THE WASHINGTON UNION PAPERS: NO. 7

AMERICA’S MIDDLE CLASS IS DYING-HERE’S HOW WE REVIVE IT

To the People of the United States,

There was a time when to be middle class in America was to stand on solid ground, to move through life with the knowledge that hard work was rewarded not with mere survival, but with the possibility of comfort, of stability, of the means to build something greater for oneself and one’s family. It meant a home of one’s own, not a borrowed space at the mercy of landlords and corporations, but a house with a yard, a mortgage that could be paid without fear of sudden eviction, a place where memories could be made and roots could be planted. It meant knowing that one’s children would have access to a quality education, not as a privilege reserved for the elite, but as a fundamental right that opened the door to opportunity, to advancement, to a life unshackled by ignorance or stagnation.

To be middle class in America was to wake in the morning and head to work not as a cog in a machine that cared nothing for the worker, but as a contributing member of a society that recognized labor as the cornerstone of national prosperity. A paycheck was not just a number; it was a promise—that the efforts of the individual were valued, that wages were sufficient not only to cover the necessities of life but to allow for a future beyond toil and subsistence. Health care was not a looming specter, a financial gamble where one’s well-being was weighed against the cost of a hospital bill, but a system in which sickness did not mean destitution and where medical care was a given, not a privilege extended only to those with the means to afford it.

It was to retire with dignity, to know that after decades of service to one’s profession, after the calloused hands and weary backs had given their labor to the building of the nation, there would be a time of rest—a time where the reward was not the anxiety of whether savings would last, whether Social Security would suffice, whether the cost of basic needs would strip away the final years of security, but a time of peace, where the autumn of life could be lived in the full knowledge that one’s work had mattered, and that the nation honored that work with a measure of gratitude.

And perhaps above all, to be middle class in America was to believe—without naïveté—that the future would be brighter. That children would do better than their parents, that hard work would not be met with diminishing returns, that innovation, ambition, and perseverance would yield prosperity not just for the select few but for the many. It was not an illusion, nor was it a utopian ideal. It was a reality, crafted through decades of policies that valued industry and effort, that placed the well-being of the worker at the center of the American experiment. It was a time when government understood its responsibility to its citizens, when corporations were seen not merely as wealth-generating entities but as stewards of economic stability, when education, health care, homeownership, and retirement were not precarious aspirations but firm expectations of a society that held itself to a higher standard.

This was the America that once was, the America that millions believed in, the America that stood as a beacon of possibility. And if it was built once, it can be built again.

That America is gone. In its place stands a system that bleeds its workers, that devours its young with debt, that tells its people to work harder for less while a privileged few extract more than they could spend in ten lifetimes. Wages have stagnated, yet the cost of living climbs ever higher. The promise of education has become a burden, its cost shackling students to decades of repayment. Health care is not a right but a financial gamble, where an unexpected illness can strip a family of its home, its savings, its very future. Homeownership, once the cornerstone of the American Dream, has been stolen away by investment firms that treat shelter as an asset to be hoarded rather than a necessity of life. The middle class, once the foundation of the republic, is now an afterthought, a relic, a casualty of policies designed to extract wealth from the many for the benefit of the few.

This decline is no accident. It is the product of deliberate choices—choices made by those who see in the suffering of the working man not a crisis to be solved but an opportunity to be exploited. The tax code has been rigged to favor those who already possess immense wealth, shifting the burden onto those who can least afford it. Corporations have been granted the rights of citizens while shirking the responsibilities of contributing to the society that sustains them. Trade policies have prioritized profit over people, sending jobs overseas while entire towns are left to wither. Wall Street, having gambled away the livelihoods of millions, was bailed out without consequence, while working families were told that hardship was their own doing, that austerity was their penance, that they must accept the slow degradation of their own prosperity as the natural order of things.

And yet, in the halls of power, they call this progress. They tell us that a declining middle class is inevitable, that automation and globalization demand that we adjust our expectations, that the wealth at the top will one day trickle down to those below if only we are patient. They lie. A middle class does not collapse by accident. It is dismantled by policy, by neglect, by the slow, calculated erosion of the structures that once protected it. And just as its demise was engineered, so too can its revival be forged.

The time has come to cast off the false prophets of economic surrender, to reject the notion that America’s best days are behind her, to declare, with unwavering resolve, that we will not be a nation of the wealthy and the poor alone, but a nation that values the dignity of labor, the strength of industry, and the fundamental right of every citizen to a fair and just economy.

To do this, we must begin by ensuring that work is valued as more than a line item on a corporate balance sheet. Wages must rise, not in increments that vanish under the weight of inflation, but in meaningful increases that restore dignity to labor. The minimum wage must be tied to the cost of living, so that no full-time worker in America is condemned to poverty. The right to organize must be defended, for it is through collective bargaining that workers secure their power in an economy increasingly dominated by monopolistic behemoths that dictate wages as they please. No longer can we accept an America where a single executive makes more in an hour than his employees do in a year, where corporations record record profits while their workers queue for food assistance. This is not capitalism. It is feudalism in a new guise, and it must end.

