Al Gore hasn't heeded their advice but has instead proposed Clintonesque symbolic minimalism and large-scale federal debt reductions.

Teixeira and Rogers are absolutely correct that the best strategy, both for workers and the Democrats, is to advocate policies that are universal, like Social Security and Medicare, which progressively redistribute income.

They are on less solid ground when they propose abandoning racial affirmative action in favor of class-based affirmative action: The legacy of racism is still a significant barrier, and racial affirmative action will work better, gradually become less important, and be more acceptable to whites in the context of universal programs, which will disproportionately benefit the whole working class.

Teixeira and Rogers's program for government action to address the "new insecurity" issues of the working class only implicitly redistributes income and tangentially addresses the questions of class power, such as the right of workers to organize, the strength of unions, regulation of global corporations, and curbing money's domination of politics.

But one reason why the working class is forgotten is that it is unorganized. Zweig emphasizes the need for working class power, but he pins his hopes--overwhelmingly and unrealistically--on the new Labor Party and offers, at best, a general strategy for reducing capitalist domination.

In the end, even within the working class, differences of skill, income, education, and occupation, along with a host of other factors, influence how people view the world. It takes a lot of effort to create out of these disparate experiences a working class that is a political and historical force, not just a demographic target for candidates.

But in their own different ways, both of these books constructively encourage Americans to think more clearly about class.

David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times and a fellow of The Nation Institute.