Farewell to the Common Man

When it comes to the “average man” or “common man”—or average woman or common woman—I side with English writer Evelyn Waugh, who said that the “common man does not exist.” (He later elaborated, saying something to the effect that each person is distinctive, with his or her own immortal soul. Not that Waugh would have said “his or her,” of course.)

This idea came to mind again in running across a fascinating (if broad-brushed) essay published by n+1, a Brooklyn-based magazine that follows the increasingly common hybrid model of creating print and online content. “Obama and the Closing of the American Dream,” which appeared a couple of months before the election, argues that “highly educated professionals are the driving force, financially and politically, behind both major parties. The Democratic leadership particularly continues to present itself as the best hope for the working class, while sharing few economic interests and fewer cultural experiences (now rebranded as ‘values’) with the people it claims to represent.”

Very broadly, the essay’s author, Aziz Rana, who teaches at Yale Law School, argues that the traditional American vision of a “classless universality—the hope that every American citizen, through free labor, could enjoy middle-class respectability, economic freedom, and the intellectual benefits of education [which] lay at the core of the dreams championed by farmers, small-business owners, and factory workers” is rapidly vanishing. Along with that is a sense of a distinctly American democratic ideal.

In its place is the “professional ideal” as personified by Barack and Michelle Obama. Writes Rana: “It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution.” It is not a “classist” ideal—it is not necessarily closed to hard-working, ambitious poor people. But it is exceedingly difficult for them to achieve, given their upbringing and the generally bad education options available to them.

There’s a lot a reader can conclude and argue with. May I offer a few random, incomplete thoughts? I may:

• In the 1980s, I once heard a yuppie corporate type speak of two “classes”—“professionals” and “consumers.” (Every middle manager was a “professional,” of course.) The 1950s–1960s upward mobility that collapsed along with U.S. heavy industry and price stability in the 1970s culminated in the Reagan-era distinction (not that it was a real distinction—yuppies were shopping until they dropped, after all).

• I wonder which of these two classes you’d put small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and farmers, a great many of whom seem to have one foot in both collars (as it were!). (As for journalists: I’m not sure where we belong either.)

• Should “non-professionals” have no choice but to become “professionals” or business owners in order to maintain and perhaps grow a middle-class lifestyle? Based on what little I know, it doesn’t seem that most “workers” want to be professionals. Most simply want a job—a decently paying job, one that allows them to own and maintain a house, feed their kids, save some money, have some fun on the weekends.

Comments

[gary]

Very good topic. Leave it to a Yale professor to decide there is no such thing as the Common Man. Coming from a clearly uncommon man, is this a bent example of the pot calling the kettle black?

Tell you what, before we eliminate the Common Man from the neighborhood, give a listen to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. Let it stir up those wonderful commonalities so smartly identified by BTW, i.e., house, kids, a savings that spares us from the bondage of serving the master indefinately and those good times
that keep us all just a slight distance from simply being meat for the maw.

Here's to all the old shoes out there who see it same.