The erosion of America’s industrial base must be reversed. The lie that the free market alone will sustain our industries has been laid bare. We have watched as manufacturing has been outsourced, as supply chains have been surrendered to foreign adversaries, as the products we rely upon are no longer made in the towns and cities of our own nation but in factories half a world away. We have seen the consequences: shuttered plants, abandoned communities, generations left with nothing but the memory of prosperity. The answer is not retreat, nor is it acquiescence. It is action. We must reclaim what has been lost by investing in domestic production, by incentivizing companies to build here, by ensuring that when America consumes, America also creates. A nation that cannot supply its own people with the goods it needs is not sovereign. It is dependent. It is weak. And weakness invites ruin.

Financial sovereignty for the people must be restored. The debt trap—be it student debt, medical debt, or the endless cycle of payday loans that prey on the desperate—must be broken. Education must be made affordable, for knowledge is not a luxury but a necessity in the modern world. Health care must be accessible to all, for a nation that allows its people to be bankrupted by illness is a nation that has abandoned them. The dream of homeownership must be reclaimed from the hands of corporate landlords who see families as tenants to be exploited rather than citizens to be empowered. No longer can we allow speculation to drive the cost of living beyond the reach of those who labor to sustain it.

This is not radical. It is not impossible. It is the necessary course of action for a nation that still dares to believe in its own strength. For too long, we have been told that we must accept decline, that the best we can hope for is to slow our descent. But we are not a people resigned to fate. We are not a people content to watch as our future is sold off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder. We are Americans. We build. We create. We refuse to accept that the middle class must be a relic of the past.

If the middle class was built, it can be rebuilt. If prosperity was lost, it can be regained. But it will not come by way of permission. It will not be granted by the benevolence of boardrooms, nor handed down as a concession from those who have gorged themselves on the labor of the many. No, the restoration of the middle class will be won through sheer force of will, through the unbreakable determination of a people who refuse to be consigned to a future of servitude, debt, and diminishing returns. We will not wait for the tide to turn. We will force it to turn.

This is not a plea. This is not a polite request made in hushed voices before the powerful. It is a declaration, a battle cry, a reckoning long overdue. For decades, we have been fed the lie that what was lost is irretrievable, that the golden age of American prosperity was an aberration, that the American worker must now accept precarity as the cost of modernity. But we reject this cowardice outright. A nation that built itself from the sweat of factory workers, from the ingenuity of its tradesmen, from the boundless ambition of those who sought more for themselves and their children, does not simply bow before the forces of decline. We will not kneel before greed. We will not cower before manufactured scarcity. We will take back what was stolen.

They tell us the world has changed, that globalization and automation have rendered the middle class obsolete. That America must learn to live with less, that the dream of homeownership, of financial stability, of upward mobility must now be reserved for the privileged few. They believe they have broken us. They believe they have dulled our sense of injustice. But let them hear us now: we are not broken. We are not defeated. We are the builders of this nation.

We are the hands that lay its bricks, the minds that craft its innovations, the backs that bear its burdens. And we will not go quietly into economic oblivion.

There is no justice in waiting for the powerful to correct their own excesses. There is no reason to expect mercy from those who profit from misery. Wall Street will not weep for the middle class. Lobbyists will not advocate for fairness. The billionaires will not suddenly awaken to a sense of moral obligation. No, it will take the collective force of an American people who refuse to be strangled by debt, who refuse to watch their children inherit a nation poorer than the one they were born into, who refuse to let their labor be turned into profit for those who give nothing in return.

The time for waiting has passed. The time for hoping that our leaders will suddenly rediscover their duty is over. This fight will not be waged in whispers. It will not be won by waiting for a better moment, for a more convenient time. The powerful count on our patience. They expect us to suffer in silence. They bet on our exhaustion. They think we will grumble, shake our heads, and carry on, drowning in work, in bills, in endless struggle. But they have miscalculated. Because this time, the answer is no. No, we will not be docile. No, we will not let them dictate our fate. No, we will not consent to our own demise.

Every great era of American progress has been born not from waiting, not from hoping, but from rising. The labor movements that shattered the chains of industrial exploitation did not wait for their masters to grant them dignity. They seized it. The civil rights movement did not politely request justice. They marched. They organized. They disrupted. The New Deal did not emerge because the rich suddenly felt guilty—it came because the people demanded it, because they refused to accept that their suffering was the natural order of things.

And so it must be now. We will organize, we will fight, we will reclaim what is ours. We will demand a living wage, not as a request, but as a fundamental right. We will tear down the structures that have allowed the rich to plunder while the working class suffers. We will break the power of monopolies that rig the game against small businesses, against workers, against innovation itself. We will shatter the lie that health care is a privilege, that education should bankrupt families, that housing should be an investment vehicle for the elite rather than a foundation for human dignity.

The powerful will resist. They always do. They will call us radicals.

They will say we want too much, that our demands are unreasonable, that we must be patient, that change takes time. But we have been patient. We have waited. We have watched as wealth was hoarded, as wages stagnated, as futures were stolen. And we say: no more. If they think us radical, then so be it. If demanding dignity, fairness, and justice is radical, then let us be radicals. If fighting for the right to a decent life is unreasonable, then let us be unreasonable. We do not seek permission. We do not need approval. We need only our own resolve, our own unity, our own willingness to stand and say: enough.

A storm is coming, not of chaos but of justice, not of disorder but of accountability. Those who have fed off the suffering of the many would do well to hear the warning now: the American middle class is not dead. It is rising. It is sharpening its teeth. It is done asking. It is done waiting. It is coming to take back its future.

The time is now. The fight is here. And we will win.