The triumph of 'middle class' joe biden | thearticle

Last week, Joe Biden shocked everyone by winning the majority of states and delegates on Super Tuesday. But his victory wasn’t the only shock — to British pundits at least. One of Biden’s

key campaign messages is to rebuild the “backbone” of America: “the middle class”. He even refers to himself as “Middle Class Joe”. To the untrained eye in Britain, Biden’s choice of words

might seem perplexing. As the _Daily Mail_’s political correspondent, Michael Crick, tweeted: “No British politician would ever campaign as ‘Middle Class Joe’ or whatever — they would simply

look too elitist.” To be fair, Tony Blair did exactly this, hailing New Labour’s victory as a victory for “a new, larger, more meritocratic middle class”. But Blair is an exception to the

rule, especially for the party established to represent Britain’s working class. In a TV interview a few years ago, Jeremy Corbyn squirmed when Robert Peston asked him if he considered

himself middle class. The British pundits in Washington explain this divergence as another case of “you say tomayto, we say tomahto”. The American middle class, they allege, is what the

British call working class. But they are making the mistake of interpreting America through a British (and Marxist) lens. Dwight Eisenhower called Marx’s class theories “the invention of a

lonely refugee scribbling in a dark recess of the British Museum”. Indeed, compared to Britain, where 60 per cent of the population consider themselves “working class”, including 47 per cent

of those in professional or managerial jobs, in America 68 per cent of the population consider themselves middle class, which they consider to be earning an annual salary of between $50,000

and $99,999. In other words, the British pundits are wrong. And there are several reasons for this. America, don’t forget, is the land of opportunity. Of course, America is unequal like

everywhere else, certainly more so than Britain given its smaller welfare state. But, it’s also probably fair to say that, in general, Americans are less resentful of wealth and status than

us Brits. Sure, there have always been Americans who have railed against the rich, from Jacksonian Democrats to the Occupy Movement. But if the one per cent are resented, the bulk of the

population, the middle class, are not. After all, the Founding Fathers themselves were a mix of cash-poor slave owners and self-made men. You would probably call them “middle class”, but,

unlike you, they saw this as a virtue, not a vice. This is because, at the time when the US was founded, European society was made up of aristocrats and paupers. Having been ruled from afar

to begin with, and having lots of land, America didn’t have this problem. As a result, figures like Benjamin Franklin argued that the “middling people” made the best citizens because they

were uncorrupted by poverty on the one hand and luxury on the other. And the “middle class” is not only rooted in America’s founding mythology. Its nobility was also reinforced by the Cold

War, when Soviet communism and the workers’ paradise provided a direct challenge to “the American Way”, as William Herberg called it in 1955. This is why socialism has such a bad press in

the US. Not only does it go against the very idea of America, but it was also the ideology of its greatest foe. Broadly speaking, Republicans and Democrats agree on this, which is why both

parties court the middle class in election season. Even their names, Democrat and Republican, speak to the fact that class war is not the driver of American politics. Labor is a caucus, but

not a party itself. The Democratic Party, as Adlai Stevenson once put it, “is the Party of no one because it is the Party of everyone”. This is the problem for self-styled socialist Bernie

Sanders. The only candidate with similar views to run for president in the past, Eugene Debs, ran for president five times — and failed each time. Sanders is likely to fail at his second

attempt too, and it’s not just because of his socialist policies: it’s because his appeals to the working class don’t fit in the American political tradition. To be sure, thanks to Bernie

(and perhaps the British pundits too), the term working class is gaining tract in America. But it’s still the preserve of the college educated rather than the workers themselves. Gallup

concluded in 2018 that “Americans resonance with the label ‘working class’ is not as substantial as might have been expected, even for those without college degrees”. Donald Trump knows

this, which is why he talks of a Blue Collar Boom and Middle Class Miracle instead. The question, in 2020, will be whether Americans vote for the Middle Class Miracle or Middle Class Joe.

Comrade Bernie doesn’t stand a chance.