Middle class dreams

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 stage for the middle class's abandonment of the traditional party system in 1992. Drawing on original polling data, Greenberg lays out the pitfalls facing both major parties if they fail to recognize the new rules of political life, including the role played by the followers of Ross Perot, loyal to neither party and suspicious of both. He is brutally honest about the challenges facing the Democrats and the Republicans, and he backs up his arguments with the raw data he has gleaned from focus groups coast to coast.