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My previous column expressed hope that the nation may be at a turning point—a moment when the public is more prepared to renew its commitment to our founding ideals. However important those ideals are—and I believe they are very important—they are not, by themselves, sufficient to energize support from the large portion of the population living paycheck to paycheck, wondering whether there will even be a next paycheck.
Not everyone living paycheck to paycheck is low-income. It is a condition of anxiety that stretches from those at the very lowest income levels well into the middle class. What unites them is uncertainty about their economic future.
If the hope of renewed national commitment to American ideals is to become reality, influential voices in public life must first address the fundamental conditions that create obstacles to economic security and deepen anxiety among those who feel their concerns are neither recognized nor taken seriously. People want to believe that housing, food, and the basic necessities of a decent life are available to them as a matter of right, earned through their labor.
The conviction that next year will bring greater opportunity, more discretionary income, and some measure of upward mobility lies at the heart of the American dream. Whether that dream is more myth than reality is beside the point. It drives emotional response. Facts, however important, are often peripheral.
A renewed commitment to democratic ideals can be generated only when public leaders begin here. Policy white papers are not the place to start.
The first step is to listen—carefully—and to respond in ways that demonstrate that anxious and insecure voices have been heard. Those feelings may or may not align with the facts, but they are real, and that reality must be acknowledged. The second step is to ask what people believe should be done. The answers will be varied, even contradictory. The third step is to ensure those voices are shared in ways that encourage mutual understanding and reduce the tendency of groups to turn against one another.
Out of that process, influential voices can begin to articulate practical steps capable of improving lives. At that moment—and not before—it becomes possible to reintroduce the essential importance of democratic ideals. That is how progress toward achieving them is made.
The New Deal, now nearly a century behind us, cannot serve as a blueprint for our time. But it does illustrate how this process can work at its best. Even then, it did not produce perfection. It produced something workable—a measure of national unity, always contested by those who felt threatened by it. That remains the nature of the task before us. The goal is not perfection. It is something that works.
I do not pretend to have a ready framework for applying this process to the conditions of our own time. But the process itself is not new. It is very old. “A chicken in every pot,” often attributed to Henry IV of France, reflects a ruler’s recognition that support from the peasant class depended on meeting the needs people actually experience. Whether he succeeded is open to debate, although he did much through investment in public infrastructure and by limiting conflict between Catholics and Huguenots. What matters is that he understood the principle.
We no longer speak of peasants. We speak of the working class. In 1949, W. Lloyd Warner published Social Class in America, describing a layered structure ranging from the lower-lower class to the lower middle class, middle-middle class, upper middle class, and on to the upper classes. His categories were largely economic, with some attention to lifestyle. Contemporary sociology has moved in more complex directions, especially in recognizing the impact of race and ethnicity on economic and social opportunity.
Even so, there is something useful in Warner’s approach. It avoids the easy distinction between blue-collar and white-collar work and allows us to recognize a simple truth: anyone working for wages, salary, or commission belongs, in one sense, to the working class.
This brief essay does not offer a conclusion. It offers an invitation—for each reader to consider what conclusions ought to be drawn, and why.