Sublime

tenuous

simultaneous attack on domestic containment and the cold war ideology also found expression in the popular culture.

The Democrats, by default if not by design, are sorting themselves in the reverse direction, with increasing attention to urban and suburban professionals. Their campaign language is tailored ever more to the outlook and priorities of an educated and mainly White elite.

As of 2007, middle-class Americans64 had more than 65 percent of their wealth tied up in their homes.65 Otherwise they had been getting poorer—they had been using their household equity as ATMs.66 Nonhousehold wealth—meaning the sum total of things like savings, stocks, pensions, cash, and equity in small businesses—declined by 14 percent67 for the

The original modern housing finance system was designed with political goals in mind. In the words of William Levitt, the founder of the first postwar suburb, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.”8 This was a literal statement. People with a stake in society—a bit of property—do not rebel. People with no

they did, with terrifying impunity. Above all during these decades, social priorities in America and much of the world seemed to shift in the same direction: from the individual to the group; from private rights to public results; from discovering ideals to championing them; from attacking institutions to founding them; from customizing down to sca

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way it renders the Black working class invisible. From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth w