David R. Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness. His book The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) recently won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. He is past president of the American Studies Association and of the Working-Class Studies Association. A long-time member of the Chicago Surrealist Group, his work grows out of engagement with social movements addressing inequality, from the United Farm Workers grape boycott to Black Lives Matter.

THE TIME OF ENDLESS ELECTIONS

Over the last thirty years, this book argues, self-serving, vague, and often empty political rhetoric regarding "saving the middle class" has provided the language for rightward political motion finding its way even into unions. Put forward first by the Democrats, it has debased how we understand social divisions in the United States and sidelined meaningful discussions of justice in both class and racial terms. In the last decade, the rise of an allied language tying political possibilities to the "white working class" has done much the same work in telling us why dramatic social change is impossible given the supposed, and supposedly understandable, defensiveness of a group named by a collective noun hardly better defined than the middle class.

To insist on these points implies no golden age that we should yearn to recapture. The languages of mainstream electoral politics have offered only very loosely drawn conceptions of class, and still less that is useful on race and class at their intersection. The people, the yeomen, Americans, free labor, the progressives, the forgotten men, and the Silent Majority, busily realizing Manifest Destinies, making New Deals and traversing New Frontiers-all left much unspecified in the interests of putting together winning coalitions. However, they did so in eras when electoral politics did not nearly so thoroughly define the universe of all things political and preoccupy everyday life for so many-while fully alienating an equally massive number who often conclude that they couldn't care less about that thing called politics. Prior elections gave those in the US a language vaguely defining and liquidating class every four years, not every day of the year. The story of the great modern Democratic conjuring trick of making the unspecified but clearly white middle class define the limits of possibility along meager and austere neoliberal lines thus allows us to consider how the media and the candidates make such class terminology both a series of platitudes and a seemingly exciting insider’s argot underpinning liberal warnings against going too far.

David R. Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness. His book The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) recently won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. He is past president of the American Studies Association and of the Working-Class Studies Association. A long-time member of the Chicago Surrealist Group, his work grows out of engagement with social movements addressing inequality, from the United Farm Workers grape boycott to Black Lives Matter.

THE TIME OF ENDLESS ELECTIONS

Over the last thirty years, this book argues, self-serving, vague, and often empty political rhetoric regarding "saving the middle class" has provided the language for rightward political motion finding its way even into unions. Put forward first by the Democrats, it has debased how we understand social divisions in the United States and sidelined meaningful discussions of justice in both class and racial terms. In the last decade, the rise of an allied language tying political possibilities to the "white working class" has done much the same work in telling us why dramatic social change is impossible given the supposed, and supposedly understandable, defensiveness of a group named by a collective noun hardly better defined than the middle class.

To insist on these points implies no golden age that we should yearn to recapture. The languages of mainstream electoral politics have offered only very loosely drawn conceptions of class, and still less that is useful on race and class at their intersection. The people, the yeomen, Americans, free labor, the progressives, the forgotten men, and the Silent Majority, busily realizing Manifest Destinies, making New Deals and traversing New Frontiers-all left much unspecified in the interests of putting together winning coalitions. However, they did so in eras when electoral politics did not nearly so thoroughly define the universe of all things political and preoccupy everyday life for so many-while fully alienating an equally massive number who often conclude that they couldn't care less about that thing called politics. Prior elections gave those in the US a language vaguely defining and liquidating class every four years, not every day of the year. The story of the great modern Democratic conjuring trick of making the unspecified but clearly white middle class define the limits of possibility along meager and austere neoliberal lines thus allows us to consider how the media and the candidates make such class terminology both a series of platitudes and a seemingly exciting insider’s argot underpinning liberal warnings against going too far.