The triumph of 'middle class' Joe Biden

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.

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