Moving the Middle

For as long as I can remember, the middle class has been the gold coin of American politics. Every candidate I’ve ever heard—from either party—has claimed to represent the middle class. According to every poll I’ve seen, most Americans think they’re part of the middle class. It should come as no surprise that pundits from every political perspective have spent much of the time since the 2004 election trying to figure out what the middle class wants. What’s more surprising is that when many pundits talk about the middle class, they’re not actually talking about the middle class.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who made a name for himself by pillorying the “liberal elite” on behalf of average Americans, does a great job looking at the middle class and seeing whatever he wants to see. In a wrap-up piece on the 2004 election, Brooks claims that 19 percent of wealthy voters can be classified in the liberal elite, while a mere 11 percent are “business-class conservatives.” I’m not sure how Brooks came up with this statistic, but, at best, it is horribly misleading. George W. Bush won every income bracket above $50,000 per year, and the wealthier you are the more likely it is that you are a Bush voter.

Unlike the elite, according to Brooks, voters of more moderate means stood by their Commander and Chief. The “white working class,” according to Brooks, went to Bush by a 23 percent margin. Imagine! And here I thought the Democrats were the voice of the people. Of course, Brooks has added a very important modifier to “working class.” He decided to exclude all non-whites from his analysis. When all Americans are considered, pollsters have found that Kerry won every income bracket below $50,000 per year. And—you guessed it—the less money you make, the more likely it is that you voted Kerry.

Excluding minorities is just one way that pundits create the false impression of a Republican middle (or working) class pitted against a liberal elite. And it isn’t just conservatives who are fudging the numbers. Earlier this year, in their series on class in America, the New York Times—which Brooks ridiculed before joining it as a columnist—told the story of Will Wilson, a man who “fits squarely into [New York City’s] middle class.”

Wilson, says the Times, earns $73,000 a year and owns a house worth $450,000. The median income in America when the story was written was a little over $41,000. Less than a quarter of Americans earned more than $60,000. The Times goes to great lengths to show that Wilson has what they consider middle class traits—he eats fatty foods, his parents were poor, he didn’t finish college—but the fact remains that Wilson has a ton more money than most Americans.

Why does this kind of statistical gerrymandering matter? Well, a very interesting thing happens when you go from making $41,000 a year to making $73,000: you become a Republican. Income is still one of the best indicators we have of how a person will vote, and while Kerry narrowly won the true middle class, he got trounced among voters earning $73,000. When you limit your analysis to whites, like Brooks, or to the comparatively wealthy, like the Times, the world starts to look a lot more Republican.

It’s pretty obvious why Brooks would want to repaint the world in redder hues, but the Times’ mistake doesn’t really fit their M.O. I don’t think the Times did this because they secretly have a Republican bias. That would be less frightening. I think the Times is just reflecting a popular fallacy: the myth of the affluent middle. Brooks and his cronies have been peddling their skewed statistics so long that even the liberal establishment has adopted them. Harvard students are uniquely susceptible to this kind of distortion for two related reasons. First, when Harvard students look around every day, we see wealthy liberals. Only 24 percent of Americans are earning more than $60,000, but that number jumps to more than 83 percent when you look at the households of Harvard students. It can be easy to believe that the Democrats are a party of the wealthy and the rest of the country, the great middle, is where all the Republicans are. It ain’t true.

And second, Harvard’s middle class makes way more than the American middle class. Harvard has the remarkable ability to make the wealthy feel poor. Unfortunately, this can lead Harvard students to think of the middle class exactly as the Times does. We look at the middle of our classes and see fairly affluent individuals whose economic interests aren’t even close to those of the real middle class.

We must resist the urge to woo the middle class by working for a Democratic Party that serves the wealthy. If you think the middle class is earning $73,000 per year, you might woo them by gutting social programs and cutting taxes—and some Democrats advocate doing just that. But if you recognize that most people earn less than $42,000 per year, you realize that the real middle class often relies on social programs and spends significantly more money on payroll taxes—those regressive little buggers that Bush never thought to cut—than income taxes.

Americans, and particularly Harvard students, need to look at the facts and recognize the real situation of most Americans. If we do, we’ll be more likely to support a strong Democratic agenda. And the middle class will thank us for it.

Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.