Who cares about the middle class? - The great changes that have transformed the American family

Perceptions vs. facts

By Janice Shaw Crouse

The changes in societal mores over the past six years, especially in regard to sexual matters, have disproportionately hurt the lower and middle classes.


The great changes that have transformed the American family in the past half-century, such as divorce, childbearing outside of marriage, single-parent families, cohabitation, and delayed marriage.

In a new national survey, the Pew Research Center reports an ironic public perception: Democrats are viewed, in general, more favorably than Republicans, while the same survey indicates that the public agrees more with the Republicans on certain particular issues (including, according to the Pew media release, “double-digit leads over the Democrats on terrorism, foreign policy and taxes”). In other words, people are buying into the rhetoric of the Democrats, while at the same time, they agree with critical public policies advocated by the Republicans.

The major finding of the survey is intriguing and puzzling. “Majorities say the Democratic Party is open and tolerant, cares about the middle class and is not ‘too extreme.’ By contrast, most Americans see the GOP lacking in tolerance and empathy for the middle class, and half view it as too extreme.”

The perception that the GOP cares less about the middle class than the Democrats is especially troubling for the Republican Party because demographic and economic data is clear that Democrat policies have been disastrous for the middle class. There is a huge gap between public perceptions and the reality of life in the middle class during the Obama presidency. Thomas B. Edsall’s December 2014 column in the New York Times asks, “Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class?” It’s a fair question because, he writes:

“At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.

“This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.

“Liberal victories in the sexual and women’s rights revolutions – victories that have made the lives of many upscale Democrats more productive and satisfying — appear, from the vantage point of the white working class, to have left many women to struggle as single parents, forced to cope with both male defection from paternal responsibility and the fragmentation of a family structure that was crucial to upward mobility in the postwar period.”

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