It’s not often, two months away from the midterms, that you’ll find a commentator who doesn’t assault readers with “back-of-the-envelope” predictions (and a battery of “battleground” polls) and instead flips on the entertainment button. It’s a break from the columnists, affecting a “deeply serious” tone, who proclaim the upcoming elections are the “most important in American history,” like they’ve bellowed since 1964 or so. (I was a squirt in ’64, but thought that LBJ blast on Barry Goldwater—a hated conservative then, later a hero, like John McCain, of the moderate-liberal faction—that “In your guts, you know he’s nuts” was pretty mean. Like the “Daisy” ad, which aired just once and I never saw that year.)
In The Wall Street Journal last week, Andy Kessler, a free-market conservative nearing 70, wrote: “Class warfare is the in the air again—usually a sign that both sides have run out of ideas. The midterms are a battle over who is taking care of the working class. But what is ‘working’ class anyway? ‘I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that’s one definition,’ New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told the New York Times.’ So almost everyone?”
Ramping up, he continues: “Adding modifiers like ‘working’ is more political spin than socioeconomics. TV host Mike Rowe highlights ‘Dirty Jobs.’ But we don’t call those who hold them the dirty class… The working class is larger than Mr. Mamdani thinks and is infused from lower class through the upper class. Ask any CEO how many hours he works. It isn’t 40. It’s probably more than 80.”
Hardly mentioned in the media is that not all of today’s upper or upper-middle class men and women, who put in upwards of 60 hours a week, are so happy. Two years ago, I was talking with a longtime friend (known him since he was a gregarious and funny 16-year-old), a lawyer and partner in a prestigious firm and nearing retirement, and he gave an assessment that was typically frank. “If I had to do it all over again,” he mused, “there’s no way I’d be a lawyer. Too many hours on bullshit tax cases that I hate, too many hours away from the kids and my wife, too many hours trying to ‘advance’ in my career. And what do I have to show for it? I made partner. Not the biggest accomplishment in the world.” I asked what career he’d have preferred. “That’s the problem. I didn’t know in college. So I became a lawyer because it was the easy way out.”
I’m not sure that spending three years, and racking up debt, in law school is “easy,” and, given the slang of our youth, he’d no inclination to be a truant officer, dog catcher or ditch digger. Ringo Starr, in one of his two great solo hits, sang, “And you know it don’t come easy.” It did for Ringo! He had a hell of a job.
Throughout all the political, and presidential campaigns I’ve observed, and written about since the early-1970s, I don’t remember so much “class rhetoric." It was boilerplate for both parties. The Democrats, who once relied on a union base, rattled on about welfare, abortion healthcare, and, in Bill Clinton’s case, fighting for people who “play by the rules.” (Excuse another reference to Clinton’s infamous 1992 line; it’s just too ludicrous, considering his conduct, to pass up.) The Republicans concentrated on the Cold War (and later more current international issues), cutting penurious taxes, religious mumbo-jumbo and law and order. In 1994, California Gov. Pete Wilson ran on keeping “illegals” out of the country; he was rebuked by George W. Bush, then a gubernatorial candidate in Texas, who championed immigration (as he did in the White House, which the paleocons still haven’t forgiven him for). But “Eat the Rich,” was a funny, fringe slogan: today, it’s the Democrats’ number two issue, behind antisemitism.
Kessler concludes: “I’ve always liked the movie-script idea of a virus that wipes out humanity but somehow misses all those attending Burning Man, who then repopulate the earth. I think that’s already happened to the Democratic Party.”
As a kid and teen, living on Long Island, I never thought much about class. My dad owned a car wash (pictured above) in Copiague, and it was tough going. This was before car washes were automated, with all those colorful brushes, and the work was done with hands and towels. He never made much money from the enterprise—and once a month or so was called by cops in the middle of the night to bail out an employee—but it was enough for our family of seven. We were on the lower rung of “middle class,” as were most of our neighbors, although there was a doctor (not the best) a few doors down, a grumpy Sperry Rand drone, and next to us, a sadder family; the father was an alcoholic, a survivor of Pearl Harbor who kept a sword from the ship in the living room. The mother was mostly silent, while the two daughters (very likable) “got around.”
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Robert Heinlen’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana and R.D. Laing’s The Self and Others are published; Will Self is born and James Thurber dies; Tad Mosel wins the Drama Pulitzer; the Miracle’s “Shop Around” is Motown’s first million-selling record; the Everly Brothers enlist in the Marines; Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” is top of the charts; The Apartment wins Best Picture Oscar and Billy Wilder takes home Best Director; 18,000 “military advisers” are sent to Vietnam; and Mickey Mantle becomes the highest-paid MLB player with a $75,000 annual salary.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023