The Sinking Middle Class - by David Roediger

About the Book

A fierce, historically informed polemic against the idea that the middle class is the key to US greatness, past and future.

Book Synopsis

A fierce, historically informed polemic against the idea that the middle class is the key to US greatness, past and future.

Review Quotes

"[A] useful contribution to our understanding of how for nearly three decades saving the middle-class has preoccupied national political debate, but produced very little in the way of uplift. As The Sinking Middle Class makes painfully clear, the middle layers of the structure of wealth and income have fared abysmally." -California Review of Books

"As the nation burns and the future appears uncertain, David Roediger delivers another incisive, timely, clear-eyed analysis of class and race in America. His point is clear: another world won't be built by pollsters or slick election strategies aimed at saving the middle class. We have to grow a movement. " --Robin D. G. Kelley

"With precision honed through a lifetime of radical analysis and a touch of biting humor, David Roediger pulls apart the myth of the middle class and shows us its rotten center. He takes aim at lazy assumptions treasured by both liberals and the left, showing us the ways the thing that passes for class analysis in American discourse is actually nothing of the sort. The Sinking Middle Class is an antidote to smarmy campaign-trail paeans to the middle and sloppy treatises on the newly discovered "white working class," a reminder that true class struggle is built through the difficult and absolutely necessary work of building solidarity where it is uncomfortable." --Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble and Work Won't Love You Back

"A consistently pathbreaking historian." --Monthly Review

"No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination." --Nikhil Singh

"Brilliant and insightful... Explores the ways in which appeals to save the middle class in electoral politics harm the very constituencies they purport to help." --George Lipsitz

About the Author

David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race, and Marxism.