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Hello and welcome to Behind the News.

My name is Doug Henry.

Two guests today, no surprise there.

David Rutiger will take apart the obfuscating use of middle class

and American political discourse.

And Paisley Kura will talk about transpolitics.

Middle class is one of those terms people use without a clear idea of what it means.

Its ideological function is to obscure the vast differences across this highly polarized society.

And its no surprise at the higher you go up the class ladder, the more likely people are to use it.

As my next guest, David Rutiger argues, it was brought into modern politics with powerful effect

by the Clinton campaign in 1992 under the guidance of the consultant Stanley Greenberg.

Greenberg had researched McComb County Michigan, a largely white suburban settlement north of Detroit,

where many former Democrats voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Trying to figure out how to appeal to those Reagan Democrats as an obsession of Clinton

and his cohort of neoliberal DLC Dems.

The obsession persisted well into the new century.

In her 2008 primary fight with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton gleefully but wrongfully noted

that he was losing his appeal among, in her words, hard-working Americans, white Americans.

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