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How Working Class Americans Became Second-Class Citizens
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Free Press
Posted: March 1st, 2025
https://www.thefp.com/p/working-class-americans-second-class...
Americans are constantly told we are hopelessly divided. Our politicians relentlessly accuse the other side of undermining democracy and endangering the vulnerable, while our legacy media, which no longer even pretends to be objective, consistently portrays its side’s enemies in the starkest of terms. A 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that individuals harbor more animus toward the other party’s elites than they do toward people who vote for the other party. I spent one year interviewing working-class Americans across the country from every political persuasion for my new book, and what I found was a remarkable consensus on the issues. The partisan claims of a polarized America ring especially false to working-class Americans. Two-thirds of Americans agree that abortion should be rare and also legal. This is because—unlike the college-educated elites who run the country—they don’t identify with the full list of policy proposals produced by either party. Working-class Americans across the country ... want higher wages. They want better healthcare—or really, just affordable healthcare. They want stable jobs that reward their immense efforts with [what] top income brackets take for granted: a home. And yet, neither political party represents these positions that unify most Americans. They know that the way they vote reflects only a portion of their political views, and extremely little of their larger identities. There is no party that represents the American Dream, in which a life of hard work is rewarded by a home, retirement, the occasional vacation, and a better life for one’s kids. In other words, a life free from the precariousness that plagues the working class today. It’s led to a working-class electorate that feels alienated from both parties.
Note: A groundbreaking 2022 study by More in Common revealed that Americans significantly overestimated the extremity of the beliefs held by those with differing viewpoints. Read our powerful Substack on healing the polarization poisoning our conversations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality.
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