>There is no evidence in your posts for your view that Wolfe offers a
>perspective that you impute to him. Doug wrote: "Alan Wolfe writes,
>'According to the General Social Survey, at no time between 1972 and 1994
>did more than 10 percent of the American population classify themselves as
>either lower class or upper class.' He says this to prove that the rest,
>90%, are middle class." Any textual evidence from Wolfe's work that
>contradicts Doug's judgment here?
he is talking about subjective understandings of what it means to be middle class. furthermore, this discussion does not serve as his justification for why he chose to study the people he studied. for THAT you have to read the book where he talks about Bellah et al., and then you have to read Bellah et al.
now, if you read the intro, the link to which was posted here, it is plainly evident that he is asserting something about what USers think about where they sit on the social class ladder. but don't forget: his project is to ask about "middle class moraility" not so much to make a definitive statement about who really is or isn't part of the middle class.
doug is actually wrong is his complaint on two levels. wolfe might have fleshed the whole thing out more fully, but the lapel grabbing opening of a book isn't exactly where one does that. and, at any rate, the point he is making is that USers think they a middle class and even when they name themselves as working class they think they are middle class. this has been a bone of contention.
here is where an actual familiarity with the debate on subjective defs of social class would help. as a test of this issue, the GSS constructed a question that asked people to rank themselves via a different model. That is, they wanted to test people's understandings of what they meant by "working class" and "middle class" (the same number identify as middle class as working class by the way). this is the question:
186. In our society there are groups which tend to be towards the top and those that are towards the bottom. Here we have a scale that runs from top to bottom. Where would you put yourself on this scale? HAND SCALE AND PENCIL TO RESPONDENT. LET RESPONDENT MARK SCALE. Be sure that the mark is within one of the boxes. Record answer below. (coded at GSS as RANK)
guess what? on a ten point scale, it turns out that people still identify themselves as middle and upper middle class more than they do as working or lower class, not to mention at the very top or bottom. here are the numbers:
10=bottom // 1 = top 1 4% 2 4% 3 13% 4 16% 5 33% 6 15% 7 8% 8 5% 9 1% 10 2%
when you break this up into quintiles as they do it looks like this:
1 8% 2 29% 3 48% 4 13% 5 3%
a whopping 16% identify as what we might think of as poor and working class. a whopping half thinking they are smack dab in the middle. and a whopping 77% think they are either middle or upper middle class!
in other words, when americans say working class to identify themselves, at least half of them are associating working class with middle class, with being in the middle, with being average, with being the norm, whatever.
does that make sense? i know you hate this approach to class. but what people think of themselves matters.
moreover, in the end, doug's criticism is not only revealing an unfamiliarity with this research--which set out precisely to deal with the issue he raises implicitly--but the numbahs aren't THAT important to what he is saying about class and values -- or morality. if you asked people whether or not they ascribe to middle class morality and then operationalize what that means by asking them to flesh it out, they tend to identify themselves as being of "middle class" values.
also, not that the oversampling of blacks in 1987 reveals the exact same distribution of identification!
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS//rnd1998/merged/indx-sub/socialcl.htm
>>see the book for that literature which suggests that, paradoxically, what
>>unites "us" is that probably 90% of USers are liberal individualists who
>>believe strongly in tolerance. we might not agree substantively on much,
>>but i'll bet you'll have a hard time finding any data whatsoever to
>>support the notion that USers don't value liberal individualism and
>>liberal tolerance.
>
>In the case of Wolfe, what he says on liberal tolerance & individualism is
>normative, not just descriptive. His own political preference is to
>affirm liberalism that casually derogates both the Left & the Right as
>extremisms. What he calls "morality writ small" -- live and let live --
>is _& should be_ the American consensus, he suggests. He wants the reader
>to think that his interviews reflect (1) what every decent person thinks,
>(2) how things should be, & (3) how things will be in the foreseeable
>future; _& to act accordingly_.
well, when i get a chance, i'll take a look. but i suspect you are wrong, since you have failed to interpret what he said in the intro posted here. i have little faith that you can grasp what "morality writ small" actually means. see the review of Whose Keeper that I posted here. Wolfe should be criticized for all of this. However, I'm a firm believer that one should engage, first, in an internal critique of what the author sets out to do. Then you can take him to task for his failures to live up to whatever political ideology you espouse. By engaging in an accurate internal critique in the first place, I think one's criticism in an external critique are far stronger.