Written by Peter Avanti   

Senator Bernie Sanders’ win in Michigan, along with the results in other Blue States where he either won or was so close, has left with a clear picture of what would happen if the playing field was level. That is, if the Democratic Party was not running against him. Notwithstanding the entire party apparatus and its corporate media backers arrayed in full hosanna mode, Hillary Clinton has been revealed to be a deeply flawed candidate, heaving under her negative baggage, clinging to an air brushed record of service that is mediocre at best, callously disregarding of human suffering at worst, and self-serving at all times. She is also utterly out of touch with the times and the direction of the American electorate (not surprising her strongest support is among the over 65 demographic).

As her image and her message crumble, and Sanders becomes better known, we can begin to ask if we are not seeing what might be called an “American Spring”, after the much ballyhooed “Arab Spring” where, we were told, misinformed and oppressed peoples in the Middle East used the internet and social media to outflank established power and bring them down. Sanders’ rise is impossible without “alternative” media.

At the Democratic primary debate in Flint Michigan, March 7th, Sanders responded to what has become a media talking point pushed by the Clinton campaign: “Secretary Clinton says I’m a one-issue person, well, I guess so. My one issue is trying to rebuild a disappearing middle class. That’s my one issue.”

Like much of Sanders’ to the point linguistic parsimony (a New England trait) it makes the point, yet requires the kind of unpacking that would render both the complex nature of the cause of the “disappearing” middle-class and what is needed to reverse it.
Today the vast majority of American households live one or two paychecks away from economic disaster. The media talks 24/7 of the terrorist threat that justifies aggressive military spending while our real fear is losing the job, or getting sick, or getting stopped for driving while black.

The middle class is not households making under 250,000 dollars as Hillary Clinton would have it, 250k puts you in the top 3% of earners. And it is not the working poor, households making less than 45k. The American middle class resides somewhere between households earning less than 55,000 dollars (just above the 50% level) and those earning more than 145,000 (the top 10%). That comes to less than 40% of households. This percentage has been shrinking since the 1980s.

More than the raw numbers the middle class is an idea, something we might juxtapose to the American Dream and call the American Real. It has been sustained, at least since the progressive era, by social, economic and political structures (mostly for white people, while African-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos access to the American Real was never a given). While the American Dream is to get rich, the true driving force of the expanding middle class, has always been about the opportunity to make a good life for oneself and one’s family. To “get ahead” and see your children get a bit further ahead.

The American Real is about getting an education, a job that pays a living wage, an affordable home, and an environment that sustains physical and civic health. As importantly, it was about feeling secure in that job, community, environment, and a sense of having a voice in the political process.

The American Real as a set of middle class values and aspirations are embodied in FDR’s four freedoms: to be able to speak your mind and be heard and to have access to information and discussion in an unfettered public sphere; freedom to believe in whatever God or cause you see fit (or to believe in nothing at all but the life you have); to be free from want, that is to have opportunity and the promise for a healthy and secure life; and finally, freedom from fear, from aggression, abuse, unfair treatment, and dispossession by government or private forces, from within or from without both personally and as a community.

If we reflect on our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, on our quarter century of never ending war and the social an economic costs of an ever expanding militarization, on the inadequacy and absurd costs of our healthcare system, on the deregulated financial crap game, we can feel the ebb of the American Real as a system of beliefs underpinning a way of life.

If we examine the health of the environment, our schools and cost of education, the quality of our food, the almost universal loss of job security, declining salaries and opportunity, the scandal of payday lenders, or the horror of a criminal injustice system that has left millions of lives ruined and no way out, and a broken immigration system that has many millions of hard working people living in fear for their families it is easy to imagine that the American Real is just bit of nostalgia from TV land.

Finally, if we look at our place in the world (arms sales, intelligence, drone killing, support for repressive regimes, lack of foreign aid), as a Nation we can see clearly that we have not been working toward peace, or for the spread of those middle class values we believed to be at the center of our identity. The middle class is shrinking ethically, economically, socially, and psychologically (as a horizon of who and were we are in the world).

There is certainly plenty of win the lottery hype and spectacle about the American Dream but very little to support or suggestion for the continuation of the American Real in a system of information that is 90% owned by 6 gigantic corporations with highly convergent interests. Still less in an election system that feeds huge sums of money to those media interests to maintain the status quo, sustaining a government that is quick to use force internally and internationally, tireless in privatizing the commons, and minimizing regulation and taxes. The strophe is profits are private, while costs and cleanup are public, the refrain is the poor are milking the system, and ruining the country, they need to be disciplined.

Unpacking the decline of the middle class we find the brutal beating and trashing of the American Real in hyper-inflated, misleading concepts like Globalization, mostly used to mean chasing profits and the abandonment of common interests and communities.

The notion and promise of the middle class has been exchanged for something that might best be called financial serfdom. People are “human resources,” essentially infrastructure. Their lives are controlled by financial institutions (from banks, to credit ratings, to payday lenders, unfettered employers, and insurance companies): they are not tied to the land, but to these institutions. Their future is always fearful, a life of precarious labor, risk of financial/medical/legal catastrophe, and little promise for improvement (often enough just the opposite). Participation in civic action, the exercise of speech, is a sacrifice or a luxury that most cannot afford. Everything comes with a bill including their information and entertainment.

Thus, the “American Spring” then bumps up against a possible “American Winter” similar to the Arab Spring’s end in Egypt and Libya. Donald Trump can surely play the role of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with a dust mop on his head. Financial serfdom without the costume or euphemistic custom. Or we can just opt for the more of the same with Hillary Clinton promising to go and have a long talk with the banks.