In the modern day, Americans’ jobs have simply fragmented too much to form a cohesive class. Service occupations are all over the place — cashiers and baristas, sales assistants and servers, customer service reps and personal trainers, sommeliers and receptionists, medical assistants and warehouse workers, etc. Their jobs don’t necessarily have much in common — probably not enough to form a class-conscious proletariat like in the industrial age.
Another thing that defined the American “working class” in the mid 20th century was unionization. But private-sector unionization has declined to almost nothing in America:
As you might expect, the fall-off in private-sector unionization, coupled with still-high public-sector unionization, means that union workers are now a lot more educated than they used to be. Farber et al. (2018) show that in the postwar period, union workers in America tended to be significantly less educated than other workers, but that this is no longer true.
Sehr wenige US-Amerikaner:innen würden tatsächlich nur von passivem Einkommen leben, schreibt Noah Smith:
So almost all Americans are putting in a lot of hours on a day-to-day basis. Yes, some do backbreaking manual labor and some write emails. There is still a divide between blue-collar and white-collar work. But so many Americans now do white-collar work that we seem to have collectively decided that it too constitutes “real work” — that as long as you put in the hours, you’re working. And so there’s very little divide between workers and non-workers in America.
What about just defining “working class” by income? For all the talk of the working class vs. the professional class, there’s not actually a discrete divide between these groups in the data. […]
Suppose the cutoff between the “working class” and “middle class” on your chart is at $40,000. My bet is that someone making $39,000 will identify more closely with someone making $41,000 than with someone making $12,000. A continuous distribution just doesn’t lend itself to “classes”.
In fact, the only real class distinction in America that I think makes any sense is higher education. Whether you go to college makes a huge difference in your life — both in terms of future income and the kind of jobs available to you, and also in terms of health and other social outcomes. This is why I do think it makes sense to talk about an “educated professional class” in America:
But just because America’s educated professional class has a fairly unified culture doesn’t mean that the people who didn’t go to college have any kind of working-class solidarity or class consciousness. College is a powerful integrating institution — it instills a certain culture and certain attitudes in the people who go there, and it teaches them to behave like a single community. But the Americans who don’t go to college mostly don’t have anything like that, unless they join the military or are very religious. Instead, the non-college “class” is highly fragmented and isolated. We can call them “working class” if we want, but that doesn’t mean they’ll behave like one, or care when Bernie gives them a shoutout.
A postindustrial economy like America’s has a whole lot of workers, but no real working class. That’s why if Democrats want to win back lower-earning and non-college voters, I think they’ll have to appeal to them as Americans, rather than as one side of a class struggle. Bernie Sanders’ class politics may have felt like a refreshing alternative to racial identitarianism back in 2016, but they’re really something out of another age.
Therefore I think that while Democrats should definitely address pocketbook issues, the idea that lower-earning and non-college Americans can be motivated to rise up against the rich with some combination of pro-union policy, more health care subsidies, higher minimum wage, and fiery rhetoric against billionaires is probably fanciful. As much as people might like class war to be an easy off-the-shelf substitute for identity politics, it’s unlikely to be any more successful.
