Who Are 'The Working Class' and Aren't Most of Us Already Them?
Midterms! Holy shit. More money is being spent on campaign ads in this concentrated period than Big Pharma spends on convincing old people that shingles is an existential threat and they must purchase a treatment because shingles are the END OF DEMOCRACY.
Beyond the hyperbolic rhetoric that states quite clearly and with great repetition that a vote for pretty much anyone of any ideological stripe is the final nail in the coffin for our democratic way of life, there is the drumbeat that gives us that delicious rhythm of the Great Abandonment of the Working Class. The image of this elusive and neglected group is malleable based on where you stand on, you know, issues.
If you're on the right side of the purity fence, this working class looks like a bunch of white people wearing overalls, their hands are permanently dirty from fixing cars, fixing roads, fixing sewers, carrying hay bales, and dutifully frustrated that the Big Cities are dictating that their kids unnecessarily learn about racism in public schools. They also are both mystified and a bit disgusted with the sexual inaction of everyone and would prefer the teachers stick to teaching their children to read and write rather than gender identify.
Over on the left part of the Great Yard, the working class looks like black people working in restaurants, brown people working in Amazon warehouses, black and brown people laboring in migrant jobs, all while dealing with the idea that their forebears were scarred by slavery, Jim Crow, anti-Latino racism, and woefully underfunded schools in neighborhoods that haven't seen a pothole fixed since before Roosevelt was in office (Teddy not Frank).
Suspiciously absent from this wildly diverse group are Asians but that is because, despite the rampant white supremacy laced into every aspect of American life, those Asians make considerably more money, their kids are smarter and do better in school, and pretty much smoke white people on every metric measurable except for weight class and the whites, blacks, and browns beat the Asians by a solid ton of unnecessary gut fat. Gotta win at something, right?
Like so many of our accepted terms, working class is effectively meaningless but that doesn't stop those crazy Zoomer marketing geniuses from barking out the label every 4.3 seconds in every campaign ad in between the persistent calls to action to buy shitty processed food and mattresses that guarantee a good night's sleep (hint on the last—be single. You'll sleep like a fucking baby).
I'm squatting in the Heartland, smack dab in the center of the country, and I'm seeing something a bit more nuanced than either of the wonk patrols are willing to see. The working class is, well, most of us.
Luis Lopez is a full-time high school social studies teacher in Wichita. He has a Master's Degree which bumps his annual pay to just under $40,000 a year (with benefits he never uses because the deductibles are kind of ridiculous). On his classroom wall he has an Associate's degree, a Bachelor's degree, and his Master's in frames on display. He is college educated. That isn't working class, right? Wrong. As a public school teacher he makes less than $7.00 an hour considering he spends his nights and weekends grading papers and purchasing things for his class that the school can't afford (like extra pencils, laptop chargers, and lamination for his Dwight Schrute inspirational posters).
Jessica Poole works part-time at the local YMCA, part-time at one of the movie theaters in town, and part-time parking cars at local sporting events. She lives with her aging father and hasn't left the city for a vacation in a decade. Once a week she treats herself to a couple of pints at a downtown hotspot (yes—the irony of a downtown hotspot in Wichita, KS is not lost on me) but feels a little guilty that she can't tip the server much. She has a BLM sticker on her phone case and both PETA and Greenpeace bumper stickers on her Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Ryan Hawley has been at the same body shop on the south side of Wichita for almost thirty years. It's a family-owned place and he can remember when he last got a raise in salary. He does fine. He took a few years to save up some money to buy a speed boat which he takes out on the Arkansas River on weekends in the spring and summer. He's divorced which is why he believes he has the money to get a used Jet Ski soon. He lives in a house his mother left him when she passed but hasn't put any effort to keep it up and resents the idea that he has to mow the grass as a pointless task. He can't recall the last time he read a book. He aligns with Trump but only because he hates the Left.
My guess is that the working class is far less monolithic than is possible in a sixty-second ad that must also include references to guns (either pro or con), abortion (either pro or con), inflation, trans issues, public education, and an acknowledged approval of the message. My thought is that when I hear the phrase the working class it is supposed to evoke imagery of the Other Americans not like me but the reality is that most Americans are making less than $40K a year before taxes, are three bad choices from being homeless, and are sporting a smartphone with a spiderweb of cracks and an operating system two years out of date.
Look around. That MAGA guy wearing a "Let's Go, Brandon" sweatshirt, that woman with the Ruth Bader-Ginsburg bobble head on her dash, that retired man working as a receipt checker at the Wal Mart, that barista, that comic book artist, that poet, that Uber driver? That's the working class and both political parties ignore them because politicians do not want to be working class themselves and the Big Money comes from the wealthy class.
