Since this is "Ding dong, bin Laden is dead" day, I'll note that we still have the same problems with energy depletion and financial shenanigans and unemployment that we had yesterday. Perhaps killing OBL will gain Obama some slack with people spending $50 to fill their compact cars. But for how long?

At 3QuarksDaily, in American Liberalism’s Middle Class Fetish, anthropologist and 3Qd contributor Michael Blim heaps blame on liberals, as he defines them, and questions whether the middle class is worth saving:

American liberalism arose at the turn of the 20^th Century when the middle class produced by our nation’s massive industrial great leap forward began to make money and to thirst for the power to remake American society in its own image. It strived to make an America that was educated, efficient, and fair. Convinced that social problems could be solved through scientific study and pragmatic policy-making that prescribed specific remedies, American liberalism sought to regulate business abuses, restore competition in markets, and to build, albeit incrementally, a welfare state. It sought the upper hand politically by eschewing social democracy, thus rejecting any real need for power sharing  with labor and the working class. Ensnared by its own narcissistic self-regard, it imagined itself the guardian of the general interest; every other group or class was just a special interest.

Given that the poor at the turn of the century could not even represent themselves as an interest, middle class liberals became their paladins and later reluctant allies of organized labor representing sizeable working-class unrest. Never secure in its mandate and always fearful of its plutocratic cousins, middle class liberalism via the Democratic Party became a rather inconstant tribune of the people. When the poor wanted power and money, as in the fractious years of the war on poverty, liberals disabled them politically. When labor sought not simply a welfare state and the right to organize but the political muscle to take over basic industries, liberals cooperated in anti-communist crusades during the forties and fifties to root out the radicals in labor’s midst, and never made turning back punitive anti-labor laws a congressional must. Liberals, self-presenting missionaries of the middle class, believed as so many liberal parties before them that their class was finally the best and the brightest, and the most fit to rule in a democracy composed of the more fractious and self-interested.

And so, over the past thirty-some years, the poor and then the working class, the latter initially as organized labor and then as “working families,” have been thrown over by liberals, and a new fascination with the middle class since the Clinton era has taken their place.  Perhaps fascination is too genteel a term; it’s more of an obsession. American liberalism is waging its latest (or last?) campaign to save the middle class, and in so doing, save its waning power base in a country where wages are being brutally beaten down by a perfect storm of economic disaster and political malice, and the few badges of middle class aspirations such as home ownership, a financed oversize car running on cheap gas, a kid or two at good colleges, and winter vacations to Florida and the Islands are seeming like high cost items on an over-used charge card. (See the March 2011 issue of American Prospect for the left liberal version of “save the middle class” politics.).

In the paragraphs above, though, Blim is describing the middle class, and its political will, as almost entirely liberal. However, I grew up in the middle class and saw mostly moderate conservatives. My parents, relatives and their friends liked Goldwater and the nation later elected Nixon. I know that Nixon appears relatively progressive by today's standards, but he was not a liberal, nor were most of the people that elected him.

In closing, Blim does admit that only some of the middle class was liberal:

Yet, liberalism’s dilemma is that it seldom if ever achieves a majority among its own kind in the middle class. The blandishments of riches bribe some, and lead others to aspire to the plutocracy. The resentments of losing middle class position and status quickly create reactionaries. As political scientist Larry Bartels (Unequal Democracy. 2008) has shown, it’s the middle class that has run off as the going has gotten rough electorally. The poor and working class since the seventies, if anything, have been too loyal to liberals and the Democratic Party for what modest gains they have received in return.

Of course there were moderates and conservatives in the middle class all along. Middle class liberals may have become more moderate, but the, "middle class that has run off," sounds more to me like a description of libertarians and conservatives forming the Tea Party than anything that liberals have done.

As to whether the middle class is worth saving, environmentalists like Julian Darley tell us that the world's resources can't sustain the middle class anyway. So we really have to throw in with the working class. So I can see why Blim questions saving the middle class, I just can't see why he's trashing liberals.