For roughly three decades after World War II, the United States had something that seemed almost unremarkable at the time: a large, stable middle class. A factory job paid enough to buy a house, raise a family, and retire with a pension. One income covered the household. The kids could expect to do at least as well as their parents.

That world was built deliberately, through a combination of union power, government investment, and economic policy that directed a significant share of growth toward ordinary people. And starting in the late 1970s, it was systematically dismantled.

What Built It

The post-war middle class rested on specific foundations. Manufacturing jobs paid well because unions had the power to demand a fair share of what workers produced. At their peak in the mid-1950s, unions represented about 35 percent of private sector workers. That density gave them real bargaining power, and wages across the economy reflected it. Even in workplaces without unions, nonunion employers had to compete for workers.

The GI Bill sent millions of veterans to college and helped them buy homes. Federal investment built the interstate highway system, funded public universities, and made homeownership broadly accessible through mortgage programs designed for the middle of the income distribution. The top marginal income tax rate sat above 90 percent through most of the 1950s, which meant the very wealthy couldn't simply accumulate unlimited capital while everyone else fell further behind.

None of this was permanent. It required ongoing political will to maintain it, and that will eventually collapsed.

What Dismantled It

The erosion happened in stages, over decades, through policy choices that compounded over time.

The Reagan years brought deregulation, tax cuts weighted toward the top, and an explicit attack on union power. When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, it sent a signal to private employers across the country: the federal government wouldn't protect organized labor. Union membership began its long decline.

Then came the trade deals. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993, the agreement George H.W. Bush had negotiated to lower trade barriers with Mexico and Canada. Jobs in manufacturing, particularly in the Midwest, moved south where wages were lower. Clinton then pushed for China to join the World Trade Organization in 2000. The result was another wave of factory closures across the industrial heartland.

Youngstown, Ohio lost its steel mills. Detroit watched the auto industry shrink and shift. Textile towns in the Carolinas emptied out. These were the predictable results of trade agreements that made it cheaper to move production overseas than to pay American workers decent wages.

The communities that lost those jobs didn't just lose income. They lost the social infrastructure that decent wages supported: the local businesses, the tax base that funded schools and roads, the sense that showing up and doing the work led somewhere.

The Political Abandonment

Both parties bear responsibility for what followed, but the story of how Democrats specifically walked away from the communities they'd represented for generations deserves to be named directly.

By 2016, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer had made the strategic calculation explicit. He said out loud what party insiders had been whispering for years: "For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."

It was a trade. The party decided college-educated suburban voters were more winnable and more worth pursuing than the factory towns it had represented since the New Deal. It bet that the people who'd been left behind by deindustrialization would keep voting Democrat because where else would they go.

They went to Trump.

By 2024, the class composition of the two parties had flipped in ways that would have been unrecognizable a generation earlier. High-income voters, those earning over $100,000, supported Kamala Harris over Trump by 51 to 41 percent. Ronald Reagan in 1980 had won 66 percent of voters in that income range. The Republican Party had successfully positioned itself as the voice of displaced industrial workers while delivering, in practice, tax cuts for the wealthy and hostility to unions.

Where Things Stand

The middle class that existed in 1970 has shrunk significantly. Pensions have been replaced by 401(k)s that shift investment risk onto individuals. Employer-sponsored health insurance covers fewer people at higher costs. Homeownership is increasingly out of reach for younger adults in most major cities. The single-income household that could sustain a family is mostly a memory.

The people who grew up expecting to do as well as their parents often haven't. In many parts of the country they've done significantly worse. Wages stagnated while housing, healthcare, and education costs kept climbing. The gap between the two is where the middle class went.

What makes this a political crisis rather than just an economic one is that both parties oversaw this decline and neither has offered a credible plan to reverse it. Democrats abandoned their coalition and then expressed confusion when the coalition returned the favor. Republicans channeled the anger without changing the policies that produced it. The result is an electorate with deep economic grievances and nowhere to put them that produces actual results.

The Labor Party is built around a simple premise: the policies that hollowed out the middle class were made by politicians who answered to corporate donors, and the only way to get different policies is to elect politicians who don't. That's the whole argument.

Learn more at votelabor.org.