The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret.

• Author: Moberg, David

The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret by Michael Zweig Cornell University. 198 pages. $25.00.

Although the idea of class has typically been the skunk in e garden party of American politics, growth in income inequality and persistent Republican catering to the rich--such as the attempt to repeal the estate tax--have recently given notions of class more prominence and legitimacy. Nevertheless, there is still little acknowledgment that in America the majority of people are part of a working class, or that political parties ought to take their needs seriously.

In their well-argued, important new book, America's Forgotten Majority, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Joel Rogers, a professor of law, politics, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focus on how neglect of the white working class in particular has led to the decline of the Democrats and caused a national political stalemate. Forget the college-educated, Volvo-driving, suburban soccer moms or the wired Internet workers as the key to the political future, they argue. The real swing voter is more likely to be a woman who drives an old Chevy Malibu and goes bowling, assuming she can find the time after a hard day as an office worker, airline clerk, or nurse's aide.

By contrast, Michael Zweig, a professor of economics at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, is little interested in such electoral issues. In The Working Class Majority, Zweig is more concerned with how class matters pervasively, even if secretly, in American life. His calculations about who falls into what class are intriguing, and he makes illuminating arguments about why separating "the poor" from other workers is politically perilous. He also explains why the individualistic ideology of "family values" does not reflect working class experience and needs. But his approach to class is often so schematic and ahistorical that it doesn't deal adequately with ambiguities of class experience. Life differences within the working class, as well as consumerism, the mass media, and illusions of social mobility help explain why Americans often do not interpret their experience through the lens of social class and then act accordingly.

Both books clearly acknowledge that the old mental image of the working class as made up of blue-collar white guys headed to the factory while their wives and children remain at home is grossly misleading. Women make up nearly half the...