When I picked this up in the sale bin of East Ave books in Adelaide for $1 I was hoping to get insight into the surreal nightmare of the US’s current state. A better dollar I will never spend. It was published early 1990s, which was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want a hindsight constructed narrative. Trump is no more than a casually mentioned billionaire of a type towards the end of Ehrenreich’s account of the middle class and its relationship to the other classes in the US during the course of the twentieth century. She explains the rise of the new Right in the US as well as the new Left. The book is highly readable whilst being dense; it’s both deeply and widely researched. I will be reading all her books. I think everybody should read this one.

The story she tells in this one is painful. She shows the rise of the middle-class, how they made themselves a financial and politically important group based on professionalising what they did and excluding others. She talks of its permanent insecurity as a consequence. Even though I’ve always known about it, her analysis of the exploitation of the educated youth and their university-student-led rebellion of the sixties and seventies when university students were actually mowed down by troops in the US was particularly illuminating and excruciatingly sad; staff in universities trying to protect their status from the questioning of the kids who were expected to work at derisory rates in their young professional years. Staff more or less on the side of the troops. None of this has changed, one might add. She documents the discovery by the middle class, to its great astonishment, that there were poor people in the US and she examines the way in which the middle class then set about categorising them and determining how to relate to them. She shows the fabulously patronising attitudes to those below them and the trouble it has ultimately caused.

rest here:

https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2017/02/20/fear-of-falling-by-barbar... ( )

It is always dangerous to assume that the people that one knows constitute the majority. On the other hand, Barbara Ehrenreich's characterization of the middle class failed to include most of the people that I know (I was 36 when this book was published.) Ehrenreich did little to document that her characterizations were accurate; she documents economic facts, for example, but not surveys of the attitudes of the people whose inner life she is supposedly discussing. Mostly she relied on the scorn for the demonized "yuppies" spreading a plague of selfishness.

The people that I knew had lost confidence in the ability of the government to solve social problems. They expected the here-to-fore successful Social Security System to implode. Ehrenreich's title is right on point for their fears, but she mostly misses the implications in her text. Having lost confidence in the government's ability to meet crises, many middle-class people felt an increased need to fortify their own lives against disaster. They were certainly not encouraged to make sacrifices on behalf of the less well-off, especially if they thought that they would be futile in any case.

I don't think that Ehrenreich understands their feelings or the trends that lay behind them, and certainly not the involvement of the left in creating them. And as E.J. Dionne said in his brilliant book Why Americans Hate Politics: "Many young voters who had been drawn to the New Left and the counterculture because they attacked authority were drawn to conservatism because it attacked the state. Thus did the New Left wage war against the paternalistic liberal state and defeat it. The right picked up the pieces". Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies: the Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics also skillfully chronicles the transition.

Whatever truths she may have revealed about other people, her book had little resonance for this member of the middle class. ( )