Joe Biden’s current emphasis on the American middle class is typical of centrist Democrat strategy. It is used as a cudgel to defend the party against more radical demands that could win over working-class voters and non-voters. For Republicans, it provides a foil for disingenuous appeals to the “white working class”. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory made full use of such rhetoric.Yet, as David Roediger makes clear in a pointed and persuasive polemic, this obsession with the middle-class is relatively new in US politics. It began with the attempt to win back so-called “Reagan Democrats” by Bill Clinton and his legendary pollster Stanley Greenberg. It was accompanied by a pandering to racism and a shying away from meaningful wealth redistribution that continues to this day.Drawing on rich traditions of radical social thought, Roediger disavows the thinly sourced idea that the United States was, for much of its history, a “middle-class” nation and the still more indefensible position that it is one now. The increasing immiseration of large swathes of middle-income America, only accelerated by the current pandemic, nails a fallacy that is a major obstacle to progressive change.”As the nation burns and the future appears uncertain, David Roediger delivers another incisive, timely, clear-eyed analysis of class and race in America. His point is clear: another world won’t be built by pollsters or slick election strategies aimed at saving the middle class. We have to grow a movement”. – Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination David R. Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness. His book The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) recently won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. He is past president of the American Studies Association and of the Working-Class Studies Association. A long-time member of the Chicago Surrealist Group, his work grows out of engagement with social movements addressing inequality, from the United Farm Workers grape boycott to Black Lives Matter. THE TIME OF ENDLESS ELECTIONSOver the last thirty years, this book argues, self-serving, vague, and often empty political rhetoric regarding “saving the middle class” has provided the language for rightward political motion finding its way even into unions. Put forward first by the Democrats, it has debased how we understand social divisions in the United States and sidelined meaningful discussions of justice in both class and racial terms. In the last decade, the rise of an allied language tying political possibilities to the “white working class” has done much the same work in telling us why dramatic social change is impossible given the supposed, and supposedly understandable, defensiveness of a group named by a collective noun hardly better defined than the middle class.To insist on these points implies no golden age that we should yearn to recapture. The languages of mainstream electoral politics have offered only very loosely drawn conceptions of class, and still less that is useful on race and class at their intersection. The people, the yeomen, Americans, free labor, the progressives, the forgotten men, and the Silent Majority, busily realizing Manifest Destinies, making New Deals and traversing New Frontiers-all left much unspecified in the interests of putting together winning coalitions. However, they did so in eras when electoral politics did not nearly so thoroughly define the universe of all things political and preoccupy everyday life for so many-while fully alienating an equally massive number who often conclude that they couldn’t care less about that thing called politics. Prior elections gave those in the US a language vaguely defining and liquidating class every four years, not every day of the year. The story of the great modern Democratic conjuring trick of making the unspecified but clearly white middle class define the limits of possibility along meager and austere neoliberal lines thus allows us to consider how the media and the candidates make such class terminology both a series of platitudes and a seemingly exciting insiders argot underpinning liberal warnings against going too far.