Departments
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Week of 20 March 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 24 |
Feature
Article
Middle-class act
All over America, UNI prof finds common ground
by Eric McHenry
Implicit in the title of Alan Wolfe's new book, One Nation, After All, is the suggestion that popular assumptions about America need to be revised.
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Alan Wolfe |
The evidence he collected in researching One Nation, After All (Viking, 1998), Wolfe says, points to the conclusion that there are no sharp divisions within the American middle class on most issues of morality. Advancing this idea represents a veritable U-turn for Wolfe, who wrote in the summer 1993 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, ". . . it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no longer one monolithic entity called 'the middle class' in America today. Instead, we have two distinct middle classes and two distinct middle-class moralities, each defined by different opportunities, expectations, and outlooks."
Wolfe proceeded in the article to list the characteristics that identified these polarized bourgeoisies: the "new middle class" had struggled up the standard-of-living ladder during the lean years of "the long national economic downturn that began around 1973"; the "old middle class," by contrast, had ridden the strong economy of the '40s, '50s, and '60s to relative affluence. Their differing experiences had engendered starkly different beliefs, Wolfe argued, about such issues as entitlement, politics, and religion.
"That article," Wolfe now says with a laugh, "was based on interviews with absolutely no one." In the first chapter of One Nation, he acknowledges the shortsightedness of writing speculatively about such matters. His desire to treat the topic more thoroughly was an impetus for writing the book: Americans, he reasons, ". . . might like to have a say in the ongoing conversation about what was taking place inside their heads. Why not, I asked myself, hear what they think before pronouncing further?"
The grist of One Nation, After All, then, is extensive interviews Wolfe conducted with about 200 middle-class Americans representing four geographically distinct regions -- Brookline and Medford, suburban Atlanta, suburban Tulsa, and suburban San Diego. He named this undertaking the Middle-Class Morality Project.
"I wanted a broad definition of 'middle class.' I wanted conservative Protestants, African-Americans, immigrants, retired people," Wolfe says. "In Rancho Bernardo, Calif., I got retired people. The sections of Eastlake in Chula Vista, Calif., have immigrants. Georgia and Oklahoma have conservative Protestants. Atlanta has huge suburbs that are almost entirely black."
Beyond looking for demographic heterogeneity, Wolfe says, he was actually "deliberately trying to overrepresent conservative Christian communities" in order to prevent his results from being skewed to favor the viewpoints of liberal intellectuals.
"You can't teach at the University of Wisconsin, interview people in Madison, and conclude that you've studied America," he says.
Wolfe's only other criterion was median family income. "For example," he says, "in the Boston area, Weston, Sherborne, and Dover were too high. Revere, Brockton, and Quincy were too low."
Once Wolfe had isolated the communities where he wanted to conduct interviews, he chose his subjects randomly -- sending out letters and following up with phone calls. As a result, the economic circumstances of the families he spoke with varied greatly.
"The communities were chosen based on income," he says, "but not everyone who lives in middle-class communities is middle-class."
Wolfe and research assistant Maria Poarch elicited detailed answers to questions of contemporary moral and political importance. Taken as a whole, he writes, these responses reveal that "an insistence on a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility . . . makes us one nation morally."
"I think the biggest surprise was the religious toleration," Wolfe says. "Even in the heartland of America, people seem really to have accepted the idea that you can still have a country with a unified morality even though the people don't all necessarily subscribe to Christian views."
These conclusions fly in the face of much conventional wisdom. Wolfe believes that for various reasons there has been a surfeit of misinformation about middle-class attitudes. America has turned a sociological blind eye to the realities his book addresses, he says, because it's both easier and more interesting to perceive discord than to perceive harmony.
"Inside the Beltway, single-issue groups like to present a dramatic scenario because it helps raise money," he says. "And intellectuals like to fight about these things. I think the gap could only have been filled by sociologists who study these issues, but they weren't interested in the middle class, and they weren't interested in morality."
In one of the many enthusiastic reviews the book has received, New York Times critic Richard Bernstein notes that "a deeper message of Mr. Wolfe's book is that the standard way of measuring public opinion, asking survey respondents simply to agree or disagree with a statement, tends to skew the results toward sharper differences than actually exist. These supposed differences are then cited by pundits and scholars who tend to give credence to the more sensational and newsworthy idea . . ."
One Nation does reveal some genuine dissent over particular issues. The interviews uncovered no consensus, for example, on the rights of homosexuals, suggesting that the tolerance Wolfe identifies as a shared middle-class value extends only so far: ". . . those who have the strongest sympathy for nontraditional marriages are concentrated in particular places in America," he writes. "No one strongly supported the rights of gays to marry in Georgia and California, for example, and only four did in Oklahoma."
Similarly, predictable divisions of opinion between whites and minorities emerge on the issue of affirmative action. Wolfe concludes, however, that these differences are fairly superficial; they have more to do with rhetoric than with the substantive questions affirmative action poses. Both blacks and whites "believe that the practical goal of diversity is a more important rationale for affirmative action than the principled goal of reparations for past acts of slavery or racism," he writes. "Both think that affirmative action may not be needed some time when the racial picture improves; and both focus more on private companies and their programs than federal set-asides or efforts to classify by race." Underlying an ideological split along the surface, Wolfe believes, is a bedrock of common values that until now has obtained without being properly acknowledged.