The Republican Middle Class in America

The growth of the middle class is the single most significant change in global society over the last five hundred years. Few recognize this phenomenon and the freedom it has brought to people in modern societies. Before Gutenberg, Columbus, and Luther, or the American Revolution for that matter, about eighty percent of the people in the world were serfs or slaves; hereditary tyrants ruled most countries; and these tyrants fought wars of imperialism amongst themselves. Today fewer than half of humanity work as landless peasants; slavery and hereditary tyranny does not officially exist outside of the Islamic world; and all the European colonial empires have disappeared.

As more people learned how to read, they began to expand their interests beyond the farms they worked on behalf the local baron. They learned new skills. They moved to cities or the western hemisphere they could now read about. This process continued over the centuries so that today, in the modern “industrialized” countries, the peasants have declined to less than ten percent of the population, while the skilled middle class now makes up eighty per cent. In North America, the southern states developed along the lines of the old Europe, more than the northern states did. The plantation system with its slaves resembled the feudal system with its serfs. The north had smaller farms, more shopkeepers, and skilled craftsmen. Benjamin Franklin set the tone for the northern style as a small businessman who appreciated liberty, who used his freedom to create innovations astounding the entire world, and who eventually came to favor the end of involuntary servitude in the colonies.

America did not succeed in ending the blight of slavery until the foundation of the Republican Party in 1854, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the final victory in 1865. The Democrats north and south supported the bondage of people of African descent, and the continued oppression of the former slaves after 1865. Thinking of this, we often forget that the GOP had an important agenda aside from this one issue, one that has transformed the world, the expansion of American technological prowess.

Abraham Lincoln was a successful lawyer before he became president, dealing substantially with issues relating to the expansion of the railroad network into the western states. He and his successors in the party believed in promotion of American innovation and commercial advancement as a positive program over and against the negative policy of opposition to slavery and later persecutions of the former slaves. Starting in the Grant administration, a tremendous explosion of invention took place in the north, led by men who started out as innovative small businessmen, such as Edison and Bell. This rapidly made the United States the leader of the world as we provided great numbers of new products, manufacturing them cheaply. The Democrats tended to campaign against this process, basing their electoral strength substantially on envy of the successful, higher taxation on behalf of the governments they controlled in the north, and restrictions placed on the advancement into the middle class for blacks and poor whites in the south.

The middle class grew rapidly in the north as more opportunities for skilled work with high pay became available. With prosperity came the chance to buy more of the new products, which in turn created more demand, innovation, and production. This process took a small downturn with World War I and the administration of Woodrow Wilson, the first eight year Democrat president since the foundation of the GOP. With the elections of Harding and Coolidge and the “return to normalcy,” the American middle class once again began creating and innovating, giving everyone the chance to buy inexpensive cars, listen to radios, see motion pictures, and enjoy all sorts of new consumer goods. Then, due to an excess of government interference, the world economy collapsed. A great orator came along and convinced the American public that they should allow him, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to build up even more government. The depression in the United States consequently lasted longer and went deeper here than in the rest of the industrialized world.

After a decade of war and revolution, the people returned to policies more friendly to the middle class in the administrations of Dwight Eisenhower and the low tax policies of the conservative Democrat John F. Kennedy. Again we prospered and led the world. After the assassination, sadly, Lyndon Johnson brought his party and the nation back to policies detrimental to the middle class by rewarding sloth and penalizing production. Ronald Reagan turned much of that around for a while by lowering taxes and reducing regulatory burdens, ushering in the current period of high-tech prosperity. Much of the success that had elevated the middle class in the north began finding its way into the southern states during this time, with high-tech industries expanding in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Florida.

However, most of the crippling institutions of bureaucracy constructed by LBJ remained, and have grown. Unfortunately, the GOP did nothing about this stultifying burden during the recent period when it finally had regained total control of the Congress and White House for the first time in fifty years; indeed, it spent at a greater rate. A century and a half reputation for low taxes, help for small business, and rewards for innovation has become tarnished by this six year orgy of self indulgence. The party took the licking it deserved in 2006, and must turn back to the policies that favor the middle class, not the Washington elites, if it is to have success in the future. We must understand the importance of the middle class to true progress and rediscover the role America and the Republican Party has had in supporting that progress throughout the world. We must return to the low government, pro-people policies of the founding of our Republic and of the Republican Party.

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