Many analyses during the 1980s and 1990s traced the way these events and others combined to convince workers that their needs and interests were under assault from liberals above and blacks below; from pressures for affirmative action, busing and the extension of welfare benefits, on the one hand, and from the demands of middle-class-led social movements, including women's rights, gay rights and the peace and environmental movements on the other. By the 1980s there was no longer much debate that these measures and movements, which workers identified as coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, had significantly alienated them from the party as a whole.

This conflict was by no means inevitable. In many European countries social welfare systems were designed to be comprehensive social safety nets with universal coverage rather than special programs for a distinct group defined as "the poor." As a result, European blue-collar workers strongly supported these programs during the postwar period, rather than resenting them. But in America there was no significant force or institution in the mid-1960s prepared to propose a system of this kind that could have united the interests of black and white blue-collar workers. In fact, even if there had been, American workers no longer had a political language or intellectual tradition in which to talk about collective demands of this sort. Instead, they had only society's description of them as junior members of the affluent society and the broad "middle class." They knew they were not really in the same position as the doctors and advertising executives--people who could legitimately be described as affluent--but, as Rubin noted, they did not even have a vocabulary to describe what they really were.

The only politician who gave voice to the anger and frustration of American workers was George Wallace, the third-party candidate in the 1968 elections. Wallace's diatribes against both blacks and "pointy-headed intellectuals" echoed workers' perceptions of attack from above and below, while his potent slogan "Send them a message" precisely expressed what white workers wanted to do--to send both political parties the message that they were ignoring working-class Americans.

During the 1970s Wallace's message was refined by various Republican spokesmen. But the overt racial and social stereotyping was too bitter and divisive to serve as the basis for an enduring political realignment. It required Ronald Reagan's more optimistic and positive version of a populist revolt against big government to convert it into a political philosophy that could bind blue-collar workers to the Republican Party. Reagan's antigovernment philosophy carried the individualistic approach that American workers had internalized during the postwar era to its logical conclusion: If government programs were controlled by people who had no sympathy or understanding for working Americans, and if government actions were more likely to harm workers' interests than help them, workers would be better off if government did little or nothing at all.

By 1992, however, after a decade of stagnant or declining real income, even with both husband and wife working full time, and increasing job insecurity as factory closings and corporate downsizing spread across the economy, many of the blue-collar Reagan Democrats soured on the entirely individualistic solutions offered by the Republican Party. Workers' growing disenchantment could be traced in studies such as Ruth Milkman's Farewell to the Factory and Rick Fantasia's Cultures of Solidarity, which documented the effects of factory closings and the growing trade-union militancy in working-class America. In the political sphere, workers were once again voting in substantial numbers for a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, whose major function, like Wallace's, was to "send Washington a message" that both political parties were ignoring their needs.

The Perot candidacy allowed Bill Clinton to enter the White House without winning a majority of the popular vote and emboldened the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to begin designing strategies aimed at winning back the Reagan Democrats. By the mid-1990s the effort was well under way to recast the Great Society programs of the 1960s along lines that provided universal coverage and extended benefits to blue-collar America.

Progressive strategists were further encouraged by Clinton's victory in the 1996 election and by a variety of polls showing that blue-collar workers were actually positively disposed toward a wide variety of social programs. What did not receive comparable attention, however, was the fact that blue-collar distrust and hostility toward government, and particularly toward the "liberals" in Clinton's first administration, was entirely undiminished. (The militia movement of the mid-1990s, in which large numbers of blue-collar workers actively participated and actually came to perceive employees of federal agencies as an alien occupying army, provided a stunning demonstration of the depth and intensity of this feeling.) Opinion polls did not adequately reflect this profound antagonism, but trade unionists and others close to American workers knew that the social gap between middle-class liberals and blue-collar workers had in no way been overcome.

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