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Who is today’s “forgotten man”? In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt spoke of “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Nearly a half century earlier, Yale professor William Sumner had offered a different conception. As Amity Shlaes once summarized it, Sumner’s forgotten man was “the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of.”
The forgotten man still exists — and in a sense, always will — but his face inevitably changes over time. Today, when politicians on the left and right are falling all over themselves to align with blue-collar workers — and specifically with Big Labor — a new, urbanized version of a forgotten working class has emerged.
By nature, these forgotten men and women defy tidy classification, but they can be seen in profile: the Uber driver who logs in over the weekend to earn extra cash to pay for community college; the single mother who waits tables at the local diner to save for her child’s college fund; the recent immigrant who picks up freelance work as a language interpreter to make ends meet.
Continue reading the entire piece here at National Review
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C. Jarrett Dieterle is a nonresident senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a legal policy fellow for the Manhattan Institute.
