Puffin Interview Series: David Roediger

The Puffin Cultural Forum continues its author interview series with Dr. Joe Chuman. The next interview, featuring Dr. David Roediger and his book “The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right”, premieres ONLINE on Sunday, April 7th, 2024 at 4:00pm.
Dr. David Roediger challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination, and shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, and this social experience separates them from the contemporary middle class of today, which is overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling out of the middle class, and having to sell one’s personality at work, that misery defines middle class existence as much as fulfillment.
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