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A brilliant and insightful exploration of the rise and fall of the American middle class by New York Times bestselling author, Barbara Ehrenreich. One of Barbara Ehrenreich's most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examines the insecurities of the American middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the last two decades of the 20th century. Weaving finely-tuned expert analysis with her trademark voice, Ehrenreich traces the myths about the middle class to their roots, determines what led to the shrinking of what was once a healthy percentage of the population, and how, in its ambition and anxiety, that population has retreated from responsible leadership. Newly reissued and timely as ever, Fear of Falling places the middle class of yesterday under the microscope and reveals exactly how we arrived at the middle class of today.… (more)
User reviews
The people that I knew had lost confidence in the ability of the government to solve social problems. They expected the here-to-fore successful Social Security System to implode. Ehrenreich's title is right on point for their fears, but she mostly misses the implications in her text. Having lost confidence in the government's ability to meet crises, many middle-class people felt an increased need to fortify their own lives against disaster. They were certainly not encouraged to make sacrifices on behalf of the less well-off, especially if they thought that they would be futile in any case.
I don't think that Ehrenreich understands their feelings or the trends that lay behind them, and certainly not the involvement of the left in creating them. And as E.J. Dionne said in his brilliant book Why Americans Hate Politics: "Many young voters who had been drawn to the New Left and the counterculture because they attacked authority were drawn to conservatism because it attacked the state. Thus did the New Left wage war against the paternalistic liberal state and defeat it. The right picked up the pieces". Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies: the Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics also skillfully chronicles the transition, bringing out other factors like the "southernization" of America.
Ehrenreich can do much better than this, and this book deserves oblivion.