Fear and Self-Loathing in the Middle Class

The hidden roots of fascism can be found in the all-American family of 2.5 children living in a single house with chain-linked fence.

When I was 10 or so, my Dad, who was very much the product of the Depression and WW II, took me and my two brothers to NYC’s Lower East Side, to the legendary Bowery. We were there to get a lesson in what could happen if we made a wrong turn in our life journey.

Before it was taken over by designer clothing stores and espresso bars, that part of the city was a place known for flop houses, the Salvation Army, and an always present population of homeless men sprawled out on the streets. It was the homeless, or “ bums”, as my Dad referred to them, that we were supposed to be particularly revolted by. ‘Don’t let this happen to you’ was pretty close to what he told us. I was confused, but most of all frightened. And that was the point.

We were most definitely an upper-middle class family, lived in a new development of splanches and colonials, and the closest I came to reality and the working classes were occasional dealings with school bus drivers, janitors, and cafeteria workers, or the repair men who came to our house to fix appliances or do some renovation.

The Bowery visits were my first exposure to generalized middle class anxiety. It’s a disorder of the slightly privileged median income families involving overwhelming fear that they might drop in status and take up residence in the “nightmare alley” of the lowest levels of middle…