view them from a distance—to people in the suburbs, for example, who do not have to worry about the safety of their streets or the impact of desegregation on their schools. In city neighborhoods where anxiety about these things has become a way of life, the attempt to achieve racial justice through busing and affirmative action presents itself as a contest between "rich people in the suburbs," as Louise Day Hicks put it at the height of the Boston school wars, and the plain people of the city—"the workingman and woman, the rent payer, the home owner, the law-abiding, tax-paying, decent-living, hard-working, forgotten American." Antibusing activists point out, with good reason, that "limousine liberals" in the suburbs expect the cities to carry the whole burden of desegregation. "The burden is being put unfairly on the poor blacks and the working‐ class whites." The fact that many black people themselves reject busing and affirmative action further weakens "white racism" as an explanation for the racial crisis and the decline of liberalism. ^*

These things ought to be obvious to people who keep their eyes open, but political commentary seldom takes any account of them. Nor is it liberal commentary alone that ignores them. The right has made itself the voice of "middle America," but it too perpetuates the commonplace of the "affluent worker"—the source of so much misunderstanding about the decline of liberalism. In order to clear up this misunderstanding, we need to review each of the three objections to the "backlash" theory in some detail: the declining position of the middle class, so called; the cultural conflict between the educated classes and "middle America"; and the complexity of racial politics.

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A Gallup poll conducted in 1977 revealed that a bare majority of blacks as well as whites opposed the principle of "preferential treatment in getting jobs and places in college." A survey of New York City residents, carried out in the same year by Louis Henri Bolce III and Susan H. Gray, found that 53 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites opposed preferential treatment. Opinion about busing was divided in the same proportions. A Harris poll (1976) reported the same alignment on busing: 51 percent of blacks and 81 percent of whites opposed it.

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