In broad terms, my argument is that working-class culture is not a problem, but an asset—an asset for the people who live within it and for a modern capitalist society like ours.

Reading the last three chapters, you might be tempted to think that what I’m describing is similar to what others have called a “culture of poverty,” one that cedes, defers, takes it, and approaches life with a narrow realism that undermines people’s capacity for agency. Even though formally denounced as an idea, the “culture of poverty” thesis frames a lot of middle-class professional thinking about “the unfortunate.” Middle-class conservatives tend to use this thesis to blame the victim, thinking that if poor people would just change their culture, the poverty could be overcome. Progressives, on the other hand, start off with the opposite notion—eliminate the poverty and the culture will dissipate—but then somehow default to thinking that education is the key to providing opportunity and thus alleviating hardship. Both views see the culture as negative and something to be overcome.

Neither of these, I hope you have noticed, is my view. For starters, I don’t see the working class as uniformly “unfortunate.” Part of the working class is subject to hard times and difficult living, and a part of that part is affected by living hard for too long, even through generations. But other parts of the working class are getting by, and still others are mildly prospering. All these parts broadly share a culture, and though economic circumstances shape how the culture works, their way of life is basically the same. Low expectations, taking it, and emphasizing being and belonging are a large part of what enables people to get by and get through living hard. But in better economic circumstances, these same and other aspects of the culture become a foundation for expanding one’s prospects and possibilities without necessarily abandoning your way of seeing and being in the world.

Working-class culture does not need to be undermined, overcome, or reformed. What is needed is a change in the economic circumstances of the class—specifically, much more time and money for what you will. The culture, like the people within it, will flourish in better, more settled and reliable circumstances. Some, and not just young ones, would choose to slide into professional middle-class ways, but they would not be forced to because that was the one and only path to decent standards of living and working. Discretionary time and money, especially an ample amount of them, expand human freedom. More freedom, of course, does not mean that everybody will use that freedom in good and productive ways, but on the evidence of history so far, most will. As Benjamin Friedman has documented, “a rising standard of living, over time … usually leads to the positive development of … a society’s moral character.”¹

As an educator, I value education. I have experienced and I have seen how enormously positive, often life-transforming, it can be. But education cannot and should not play any role in improving the economic circumstances of the working class. Too many progressive discussions of our outrageous levels of income and wealth inequality end up seeing educating people for better jobs as the primary equalizer. Education cannot do that, because there are not nearly enough jobs that require much education beyond on-the-job training. More education can help some individuals, but only significant changes in labor market rules can improve working-class standards and conditions. The jobs that we have need to pay better, way better—period. In addition, where education is simply or primarily not about learning but instead is about individuals advancing their economic prospects, our culture inevitably dominates theirs. That domination is not a good thing in itself but it also tends to be educationally counterproductive because it sets up a negative dialectic between the class cultures.² Besides, defining ourselves as and requiring others to become part of the exam-passing classes is not exactly leading with the best aspects of our middle-class professionalism.

Can we substantially increase both wages and leisure time not only for the working class but also for all workers, including most of us standard-issue middle-class professionals? We can. We have enough wealth to dramatically increase living standards across the board, starting from the bottom up, if only we would systematically address our savagely inequitable distribution of income and wealth. The experience of the Glorious Thirty provides a template: share the gains from productivity growth and severely tax the very top income groups to pay for a greatly enhanced social wage. How to strengthen labor unions so they can once again enforce productivity sharing is difficult to determine, but democratic government can establish better rules for fostering workplace representation, just as it can regulate minimum wages and time off. Though they have not used the term “social wage,” more and more Democrats are advocating forms of it—from government-funded early childhood education and subsidized day care, subsidized rents, and public building of affordable housing to baby bonds and guaranteed annual incomes, not to mention universal health care. Taxing the high-income wealthy to build an awesome social wage in the United States is a no-brainer economically by now, though of course the politics is a very different matter. Nonetheless, the magnitude of our wealth and the degree of its maldistribution are such that even a very thorough redistribution of income and wealth would leave the wealthy pretty damn wealthy and thus hopefully not too pissed off.³

Those kind of policy issues may be above my pay grade, but the point is that working-class culture is not the problem. Thinking that it is the problem is the problem.

