The Muddled Middle
The right and the left have
been quarreling about the character of the American middle class for at least
three decades now. In the conservatives' populist version, the common-sense
morals of Middle Americans are under attack by libertine elites and a decadent
media. The left conjures up a heartland full of racists, misogynists, and
religious maniacs. Both pit a morally hidebound middle against a culturally
permissive overclass.
But neither of these
overwrought images of fierce division captures today's more complex reality.
The truth of the matter is that the liberals have won the culture wars. Maybe
not as thoroughly as they would have liked and maybe with much of the looniness
removed, but they won them, and we are a more tolerant, egalitarian, and
unified nation because of it.
It is the
prime virtue of Alan Wolfe's new book, One Nation, After All , that it
grasps the contours of what he calls this "mature" middle class. Wolfe, a
professor of sociology at Boston University, and his assistant, Maria Poarch,
conducted interviews with 25 people in each of eight cities. The locations
ranged from Rancho Bernardo, a gated retirement community in California; to
Medford, Mass., home to police officers and firemen; to Broken Arrow, Okla., on
the buckle of the Bible Belt. What intrigues Wolfe is not the regional
peculiarities of these places but the overlap among them. The blacks of Dekalb
County, Ga., turn out to have much in common with the Jews of Brookline, Mass.;
Newt Gingrich's constituents in Cobb County, Ga., bear a basic resemblance to
the Latinos and Asians of Eastlake, Calif. Hence, one nation. (The "after all"
that completes the title is wry, not just as in "surprise, surprise" but also
"after all the cultural upheavals of the last decades.")
These suburbanites, Wolfe finds, are wary of both
right-wing preachers and bleeding-heart liberals. They "long for a sensible
center and distrust ideological thinking." They're hardly heroic in their
virtues; there's none of the grandeur of, say, the Protestant Ethic here. But
neither is there much of the demonic. There's no wife-swapping or
anti-Semitism.
Their
morality might be described as nonjudgmental pragmatism. Wolfe finds them using
few words such as "sin," "moral rot," "decay," or "Satan." Middle-class
Americans don't deem people of other faiths as wanting or immoral. They're
"reluctant to pass judgment on how other people act and think." They don't
hanker for the old family order or want to put women back in ancient
strictures, but neither do they endorse the left's "anything goes" morality.
Wolfe describes these Middle Americans with the term "ambivalent," which I
don't think is quite right, since it suggests they're unsure of their own
views. Rather, I'd call them syncretists, who draw on the values of both moral
obligation and modern self-expression. They wish to preserve the freedoms
brought by women working, sexual enlightenment, and feminism, even as they also
worry about the fragility of family life and the dangers their children
face.
The same mix is evident on public policy issues
such as race, welfare, and immigration. Wolfe's interviewees draw sharp lines
between the deserving and undeserving poor. When they think about riven
families and social pathology in the inner city, they generally blame "people's
lack of personal responsibility." But such sentiments aren't necessarily
racist. Wolfe's suburbanites have sympathy for unwed ghetto mothers, believe in
giving people a second chance, and know that the safety net is a moral, not
just a practical, necessity. And if they don't like feeling swamped by
immigrants or people who want Spanish placed on a par with English, they have
come to value different ethnic and racial traditions--so long as those
traditions don't trump one's identity as an American.
At almost
every turn, Wolfe affirms a sensibility of the serene. The concepts he
invokes--"quiet faith," "mature patriotism," "ordinary duties," "morality writ
small," "soft multiculturalism"--proclaim a preference (both his and his
subjects') for the middle way. Against hotter images of a churning id of rabid
racism or dangerously aggrieved Middle Americans, he restores to the middle its
claims of reason and morality. We do not have to fear them.
Wolfe's approach has its limitations. His interviews tend
to focus on the more educated, affluent segments of the middle class, segments
that may more easily slip into genteel euphemisms and present themselves as
"enlightened." And the brevity of the sessions--90 minutes to 120 minutes to
cover a lot of ground--can permit the breathless clutter of quick responses to
keep at bay deeper and darker sentiments. Moreover, by contrasting his central
metaphor of "one nation" against the alternative vision of culture war, Wolfe
makes his own position seem moderate and attractive. Were he not constantly
playing off a notion of a fiercely divided society, one might discover other
questions and thus other important qualities of the middle class.
Finally,
in one case I suspect Wolfe is incorrect. He sees homosexuality as something of
a grand exception to his larger thesis: Only a small percentage of his
interviewees are willing to admit its legitimacy as a lifestyle. But the vast
majority of them have come to accept homosexuals as worthy of rights and even
of respect, if not of admiration. Measured against the historical baseline of
great fear and misunderstanding, this tolerance may actually vindicate Wolfe's
larger argument.
Still, Wolfe's portrait captures an essential
truth. Despite the huffing and puffing, divisions have been closing in gender,
in notions of patriotism, and even in some dimensions of race. Religious
fundamentalists, who once declaimed against fornication, now seek simply to
hold the line at gay marriage. Meanwhile, liberals in the Democratic party have
been publicly embracing the idiom of hard work and personal responsibility.
Wolfe also throws down an
implicit challenge to liberals. At one point he imagines this middle-class
plaint: "By dismissing our fears about declining morality out of hand, you fail
to recognize that middle-class morality is not necessarily opposed to the
values of inclusion and equality that you currently profess." Liberals have
been like the pre-Civil War Whigs, at least as rendered by Louis Hartz in his
classic Liberal Tradition in America . The Whigs kept seeing the proles
through the lens of Europe's old feudal societies, imagining that America's
lower orders wanted to seize property rather than acquire it. Rebuffing these
lower classes when they could have beguiled them, the Whigs made potential
friends into enemies. The post-1960s Democratic Party has come close to making
the same mistake. Wolfe reminds us that for the Democrats, "taking back the
middle" doesn't have to mean craven opportunism or a betrayal of its beliefs.
Rather, it can simply mean rediscovering the common ground that liberals have
long shared with the middle class without even realizing it.
It might be argued that
Wolfe's portrait of the middle's muddle will be shocking only to a rarified and
dogmatic crew of ideologues. But that's the virtue of this calm and sensible
book. It doesn't aim to dazzle with flashy but misleading rubrics like
"backlash." One Nation, After All is full of the very qualities its
author imputes to the people: ordinary virtue, mature patriotism, and quiet
faith.
