Sunday, March 22, 1998

In search of the real Middle Class: Debunking some of the defining myths

By PHILIP GAILEY

St. Petersburg Times

Much of political and cultural debate in this country has revolved around the middle class - most Americans - with both the left and right peddling stereotypical images of this group to promote their own agendas. Too often the media and social critics have embraced these stereotypes in portraying middle-class Americans as hopelessly intolerant, sanctimonious, conservative, angry and judgmental.

Now comes sociologist and author Alan Wolfe with a new book, One Nation, After All, to debunk some of the defining myths about suburban Americans. As with most questions involving religion, politics, morality and culture, exploring the values of the American middle class can be tricky, especially in public opinion polls that tend to find sharper differences than actually exist. Media commentators, social critics, politicians and ideologues on the left and the right would do well to consider the conclusions Wolfe has drawn after extensively interviewing 200 middle-class citizens, many of them solid conservatives, in a two-year undertaking called the "Middle Class Morality Project."

Wolfe consciously tried to overrepresent conservatives and Christians in the South and the West in his sample, "so as to avoid the possibility that highly educated people who are interested in public affairs and tend to be more liberal" could skew his research.

Trying to adapt

The Americans Wolfe and his researchers surveyed are far more sympathetic to the poor, civil rights, religious diversity, immigration and women's rights than their critics have assumed. They are trying to adapt traditional values to the complexity of modern living. They have strong opinions on religion, families and patriotism, but they also recognize that others must be free to hold contrary views. Wolfe found they "think complexly and yearn for a sense of right and wrong. But they think that what is right and wrong for themselves is not necessarily a guide to what is right and wrong for others."

Wolfe, a professor of political science and sociology at Boston University, writes: "Moderation and tolerance - an appreciation of the modest virtues - are the bedrock moral principles of the American middle class: On most controversial issues, Americans instinctively try to find the centrist position between two extremes and attempt to carve out private spaces in which people can do what they want as long as others do what they want."

If there is a culture war raging in this country, Wolfe says, it "is being fought primarily by intellectuals, not by most Americans themselves." He concluded that middle-class Americans, black and white, men and women, constitute a "reasonable majority" that is comfortable with diversity, religious or otherwise. They are remarkably tolerant about everything except homosexuality.

Contrary to what many liberals insist, Wolfe says, the political right has not won the hearts and minds of the middle class. That is especially true in the case of the religious right. Americans don't like mixing religion and politics.

"Americans did not become more conservative during the 1970s and 1980s; on questions of race and the acceptance of feminist goals, they moved to the left, just as on crime or immigration, they moved to the right," Wolfe writes. "It is also incorrect to say that, in their newfound conservatism, Americans turned against government and liberal social programs such as welfare; instead, what their mood registered, in political scientist William Mayer's words, 'was simply a few modest adjustments within the present system: a little less domestic spending (or perhaps a slower rate of growth), a slight relaxation of environmental regulations in order to produce more energy, a little more reliance on individual initiative in dealing with the problems of poverty.' "

Wolfe found most middle-class Americans of all races did not like welfare. Yet, 75 percent of those he interviewed supported the principle underlying welfare. An even larger percentage said they believe in God but feel that those who politicize religion have "stopped preaching and gone over to meddling." They still see America as a land of immigrants and want it to continue to be so, but only if new immigrants accept American values. They have a quiet respect for moral freedom and are reluctant to judge others.

One of Wolfe's most interesting findings is how the people in his sample reacted to some of the buzzwords in our political discourse. He found more Americans had very negative feelings about militias (28 percent) than any of the words and images proposed by the interviewers, rivaled only by the National Rifle Association (21 percent). By contrast, political correctness evoked a very negative reaction of 12 percent; affirmative action, 10 percent; and feminist, 10 percent.

Left and right could learn

Both liberals and conservatives could learn something from Wolfe's research, the first extensive survey of the American middle class in two decades. The left's contempt for traditional values and its refusal to embrace the ideal of one nation has alienated many middle-class voters. The Democratic left, he writes, has been most successful when, as during the New Deal, "it could claim to speak for the one nation we ought to be." It fails when it breaks up the country into its constituent parts - whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and American Indians.

The Republican Party, now dominated by religious conservatives and cultural ideologues, is in danger of undermining its support among middle-class voters. "If welfare once sheltered the poor from middle-class values," Wolfe writes, "Republicans are attempting to shelter the rich from such rock-ribbed middle-class moral ideals as personal responsibility, reciprocity and generosity."

Wolfe found much to admire about middle-class morality, which he feels has been unfairly maligned by critics. He concludes:

"The people who have spoken in this book have no monopoly on virtue. But they do understand that what makes us one nation morally is an insistence on a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility. By combining traditional ideals with modern realities, even if in ways discordant to intellectuals and ideologues, middle-class morality offers the best formula for making the United States the one nation economically it already is morally."

Scripps Howard News Service