The median voter does think of himself as upwardly mobile. A post on the list a few days ago cited a survey showing that an extraordinary number of Americans think that they are already in the top 1% of the income distribution, or soon will be. When I teach my Marx seminar to first year students at DePaul - many of whom are working class, first-generation college students - I often conduct a survey to find out what they think their incomes will be by the time they reach the ripe old age of thirty. The mean is usually in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, the median in the low hundreds of thousands. (The difference is accounted for by a few students who think they will be in the millions). At the same time, they're very aware that middle-class incomes are stagnant, and most of them believe that capitalism is exploitative. It's just that each thinks that s/he, individually, will end up 2-3 standard deviations from the mean. This leaves us in a nasty vicious circle. These students quite rationally believe that collective movements for better conditions for all are unlikely to have much success. Rather than accept the grim reality, that this means that they face a future of stagnant salaries, increasingly unaffordable health care, declining public goods, etc., they choose to believe that they will be the ones to escape to the valhalla of upper-class life. Thus identifying upward, they have less reason than ever to engage in collective movements for better conditions for all. And so the cycle continues.
Michael McIntyre mcintyremichael at mac.com
http://morbidsymptoms.blogspot.com
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