Why the white working class is alienated, pessimistic
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By National Journal national Journal – Tue May 31, 10:17 am ET
By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal
Almost no one noticed, but around George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, the
nation crossed a demographic milestone.
>From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two
>criteria.
They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a
four-year
college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the
largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even
as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more
than three-fifths of adults.
But as the country grew more diverse and better educated, the white
working-class share of the adult population slipped to just under 50 percent in
the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey. That number has since
fallen
below 48 percent.
The demographic eclipse of the white working class is likely an irreversible
trend as the United States reconfigures itself yet again as a "world nation"
reinvigorated by rising education levels and kaleidoscopic diversity. That
emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new
immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe) and face
challenges (including improving high school and college graduation rates for
the
minority young people who will provide tomorrow's workforce).
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Still, amid all of this change, whites without a four-year college degree
remain
the largest demographic bloc in the workforce. College-educated whites make up
about one-fifth of the adult population, while minorities account for a little
under one-third. The picture is changing, but whites who have not completed
college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces
across the country.
They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated
group in American society.
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The latest measure of this discontent came in a thoughtful national survey on
economic opportunity released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic
Mobility Project. If numbers could scream, they would probably sound like the
poll's results among working-class whites.
One question asked respondents whether they expected to be better off
economically in 10 years than they are today. Two-thirds of blacks and
Hispanics
said yes, as did 55 percent of college-educated whites; just 44 percent of
noncollege whites agreed. Asked if they were better off than their parents were
at the same age, about three-fifths of college-educated whites,
African-Americans, and Hispanics said they were. But blue-collar whites divided
narrowly, with 52 percent saying yes and a head-turning 43 percent saying no.
(The survey, conducted from March 24 through 29, surveyed 2,000 adults and has
a
margin of error of ±3.4 percent.)
What makes these results especially striking is that minorities were as likely
as blue-collar whites to report that they have been hurt by the recession. The
actual unemployment rate is considerably higher among blacks and Hispanics than
among blue-collar whites, much less college-educated whites.
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Yet, minorities were more optimistic about the next generation than either
group
of whites, the survey found. In the most telling result, 63 percent of
African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children
to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less
optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the
gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they
do; an equal number think their children won't even match their living
standard.
No other group is nearly that negative.
This worry is hardly irrational. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology
economists Frank Levy and Tom Kochan report in a new paper, the average
high-school-educated, middle-aged man earns almost 10 percent less than his
counterpart did in 1980. Minorities haven't been exempt from that trend: In
fact, high-school-educated minority men have experienced even slower wage
growth
than their white counterparts over the past two decades, calculates Larry
Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
But for minorities, that squeeze has been partially offset by the sense that
possibilities closed to their parents are becoming available to them as
discrimination wanes. "The distinction is, these blue-collar whites see
opportunities for people like them shrinking, whereas the African-Americans
[and
Hispanics] feel there are a set of long-term opportunities that are opening to
them that were previously closed on the basis of race or ethnicity," said Mark
Mellman, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the Pew survey.
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By contrast, although it is difficult to precisely quantify, the sense of being
eclipsed demographically is almost certainly compounding the white working
class's fear of losing ground economically. That huge bloc of Americans
increasingly feels itself left behind—and lacks faith that either government or
business cares much about its plight. Under these pressures, noncollege whites
are now experiencing rates of out-of-wedlock birth and single parenthood
approaching the levels that triggered worries about the black family a
generation ago. Alarm bells should be ringing now about the social and economic
trends in the battered white working class and the piercing cry of distress
rising from this latest survey.
Visit National Journal for more political news.
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