Once upon a time, America was easily understood through the lens of class. As children, we absorbed the visual shorthand: the opulent yachts and tailored suits of the upper class, the comfortable suburban homes and sensible attire of the middle class, and the worn-out clothes and dust-laden faces that symbolized the working class. These weren’t just economic categories; they were distinct uniforms, visually defining roles within society. The Working Class Uniform, whether literally overalls or metaphorically the weariness etched on faces, was a clear marker of their place.
Then, something shifted. We’re told now that America is largely one class: middle class. But can a middle exist without a top or bottom, a defining contrast? It’s as if we’re all navigating a social mid-ground, or so the narrative suggests. The term “rich” is almost vulgar, replaced by the detached “wealthy,” floating in a realm beyond class, much like their perceived detachment from taxation. “Upper class” becomes a quaint British affectation, “lower class” an unmentionable relic. Even the language of class has been sanitized. “Proletariat” is communist jargon, “working people” sounds outdated, and “labor” is now associated more with childbirth than livelihoods. As for the “working class”—the very term feels antiquated, almost a casualty of Reaganomics.
Even unions, historically champions of the working class, seem to have moved away from the term. My own union, the United Auto Workers, uses “middle class” in its publications, subtly erasing the working class identity it once represented. An article titled “Rebuilding Middle Class is All About Priorities” speaks of people who can and cannot “work,” acknowledging “workers'” past struggles in building the middle class, but implying their current role is somehow complete. It’s as if the working class uniform has been retired, replaced by the more ambiguous attire of the “middle.”
I confess, I once disliked the term “working class,” wrongly assuming it implied inactivity from other classes. Middle-class individuals I knew worked diligently, albeit in different sectors, in less physically demanding roles, and with better compensation. Yet, the term, however imperfect, pointed to a tangible societal division. Now, even the blue-collar/white-collar distinction feels outdated. We are awash in euphemisms, with “service industries” perhaps obscuring more than they reveal. The working class uniform, in its traditional sense, seems to have dissolved into this service-oriented fog.
Marx envisioned workers inheriting the world, creating a classless society. Our current language suggests we’ve arrived, yet where are the workers in this picture? Have we all become, as Marx scornfully termed it, bourgeoisie, sustained by the unseen labor of working people? Was the “American Dream” simply achieving a bourgeois lifestyle? If we’re all middle class, perhaps we have.
But then, why are so many of us, supposedly middle class, desperately seeking employment for months, only to be statistically disappeared from unemployment rolls? Why are school lunches becoming the primary or sole daily meal for “middle-class” children? Why are once-proud suburban homes now boarded up due to foreclosure? Shouldn’t middle-class young couples be thriving, surpassing their parents’ generation? Shouldn’t middle-aged individuals be on golf courses, not unemployment lines? And what are elderly “bourgeois” doing at food banks? The middle class, it appears, is a far more precarious and undefined category than we are led to believe.
The only group definitively excluded from this expansive “middle class,” unable to partake in the American Dream, are those deemed “illegal”—immigrants working for decades, raising families, yet denied full belonging. They are conveniently positioned as “other,” a scapegoat: “they can just go back where they came from and take their brats and their shovels with them. We’ll dig our own ditches and educate our own kids.” This denial is a masterful illusion, creating a bogeyman to distract from uncomfortable realities of inequality.
The fear of a “communist threat,” however exaggerated, has weaponized “socialist” to blacklist any program promoting social justice. Paradoxically, institutions like Medicare and the military, operating on socialist principles, are shielded by patriotic fervor and self-interest. Yet, the specter of “creeping socialism”—a term stretching back through political eras—is invoked against any collective social responsibility, any suggestion that the economic playing field is uneven.
So, because the concept of a working class is associated with “un-American” socialist ideologies, America, in its narrative, can’t have a working class. Or working people. Or, for many, actual work. But who needs work when we’re all, supposedly, middle class, living the American Dream? The working class uniform, once a symbol of a vital segment of society, has been subtly erased, along with the acknowledgment of the very class it represented. This linguistic and social disappearance raises profound questions about the true state of American society and the realities masked by the pervasive “middle-class” label.
