Class Identity

A very interesting report showing that despite the constant discussion of the middle class in the media and by our politicians, as many Americans openly identify as working class as they do middle class:

Pew doesn’t include working class as an option in its survey, but the long-running General Social Survey (GSS) includes both working class and lower class as options. In the chart below, I use the GSS to track class identification between 1980 and 2012 (the most recent year for which GSS data is available). As it shows, at 44 percent, the share of Americans identifying as working class in 2012 was the same as the share identifying as middle class. Only about 8 percent of Americans identified as lower class, slightly higher than the roughly 5 percent on average who identified as lower class before the Great Recession.

This is important because it shows how the media and political class work to obscure class in this country, naturalizing the middle class as important while denigrating the working class as lazy or irrelevant. It shows at least the potential for some kind of more concrete class politics in this country. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Americans vote according to political class the way many progressives would like them to vote, nor does it mean that they believe their working-class status makes capital an antagonist to their interests. These are complex questions and can’t be reduced to dollars and cents.