How America Built—and Abandoned—the Middle Class

The American middle class didn’t disappear by accident—it was dismantled by design. In this episode of The Electorette, host Jen Taylor-Skinner is joined by Professor A. Mechele Dickerson, author of Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream, for a clear-eyed conversation about how deliberate public policy once built a strong middle class—and how decades of political neglect slowly unraveled it. Dickerson explains why the middle class exists at all, how housing policy, labor protections, education, and debt once worked together to create upward mobility, and what changed beginning in the 1980s. We also discuss why conversations about the middle class so often erase race—and how ignoring systemic inequality ultimately weakens the entire economy. There’s a personal thread woven throughout this conversation as well: both Dickerson and Taylor-Skinner grew up in Memphis and even attended the same middle school, a shared history that mirrors many of the book’s core themes around affordable housing, public education, and economic opportunity. This is a grounded, urgent conversation about what Americans have lost—and the open question of whether a new middle-class deal is still possible if the collective political will can be summoned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices