The results of the 2020 US elections indicate, especially in light of the country’s massive summer uprisings and a global pandemic, that it was largely an epiphenomenal event. Pressing issues of racial and environmental justice and ever-widening income inequality have again been relegated to the margins in favor of campaigns whose raison d’être is “saving the middle class,” the subject of David Roediger’s latest book, The Sinking Middle Class. Roediger, professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas and a trenchant observer of the nexus of race and class in the US, discussed with us why every American politician’s goal now seems to be to save this near mythological class, always conceived of—though rarely acknowledged as—white, and how this strategy has been pursued at the expense of a broader politics of class and racial justice

What’s the Matter With Cultural Politics?

In 1985, at the request of the United Auto Workers, [Stanley] Greenberg began conducting focus groups in Macomb County, Michigan, once a stronghold of the Democratic Party, to figure out why so many of its members had decided to throw in with Ronald Reagan. “The very invitation for him to study Macomb County grew out of a sense that Democrats needed to shift away from racial justice and feminist issues,” David Roediger writes in his excellent The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History.

Roediger demonstrates that striving for middle-class status is a Sisyphean task.