David Brooks on “The Formerly Middle Class”
This is provocative: I’d been wondering whether the recession will cause people to bond more, socialize more, become less isolated. David Brooks writes in his column yesterday that he thinks, on the contrary, it will cause more anomie.
He makes an interesting case. I would like to ask him how it’s possible, though, that the f.m.c. will both lose their social networks, AND form the next big social movements? Don’t the isolated remain powerless? Mmm?
“Finally, they will suffer a drop in social capital. In times of recession, people spend more time at home. But this will be the first steep recession since the revolution in household formation. Nesting amongst an extended family rich in social capital is very different from nesting in a one-person household that is isolated from family and community bonds. People in the lower middle class have much higher divorce rates and many fewer community ties. For them, cocooning is more likely to be a perilous psychological spiral.
In this recession, maybe even more than other ones, the last ones to join the middle class will be the first ones out. And it won’t only be material deprivations that bites. It will be the loss of a social identity, the loss of social networks, the loss of the little status symbols that suggest an elevated place in the social order. These reversals are bound to produce alienation and a political response. If you want to know where the next big social movements will come from, I’d say the formerly middle class.”
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