If I am right that our two primary class cultures push and nudge us in opposite directions and that both directions are pretty good ways to go, then we need each other as both productive antagonists and complements. We need to be engaged with one another as adversaries who respect each other enough to also be coalition partners. We can be too aspirational and achievement-oriented and they not enough. They can be too rigidly character-oriented, but our purpose-driven lives can erode our characters. We lack their ingenuity when our plans go awry, but they are too exclusively reactive. They tend to be too parochial and concrete, but we can be too rootless and abstract. We are ruining ourselves with status anxiety and social evaluative threat. They undermine their capacity to change broad socioeconomic circumstances with their awesome ability to take it and their peasant-derived realism. A doing-and-becoming culture needs a being-and-belonging one to not only do most of the work that needs to be done but also to offset our relentless drive to improve our individual selves. But a being-and-belonging culture needs our sense of capacity and broader horizons to help them transform their taking-it culture from a tactic to a strategy for fighting back and changing their circumstances.

The English historian Alison Light wisely concludes her reflection on common people: “As we grow older we see not how unique our lives have been, but how representative we were and are; that we are part of the figure in the carpet woven by events, by chance and accident, and by the play of forces more powerful than us.”⁴ Cultures, including class cultures, are “forces more powerful than us,” but as with other such forces, the more we know and understand them, the more we can both shape those forces and adjust to them. It is helpful to remind ourselves, as working-class culture does, that we are not very powerful, that we are carried along by where the river of life is going regardless of what we do. On the other hand, the full-scale individual responsibility that middle-class culture encourages is without doubt a productive and valuable illusion, an illusion that working-class culture would do well to cultivate a bit. The sense of individual powerlessness, fostered in working-class culture, can be a wise recognition of our limits if and probably only if it leads to a mutual dependence on and reciprocity with others. A similar interdependence, or solidarity, in mutually sharing our cultures of class is what can make us stronger.

I am not arguing for a happy medium, a cultural synthesis that would be the one right way for everybody all the time. That’s neither possible nor desirable, and pursuing it might be something like totalitarian. But a more equal interchange between the cultures could allow some of us to mix and match while others maintain the real strengths of less hybrid, more pure versions of the cultures. We need, for example, those obsessively aspirational people of talent who often achieve great things for all of us, not just for themselves. And we also need those who work hard to just be okay, who pull their own weight and both enjoy and are bound by the tangled webs of their preexisting relationships. Neither group, nor all the mediocrities in between, should get all the honor or, most importantly, all the income and time for what you will. There is now plenty of all that to go around.

Cultural differences of all sorts make talking and acting with each other difficult. When you add up all our differences in class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, age, region, life stage, and even personality type, it can seem a wonder that we ever understand each other enough to get things done together. But we often do, and when we do it is because each of us has enough experience of the rest of us that we cannot blindly insist on the superiority of our own way of doing things. We cannot move forward, separately or together, if they think we are not “real” people or “real Americans,” while we think they are just backward and need to try harder to be more like us.

My critique of middle-class professionalism is not focused on how its competitive status anxiety can turn so ugly, both socially and psychologically. Though that is the part I find most debilitating and distasteful, it also seems to motivate people of talent to do good as well as well. The problem is middle-class culture’s parochial self-assurance that there is only one right way, and we’re it. On the other hand, that culture’s earnest streak in doing good and becoming better is what I’m appealing to. Not everybody, but a substantial chunk of us actively cultivate a social conscience and feel empowered to think about how we can become a better, more just and sustainable society. It’s not only that social conscience I’m appealing to, however. Our class interest is also involved. Many standard-issue professionals, for example, would benefit economically from a greatly expanded social wage. But more than that, as I have tried to indicate, we middle-class professionals have a lot to gain culturally, maybe even spiritually, from more exposure to a prosperous working class. Where both their culture and ours are stronger in themselves and more secure, we are more likely to be open to each other, as I think we were once upon a time. I’m thinking we might at least be able to renew that interrupted century of the common and make America glorious again.