These sound like "the forgotten Americans" to whom Richard Nixon referred in his acceptance speech after the GOP nominated him for president:
They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.These "forgotten Americans," later dubbed by Nixon "the Silent Majority" would put Nixon and later Reagan in the White House.They are black and they are white -- they're native born and foreign born -- they're young and they're old.
They work in America's factories.
They run America's businesses. They serve in government.
They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free.
They give drive to the spirit of America.
They give life to the American Dream.
They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.
I remember the Left’s infuriated attacks on the Moral Majority and their stupid bumper stickers in the early 80s, in high school. Ones like ‘The Moral Majority is Neither’ and crap like that.
I remember the Left’s infuriated attacks on the Moral Majority and their stupid bumper stickers in the early 80s, in high school. Ones like ‘The Moral Majority is Neither’ and crap like that.
The Forgotten American just recently presented itself again to me as I was leafing through an old copy of The Norton Reader. Since you too were reminded of it as you were reading the National Journal’s piece, I offer to all the opportunity to see that the more things change the more we get bogged down in it.
There are many links to this classic but other than http://projects.ecfs.org/fieldston57/since40/units/unit5/supplements/schrag_forgotten.html they proved to be from redacted magazine appearances https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/21/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/Age%20of%20Limits/Schrag,%20Forgotten_American.htm and much of what might be considered too much for sensitive American minds was left out. Like the meat of the last section, Can the Common Man Come Back.
...but also to arouse those who feel that they are trapped by an alliance of upper-class Wasps and lower-class Negroes. If the foundations have done anything for the blue-collar worker he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. At the same time the distrust of professional educators that characterizes the black militants is becoming increasingly prevalent among the minority of lower-middle-class whites who are beginning to discover that the schools aren’t working for them either. (”Are all those new programs just a cover-up for failure?”) And if the Catholic Church is under attack from its liberal members (on birth control, for example) it is also alienating the traditionalists who liked their minor saints (even if they didn’t actually exist) and were perfectly content with the Latin Mass. For the alienated Catholic liberal there are other places to go; for the lowermiddle-class parishioner in Chicago or Boston there are none.
Perhaps, in some measure, it has always been this way. Perhaps none of this is new. And perhaps it is also true that the American lower middle has never had it so good. And yet surely there is a difference, and that is that the common man has lost his visibility and, somehow, his claim on public attention. There are old liberals and socialists-men like Michael Harrington-who believe that a new alliance can be forged for progressive social action:
From Marx to Mills, the Left has regarded the middle class as a stratum of hypocritical vacillating rear-guarders. There was often sound reason for this contempt. But is it not possible that a new class is coming into being? It is not the old middle class of small property owners and entrepreneurs, nor the new middle class of managers. It is composed of scientists, technicians, teachers, and professionals in the public sector of the society. By education and work experience it is predisposed toward planning. It could be an ally of the poor and the organized workers-or their sophisticated enemy. In other words, an unprecedented social and political variable seems to be taking shape in America.
The American worker, even when he waits on a table or holds open a door, is not senile; he does not carry himself like an inferior. The openness, frankness, and democratic manner which Tocque-,ille described in the last century persists to this very day. They have been a source of rudeness, contemptuous ignorance, violence-and of a creative self-confidence among great masses of people. It was in this latter spirit that the CIO was organized and the black freedom movement marched.
There are recent indications that the white lower middle class is coming back on the roster of public priorities. Pucinski tells you that liberals in Congress are privately discussing the pressure from the middle class. There are proposals now to increase personal incometax exemptions from $600 to $1000 (or $1200) for each dependent, to protect all Americans with a national insurance system covering catastrophic medical expenses, and to put a floor under all incomes. Yet these things by themselves are insufficient. Nothing is sufficient without a national sense of restoration. What Pucinski means by the middle class has, in some measure, always been represented. A physician earning $75,000 a year is also a working man but he is hardly a victim of the welfare system. Nor, by and large, are the stockholders of the Standard Oil Company or U.S. Steel. The fact that American ideals have often been corrupted in the cause of self-aggrandizement does not make them any less important for the cause of social reform andjustice. “As a movement with the conviction that there is more to people than greed and fear,” Harrington said, “the Left must . . . also speak in the name of the historic idealism of the United States.”
The issue, finally, is not theprqgTam but the vision, the angle of -6view. A huge constituency may be coming up for grabs, and there is considerable evidence that its political mobility is more sensitive than anyone can imagine, that all the sociological determinants are not as significant as the simple facts of concern and leadership. When Robert Kennedy was killed last year, thousands of working-class people who had expected to vote for him-if not hundreds of thousands-shifted their loyalties to Wallace. A man who can change from a progressive democrat into a bigot overnight deserves attention.