Ryan Streeter
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I always stop to read Fred Siegel when he writes something.
His new essay in City Journal opens ominously:
Forty years from now, politicians, writers, and historians may struggle to understand how America, once the quintessential middle-class society, became as socially stratified as Europe or even Brazil
He uses New York, which has experienced a dramatic drop in middle class families in just a generation, as a picture of what we see happening in pockets across the country.
He writes:
New York is the picture of what the Tea Party fears for the country at large. In the 1970s, liberal mandarins seized the high ground of American institutions in the name of managing social, racial, gender, and environmental justice on behalf of the disadvantaged. Their job, as they saw it, was to protect minorities from the depredations of middle-class mores.
The result of rule by elites has been a breakdown in social mores, expanding bureaucracies, and middle tier job loss as upper tier jobs grow. It's worth reading the article in full to get the statistics and claims he uses to substantiate his argument.
He then offers this lens through which to view the Tea Party:
The Tea Party is the national voice of the private-sector middle class—despite the demonizations heaped upon it by public-policy elites whose own judgment and competence leave much to be desired.
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