Middle class dreams

by Stanley B. Greenberg

Nearly ten years ago Stanley B. Greenberg was the first observer to identify the depth of the middle class's disaffection with the two political parties, which today we take for granted. In Middle Class Dreams, Greenberg reveals how our nation has found itself in a political environment where voters are poised to shoot first and ask questions later. He examines how the two major parties have historically wooed the middle class - sometimes successfully, sometimes not - and how the traditional party strategies have imploded during the past thirty years. In a powerful analysis he shows how Democratic support for "the little guy" became identified in the 1960s and 1970s with welfare for the "undeserving poor," eroding the middle-class majority who had supported Kennedy and Johnson; likewise, in the 1980s, Republican belief in free-market prosperity deteriorated into an endorsement for greed, breaking the back of the Reagan-Bush majority. These dual betrayals, Greenberg argues, set the stag